Paul J. Erickson

Randolph G. Adams Director

William L. Clements Library

People ask me all the time what my job is like. Directing a rare book library and archive of early American history is not something that a lot of people realize is a thing that someone might get to do. And I usually tell them the truth: my job is a huge amount of fun. It’s deeply satisfying to help students, researchers, and instructors find ways to answer questions by using one of the best collections of early Americana in the country.

But I don’t usually tell them the complete truth. Because, if I were being honest, I would tell them that a lot of my job is about something that they might not find so exciting: Boxes. I spend a lot of time thinking about boxes. A good portion of every week is dedicated to opening boxes, which is exciting, since that usually means new additions to the collection. But it can also be a lot of boxes. This past year I bought my own personal box cutter — it’s bright purple, so I won’t lose track of it — and using a tool that is fit for purpose has made the box-opening work more pleasant.

you? Because the theme of this issue of The Quarto is “Contain Yourself.” It’s about the things that hold (or held) the things in our collection that researchers come to use. The frame around the picture, the envelope that carries a letter safely to its destination, the printed box that holds a board game, homemade bindings on books.

Most of the time, these containers are, for us at the Clements, of secondary interest to the things they hold. It is true that when we’re buying things like 19th-century board games, we look for examples with intact boxes, not least because the game instructions are often printed on the box. But we don’t usually collect empty game boxes, just as we don’t collect empty daguerreotype cases or envelopes without letters (although there are many people who do).

Still, just because these containers are not our primary collecting interest does not mean that they don’t have a lot to tell us about how people in the American past lived with books and images. When people looked at the books on their shelves, they saw the bindings, not the contents. Visually, people experienced much of the world of words indirectly, through the containers that held and organized those words. The way that people in the past framed pictures of loved ones can tell us a lot about what those relationships meant, just as the way that people decorated envelopes they sent through the mail can tell us a great deal about how they felt about the person they were writing to.

“Contain” is a word that can mean a lot of different things. To take the example of the acid-free boxes that we buy at the Clements, we use those to contain manuscript collections, newspapers, prints — things that we want to keep organized, but even more so things that we want to protect. If old letters or newspapers were just kept in piles on the shelf, their edges would get snagged and torn every time someone walked past. We put those things in containers to protect them from harm.

But to contain something is also to keep it from harming us. We work to contain oil spills, or forest fires. We also put things in containers to protect us from what’s inside. Old letters and photographs can be painful. They can remind us of heartbreak, of the death of loved ones, of ways that we failed those we care about. Many of us probably have at least one box of letters or pictures on a shelf in a closet that we can’t bring ourselves to throw away, but that we also probably never open. By keeping them in a container, we keep ourselves safe.

One of the standard stops on any tour of the Clements Library is a visit to two big boxes, at the west end of the reading room. On the bottom shelf of a two-tiered wooden stand is Henry Clinton’s uniform trunk, an elaborately embellished leather-covered piece of luggage created for the commander in chief of Britain’s forces in North America. We talk more about the box on the shelf above it, a more prosaic square wooden trunk covered in heavy canvas. It is one of twelve document trunks that held the correspondence of General Thomas Gage during his stint as commander in chief, from 1763 to 1775 — one trunk per year. (We only have three left, which is a story for another Quarto.)

As many of you have seen, the Gage trunks are organized into two layers of cubbyholes, which are labeled according to geography. While the manuscripts in the Gage Papers are essential to understanding the coming of the American Revolution, I’d argue that the trunk is essential to understanding Thomas Gage. He was a man who was responsible for a continent — all of Britain’s colonial possessions in North America. How he physically contained his letters tells us a lot about how he organized his thoughts, and about how he approached his job. Maybe the box business isn’t so boring after all.

Emiko Hastings

Curator of Books

Earlier this year, the Clements Library Book Division made an exciting acquisition with the purchase of the Garrett Scott Collection of Vernacular Bindings. Scott, an antiquarian bookdealer in Ann Arbor, coined the term “vernaculopegy” to describe the art of vernacular bindings, derived from the term “bibliopegy” for the art of bookbinding. His working definition of “vernacular binding” is “an alteration or addition to the book, pamphlet or leaf, when this alteration is made by an owner whose vocation is not bookbinding or associated book arts, when this modification is meant to enhance, protect, repair, or reinforce the structure of the item.” In other words, these are books that have been modified and repaired by their former owners. Amendments such as handmade book coverings and visible repairs are evidence of the ways that these books were used and cared for by previous generations.

The intention of the vernacular binding collection, as Scott writes, is to “open the doors to historical everyday users.” His manifesto urges book dealers and owners to notice and value these bindings in their own right, and not simply discard them as ugly or clumsy repairs. In this respect, it is as much a collection of evidence of reading and book ownership as it is of books. Including more than 300 volumes, the collection contains numerous examples of overcovers, added paper wrappers, and non-professional repairs such as rebacking and visible sewing.

