BART? In Bancroft?: Book ARTifacts Collection Documents Written Communication Through the Centuries
At Bancroft, BART is not a mode of public transport but the Book ARTifacts collection — an assemblage of objects dating back over 4,000 years that provides tangible documentation of the processes of written communication.
BART's oldest document is a rock: a piece of limestone from the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Teti (ca. 2345-2330 BC) inscribed with his official seal, or cartouche, in hieroglyphics. Among the collection's latest additions is a Macintosh PC IIe with printer and user's manual (the gift of former Bancroft staff member Richard Ogar). Between these chronological extremes the collection contains a continuum of rare, unusual, and commonplace items intended to demonstrate the technology of communication.
A few years ago, I mentioned to Karl Kasten, professor emeritus of art practice, that the BART Collection lacked an etching press. Not long after our chat, he located a small 1890s model and presented it as his gift to the Library on behalf of the California Society of Printmakers. |
The BART collection dates back to printer Roger Levenson's gift in 1956 of a super-royal Albion handpress to the University Library's rare book department.
Today the BART collection includes Babylonian clay tablets, papyrus, ostraca (writing on pot shards), vellum and paper specimens, paper and type molds, type punches and matrices, binders' equipment, samples of every conceivable book imposition, demonstration material for all types of illustration, exhibit pieces of photographic reproduction processes, nine printing presses, a ton-or-so of type (usable and unusable), linotype and monotype exhibit pieces, a complete set of music engraving tools, and specimens of wax seals and historical medals. Not to mention the Mac.
Bancroft staff prides itself in taking an active role in teaching. I am often asked to present first and early editions of works that students of all levels have read in class so they will have a sense of what these books looked like when they were new.
I point out that the technology available to early scribes and printers has a direct impact on the text that present-day students read. Medieval scribes made mistakes; when/if they were caught, how were they corrected? What options does vellum offer for correcting mistakes that paper doesn't? If there's no room for the correction, what do you do? Why are some pages of Shakespeare's First Folio crammed while others are spaced out? Why is its spelling so irregular? What is the significance of a binding?
If printing is a mechanical process, why are there no exact duplicates from the early period? What are English and American "plates" for 19th- and 20th-century publications? What are the implications for reprints and new editions? Why do mid-19th-century popular periodicals have huge illustrations printed with the text while illustrations in 17th- and 18th-century books are printed as plates?
These are questions our students should ask; BART provides the answers.
Some printing processes defy understanding without demonstration, such as copperplate etching. No one would believe it could work from a description. But when I put a plate on the rolling press and go through the grunting and groaning that is part of pulling a proof, students' disbelief becomes comprehension. When you've handled pieces of type and seen them lined up in a composing stick, when you've understood the problems of justifying a line of metal slugs, when you realize that no one is going to check your spelling, you know why so many early book texts give modern editors fits.
Flora Elizabeth Reynolds, librarian emerita of Mills College, has been volunteer cataloguer and unofficial curator of the BART collection for more than 20 years. Here she shows off French type cut ca. 1820 under the supervision of Pierre Didot. Photo by Peg Skorpinski |
Many special collections libraries have a printing press for demonstrations, but scarcely any have a collection of the depth, breadth, and chronological range of Bancroft's holdings. BART is a museum collection in support of a library. Its artifacts explain how the written and printed documents that students and scholars examine in our reading room were made, thus making them more understandable.
The BART Collection also supports the biannual Friday afternoon class taught in the Library: "The Hand Printed Book in its Historical Context."
Students use types, presses, and other equipment from the collection to produce a class project, usually a pamphlet drawing on material in Bancroft collections. Like most of the class publications since 1983, this year's productions have both been selected for inclusion in the Rounce & Coffin Club's Western Books Exhibition: The Last Words of Arthur Rimbaud by Barry Gifford and Seeing the Elephant, excerpts from the Gold Rush journal of E. A. Ingalls. The Rimbaud was designed and printed under the supervision of Peter Koch in 40 copies; the Ingalls journal was edited and designed by Les Ferriss with an introduction by Kerwin Klein, Assistant Professor of History, in 35 copies.
It's all very well to have a wonderful collection of typographical artifacts, but it must be publicized to reach its full potential. In 1985 Bancroft published a 48-page, illustrated Guide to the Book Artifacts Collection. This summer we published the second edition of the Guide, now expanded to 61 pages to reflect 15 years of additions to the holdings.
This new Guide, like the first one, is the labor of love of Flora Elizabeth Reynolds, librarian emerita of Mills College, who has reported to Bancroft on Thursday mornings for over 20 years as cataloguer and unofficial curator of the BART collection. Her devotion to the collection and to its founders, my predecessor Leslie Clarke and Roger Levenson, is an inspiration.
Before long, the BART Guide will go on-line. That way, Bancroft's cyber-friends will be able to search for wood-engraved blocks by Thomas Bewick, bookbinders' cloth samples, typographical ornaments from the Merrymount Press, the smallest Bible in the world, and thousands of other artifacts at the squeak of a mouse.
In the 15 years since the first edition of the Guide, there have been a variety of acquisitions. When the typographic laboratory of the School of Library and Information Science in South Hall closed, Bancroft was very pleased to receive the South Hall Paper Mill equipment and the 1861 crown broadside Albion handpress.
Our late director James D. Hart's own iron handpress, a 1913 Reliance (Washington-style) is now here as well.
Copies of the 1999 revised edition of the Guide to the Book Artifacts Collection can be had from the Library for $5, tax and postage included. |
Smaller items include examples of the polymer plates now in favor with fine press printers and an early (possibly 16th-century) woodblock from an edition of Virgil's Aeneid.
Some less obvious objects figure among the most recent additions to BART: an IBM selectric II typewriter (with extra ribbons, correction tape, and printing balls) and the last package of carbon paper in the Library. In another hundred years, how many institutions will be able to demonstrate the functioning of an electric typewriter? And carbon paper, now disappearing after 100 years of use, will be just as mysterious as the letterpress copybook technology that preceded it. Nothing becomes so rare as the commonplace.
Also slated for inclusion in BART is the manual typewriter used by Leslie Clarke and Elizabeth Reynolds. But not right now; Elizabeth is still using it.
--Anthony Bliss
Anthony Bliss is Bancroft's Curator of Rare Books and Literary Manuscripts.
Volume 115
Fall 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft's Marvelous Medieval French Manuscripts
From the Director: Biotech at Bancroft
Cataloging the Teatro Español Collection
New (Old) Mark Twain Found in Bancroft Scraps
Eleanor Swent Puts Her Mining Expertise to Work
Russian Emigré Wins First Hill-Shumate Prize
Theresa Salazar Is New Curator for Bancroft Collection
New Oral History Catalog Covers Two Decades
Second Chronicle Salutes UC Women Since 1870
Desiderata: Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
