The Many Uses of Bancroft Collections
The Bancroft Library, with over 17,000 visitors this past year, is the most heavily used special collections library in the country.
Have you ever wondered about the end-products of all these thousands of research hours?
As pictorial curator, I have been asked for permission to use Bancroft images on everything from chocolate tins to the San Quentin Wardens Association website, as well as in more conventional trade and academic publications.
The following list highlights a few examples of how Bancroft materials have been used over the past year or so. It is by no means comprehensive and it reflects my own work with the pictorial collections.
Next time you watch TV, surf the Net, or browse the shelves of your local bookstore, check the acknowledgements for a mention of Bancroft.
Of course, you are always welcome to visit us and peruse these publications in the Heller Reading Room or view one of the videotapes in the Stone Room by appointment.
From Exploration to Conservation: Picturing the Sierra Nevada (1998) is a beautifully illustrated catalog published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name organized by the Nevada Museum of Art and the Wilderness Society documenting 150 years of visual representations of the Sierra Nevada. Two items from The Bancroft Library were chosen for the exhibition, including a fine print by Thomas Ayres that is reprinted in the catalog.
From the bonanza of activities and publications celebrating the sesquicentennial of the California Gold Rush, two exhibitions and their catalogs stand out: The Art of the Gold Rush (University of California Press, 1998) and Silver and Gold (University of Iowa Press, 1998).
I.W. (Isaiah West), 1830–1912, Advertisement from Taber’s Photographic Parlors, page 3 from “The Taber photographic album principal business houses, residences and persons,” 1880. Reproduced in The Furniture of George Hunzinger: Invention and Innovation in Nineteenth-Century America by Barry Robert Harwood (Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1997). |
These blockbuster shows, organized by the Oakland Museum of California and the Crocker Art Museum, respectively, document the pursuit of gold as represented in paintings, including several from Bancroft’s Robert Honeyman, Jr., and Zelda Mackay pictorial collections. Both shows are currently on view in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art.
California Art: 450 years of painting and other media by Nancy Dustin Wall Moure (Dustin Publications, 1998) is an encyclopedic overview of California painting, sculpture, and architecture from the 18th century to the present. Bancroft is amply represented with illustrations by Richard Brydges Beechey, Alexander Edouart, Charles Christian Nahl, and Edward Vischer.
The Furniture of George Hunzinger: Invention and Innovation in Nineteenth- Century America by Barry Robert Har-wood is a beautifully produced catalog of an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art last year. Hunzinger’s elaborate chairs appear in an 1880 advertisement for Taber’s Photographic Parlors from Bancroft, demonstrating that his furniture was popular well beyond its Northeast origins.
Video & TV
Heaven on Earth: Orthodox Treasures of Siberia and North America, produced by Mirko Popadic and FaithNet for the Anchorage Museum of History and Art (1998, 30 minutes), documents the exhibition at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art commemorating the bicentennial of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in North America. Several Bancroft photographs of early frontier life in Alaska are included in this video.
America 1900: The Turning Point, a four-hour public television program by David Grubin Productions based on the 1998 book by Judy Critchton, aired nationally as part of The American Experience series this past November. The program opens on New Year’s Day 1900 and follows an eclectic group of men and women over the course of the centennial year. It features photographs from the Roy D. Graves pictorial collection documenting pre-1906 San Francisco and three portraits of John Muir from the Bancroft portrait collection.
Books
Walking Where We Lived: Memoirs of a Mono Indian Family by Gaylen D. Lee (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) started out as a personal project by the author to find materials on his family. A remarkable photograph of his great-grandmother, reproduced from Bancroft’s C. Hart Merriam papers, is featured on the cover. Over 5,000 Merriam photographs of northern California Native Americans are available on the World Wide Web through the library’s California Heritage Project as part of the state’s online Archive of California.
C. Hart Merriam collection of Native American photographs, reproduced in Walking Where We Lived: Memoirs of a Mono Indian Family by Gaylen D. Lee (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). |
William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863-1910 by Ben Proctor (Oxford University Press, 1998) is the most recent of many books on the Hearst family. Proctor did much of his research at Bancroft and the book features a number of photographs of Hearst from Bancroft.
The American Century (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998) by Harold Evans, chairman of U.S. News & World Report, is on the New York Times non fiction best seller list. A weighty coffee table book, it uses Bancroft photos in a thematic overview of America’s pivotal role in major 20th century developments.
Among the publications using materials from our rare books and literary manuscripts collections is Menches, komogrammateus of Kerkeosiris: the doings and dealings of a village scribe in the late Ptolemaic period (Brill, 1998) by our resident papyrologist, Arthur M.F.W. Verhoogt. (See the Spring 1998 Bancroftiana.)
Martin West, professor of classics at All Souls College, Oxford, made further use of our extensive papyri collection for a forthcoming new edition of Homer.
And More
- Yoshiko Uchida’s poems have appeared in anthologies and textbooks and her novel, Picture Bride, has been reprinted (University of Washington Press, 1997).
- The title page of Vincenzo Bellino’s La Sonnambula (NY 1838) will be used in Blase Scarnati’s Gendered Gaze, to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press
- Hillary Spurling used Therese Jelenko reminiscences, Harriet Lane Levy recollections, and Annette Rosenshine papers for her book, The Unknown Matisse 1869-1908, to be published by Penguin Viking in the U.K. and Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S.
- Dr. James Boylan made extensive use of the Strunsky-Walling Collection for his biography
of Anna Strunsky and William English Walling to be published by the University
of Massachusetts Press.
Edouart, Alexander (1818–1892), British;“Blessing of the Enrequita Mine, dedicated 1859, New Almaden, California,” 1860, oil painting on canvas; reproduced in The Art of the Gold Rush (University of California Press, 1998).
- Wesleyan University Press has published Kevin Killian’s biography of the Beat poet, Jack Spicer (see p. 6).
- Allen Campo conducted considerable research in the William Everson papers for the first volume of the Collected Poems of William Everson, to be published by Black Sparrow Press.
- The Jack London papers and related materials were used by Alex Kershaw in his book Jack London: a life, published by Harper Collins, London (1998).
- The Mark Twain papers and Julian Hawthorne papers were used by Professor Keith Newlin (Department of English, University of North Carolina at Wilmington) for Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland, to be published by the University of Nebraska Press.
- The Bruce Porter papers were used by Professor Ignas Skrupskelis (Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina) for vol. 6 of the Correspondence of William James.
- The Harry Leon Wilson Papers and Wallace Irwin papers have been used by Professor D. C. Smith (University of Maine) for the Collected Letters of H. G. Wells, published by Pickering & Chatto (1996-98).
Jack von Euw is Curator of
Pictorial Collections.
Volume 114
Spring 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft Launches Bioscience Program with Stellar Symposium March 12–13
From the Director: Just what is it that you do, exactly?
The Business of the Humanities The “Trade”— what it is and how Bancroft uses it
The Thrill of the Chase Or, How the Biography of Poet Jack Spicer Came To Be
“The Times, They Are a’ Changin’” Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive
The Many Uses of Bancroft Collections
Joseph Esherick’s Oral History Illuminates an Architectural Icon
Where Do You “Find” Mark Twain’s Letters?
1999’s Keepsake: San Francisco in the Early 1850s
Bancroft Fellows Research Women and Space, Tobacco and Chocolate