Stack of cloth overcovers

The new vernacular binding collection complements existing examples in the Clements Library collections and bolsters a long-standing interest in describing these types of bindings. A number of years ago, the binding historian Julia Miller did a survey of the library’s bookbindings and wrote descriptions of many of them that have been added to the library’s online catalog. Some of this work is discussed in Miller’s Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings, first published in 2010 and revised and enlarged in 2023. Miller encourages readers to notice and appreciate ordinary or plain historical bindings as well as decorative ones, and respect repairs made to a book as evidence of the history of that particular book. She writes, “A book with its mends is, like a life, much worked upon, as we strive to continue whole and productive. Historical bindings, even broken and mended, still have a lot to tell us.”

Window cutouts

While repairs are more common for cheaper books, they do not necessarily indicate that the owner did not value the book. As Miller notes, amateur repairs are common in “working books” like dictionaries, textbooks, and manuals that would have been heavily used and needed to remain functional. Vernacular bindings are also seen on well-loved but tattered books that were “read to pieces,” such as children’s books and music books, as well as personally meaningful volumes like prayer books and Bibles. The elements most likely to need repair are the hinges of the book, which sustain damage over time as the book is opened and closed repeatedly. This can be handled by crafting an overcover to hold the boards onto the text block, by repairing the spine with new material, or by stitching the boards back to the text block.

Removable cover showing original binding and overcover

Rebacking

Rebacking a book is a technique by which a damaged book spine is replaced and the boards reattached. In traditional bookbinding, this usually involves inserting new spine material underneath the existing cover material, and the original spine is often pasted back over the new spine to preserve its appearance. The examples of amateur rebacking in this collection differ in that the new spine material is pasted or sewn over the primary cover rather than inserted underneath, making the repair more obvious but still functional. This repair method is a straightforward solution to a problem, similar to the way a modern book owner may use adhesive tape to repair their book.

Repairing a page with sewing

Books with exposed exterior stitching repairs are also colloquially known as “Frankenbooks,” a term coined on Instagram by the American Antiquarian Society. A post by Galter Special Collections says, “Similar to Frankenstein’s monster, Frankenbooks are books that have been stitched back together to give them new life.” The stitching may look crude compared to what a trained bookbinder would have done, but if done carefully, it can still prolong the life of the book and restore its function.

Embellishment

Lastly, the definition of vernacular bindings can encompass other decorative additions to the book made by an owner, such as cover embellishments or artwork on the endpapers. These can range from doodles likely done by a child to exquisitely detailed ownership inscriptions and embroidery work.

Added wrappers

Traditionally, rare book collectors such as our founder, William L. Clements, prioritized books in pristine condition or with decorative bindings made by skilled craftspeople. Likewise, librarians and book historians have often focused their attention on the most lavish or unusual binding examples rather than the ordinary styles of bindings most often encountered on library shelves. While plain bindings and folk repairs have always existed in the Clements book collection, they were not necessarily considered worth describing in detail until binding scholars like Julia Miller began to generate more interest in the subject. Today, those who study book history and bookbinding have come to appreciate such repairs and other traces of former ownership, part of a growing interest in marginalia and other provenance evidence of past readers and owners of books. Far from detracting from the value of a book, these alterations can help us learn how readers of the past used their books in everyday life. We are excited to begin cataloging the Scott Collection so that it can be made available for study and to encourage similar collecting efforts by other institutions and private collectors.

Jayne Ptolemy

Associate Curator of Manuscripts

Admit it. When going through your mail, besides a cursory glance, you don’t really pay much attention to the envelope. We rip it open to get to the good stuff (or the bill. These days it’s usually a bill.) Regardless, the envelope isn’t the point; it’s just the packaging. In the library world, we’re guilty of this, too. Browse our finding aids, and you’ll see detailed descriptions of a collection’s content and then the ubiquitous phrase “… and empty envelopes.” We’ll count them, sure, but we absolutely will stack them in a folder at the back of the box and expect almost no one to look at them seriously. Like most things in life, though, once you shift your perspective and look more closely, give attention to the smaller or seemingly insignificant things, there’s so much more to learn.

An envelope can reveal a lot about the sender’s personality or intentions. Before the nineteenth century, postal charges were largely calculated by the number of sheets being sent. To save money, most letters were simply folded upon themselves and sealed with wax, and the address was written on the blank panel of the back page. By 1845, postage charges were being calculated by weight and distance, meaning that using an envelope made far more sense. With literacy booming and populations becoming more dispersed, by midcentury, letters safely nestled in their envelopes were being sent in record numbers. To meet the demands, machines were built to automate the production and gumming of envelopes. A correspondent’s trip to the local stationer would reveal a whole range of options in how to write and send mail.

The Patricia Wilczak Funeralia Collection includes boxes of mourning stationery, with their black-edged envelopes, which would have been used by those who had experienced a loss.

As part of elaborate 19th-century death practices, the bereaved could purchase writing paper and envelopes with black borders whose width signaled the “nearness of the relationship, and the recentness of the bereavement.” The chilling effect of seeing a postal delivery of such an envelope quickly entered the cultural lexicon. The illustrated sheet music for “The Letter Edged in Black” shows a mail carrier holding the dreaded black-edged envelope. The refrain homes in on this visual cue’s impact: “As I heard the Postman whistling yester-morning coming down the pathway with his pack, O he little knew the sorrow that he brought me, when he handed me a letter edged in black.” This tradition was one that lasted, as Hattie Nevada’s song would be recorded by numerous artists, including Marty Robbins, Slim Whitman, and Johnny Cash.

While options for printed envelopes were becoming increasingly available throughout the 19th century, if a writer’s talents and inclinations allowed, some chose to embellish their envelopes themselves. Examples of drawings,

The beautiful embossed envelope lends additional romance to this rhyming Valentine’s poem from 1858 in the Women, Gender, and Family Collection.

These three envelopes from the Pen-and-Ink Collection were hand-illustrated by different writers, but they’re united by their desire to stand out amid a flood of other correspondence.

By the 1860s, the combination of chromolithography and new mechanical processes to produce envelopes changed the game. Patriotic covers became a way to declare your political allegiances in times of upheaval; businesses could advertise themselves on the outside as well as the inside of their mailings; and people’s creativity blossomed to take advantage of the medium. If you have the option to expand the scope of your message, and it’s cheap to do so, why not use every square inch of paper? Bright colors, smart designs, dense text—in the late 19th century, innovative printers revolutionized people’s ideas of what an envelope could be.

Letters, and their envelopes, can tell us grand narratives about postal history and the steady advance of industrialization, technology, and communication, but they’re also a reminder that it’s only by looking at all the evidence before us that we can really get a glimpse of the people who came before us. So zoom in and be curious. Look closely, for example, at all the mail just this one U.S. Postal Service employee from Detroit was carrying with him: newspapers, letters bundled together with twine, parcels wrapped in paper, and many envelopes with stories of their own to tell. After all, a library like the Clements is a testament to just how much people have written down in the past, and all the ingenious ways they’ve devised to carry, save, and treasure these records.

These printed envelopes from the Postal History Collection advertise the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, and the memorable visual messaging surely underscored the public’s awareness that it was happening in BUFFALO, New York.

Sierra Laddusaw

Curator of Maps and Graphics

Gavitt’s Stock Exchange was issued in a classic tuck box.

The humble game box hasn’t changed much since the 19th century. If you enter your local board game store today, you will find a variety of games housed in colorful tuck boxes and two-piece boxes. Tuck boxes are most often used for card games and are made by folding thick paper and tucking in the ends. Gavitt’s Stock Exchange (Gavitt Publishing & Printing, 1903), a card game where players trade “stock” in an attempt to corner the market, was issued in a tuck box printed on all sides in a variety of typefaces and sizes. Two-piece boxes, as the name implies, are two separate boxes that when put together form a lid and base. The lid box is slightly larger than the base box and slides over it when closing the box. Milton Bradley’s 1898 game Conette is a good example of a two-piece box, with the illustrated lid fitting tightly over the base. Bradley is often credited with creating the modern board game industry, and it should come as no surprise that he was a pioneer in producing games with appealing boxes, since his first commercial venture was as a

The box for Madame le Normand’s Mystic Cards of Fortune is illustrated with a fortune teller and her cat.

the box for Conette, which shows shoppers how the game is set up and a group of three adults playing. Other box designs were more fanciful, creating an entirely fictional scene. Madame le Normand’s Mystic Cards of Fortune (McLoughin Bros., 1887) is illustrated with a fortune teller decked out in medieval garb and accompanied by a black cat, reading someone’s fortune. In both cases, shelf appeal was the point.

While game boxes are designed to be durable, inevitably the boxes of frequently played games fall apart, as most boxes are made from paper or cardboard. The corners get dented in when dropped. The seam holding the box together separates. The entire box gets smashed, with the sides collapsing out. Today, you might use tape to repair a broken game box. The previous owner of one game at the Clements, a set of picture puzzle blocks (Klee, circa 1940), repaired the game’s box by wrapping and gluing cloth around the box. Other games in the collection are housed in boxes made at the library. Abbott’s Drawing Cards (Saxton & Miles, 1845) was originally issued in a tuck box. Over time, that box has fallen apart, and all that remains are two sides. To store and protect the cards and what remains of the original box, the Clements Library conservator built a custom tuck box for the game.

Abbott’s Drawing Cards lack their complete original box and are now stored in a custom-made tuck box made by the Clements Library’s conservator.

Maggie Vanderford

Librarian for Instruction and Engagement

Imagine that you have two items on a table in front of you. One is an impressively formal manuscript wedding certificate, dated May 14, 1838, and signed by various witnesses — many of whom were leaders of the abolitionist movement in the antebellum United States. The other item is a small ivory moiré silk wedding purse, hand-painted with popular, sentimental engravings depicting the plight of enslaved women. Now take a moment to think: Which item tells you more about that wedding day? Which one would you use as “evidence” in a research paper about the wedding? Which gives you better insight into the bride? The groom? Their relationship?

These questions, developed with Associate Curator of Manuscripts Jayne Ptolemy, are ones we regularly pose to students in History 202 as part of their introduction-to-the-archives experience on their visits to the Clements Library. Of course, no “right” answer exists. Our only goal is to push them to make an argument — any argument — about the role of community in religious ceremonies, fashion as personal advocacy, the use of visual images in the abolitionist movement, or any number of other approaches depending on their interests and questions. As they learn in this class and in their future archival work, sources will not often explicitly tell you which historical arguments they can be used to support. It is often the work of the historian to, as our colleague Dr. Rebecca Scott describes it, “get the documents to speak.” More often than not, students leave their first archival visit with more questions than answers: When did women begin carrying wedding purses? When did they stop? Was it common to use fashion as a political statement in the 19th century? Why was William Lloyd Garrison at the wedding? This organic, genuine curiosity inspired by the in-person encounter with material artifacts from the past has always seemed to me an ideal way to initiate a relationship with the archive and its possibilities. Both the wedding certificate and the purse are indeed part of a cornerstone collection at the Clements Library, the Weld-Grimké Family Papers. These specific items relate to the marriage of the famous abolitionist-activist couple Theodore Dwight Weld and Angelina Emily Grimké Weld.

The Clements Library holds the wedding certificate documenting the marriage of Theodore Dwight Weld and Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, celebrated on May 14th, 1838. The certificate bears the signatures of many prominent abolitionist attendees from around the country, including William Lloyd Garrison.

At least, they might be? As I sat in my office after a recent class session (pleased as punch with our innovative approach to primary source instruction and patting myself on the back for a job well done), I took a closer look at the finding aid for the Weld-Grimké Family Papers. While the wedding certificate is undoubtedly the genuine article documenting their wedding day, the purse is described as “possibly Angelina’s wedding purse.” Suddenly, I found myself drawn into the same rabbit holes I regularly ask our students to climb down. Possibly? Had we been asking the wrong question all along? And had I been misleading our students about the origins of this purse

As it turns out, little evidence exists to definitively affirm or deny the possibility that Angelina walked down the aisle or attended the reception with this specific bag in hand. Newspaper articles about the wedding did describe her wardrobe — a brown dress, reminiscent of the Quaker imperative regarding “plain dress” — made with “free cotton,” sourced from producers that did not use enslaved labor. The wedding itself was an unprecedented abolitionist spectacle and was strategically designed to employ only vendors who supported the cause. The wedding confectioner was a baker of color who used “free sugar” in the cake itself, and the event invitation featured a letterhead with the famous “kneeling slave” motif designed by Josiah Wedgwood — the very icon painted on our silk purse. The wedding certificate indeed lists the names of dozens of prominent abolitionists attending what was as much a high-profile advocacy gala as it was a celebration of love.

Materially, the purse certainly makes a statement in line with the ethical goals of the wedding. On one side of the purse is a hand-painted version of an engraving by English designer Samuel Lines, depicting a female slave holding a child in her arms and seemingly in distress. On the reverse is the iconic kneeling slave symbol, modified from Wedgwood’s original medallion design to portray a female slave. The medallion was originally produced in 1787 for the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, but reproduced in 1828 to bring attention to the plight of female slaves. Both images were powerful, popular, and immediately recognizable images meant to evoke the intensity of feeling that drove the abolitionist movement. As such, they were printed and distributed on all sorts of materials, from pincushions to jewelry to prints and even bags. The silk purse in the Clements collections is nearly identical to other drawstring purses produced by the Female Society for Birmingham, which created and sold these fashionable accessories to wealthy abolitionist women in Britain. However, while other similar versions exist, no known version is actually identical to the Clements purse. Other purses held by the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and various historical societies all feature anti-slavery poetry printed on the back of the purse, rather

than a verso image. Moreover, the close eye of Clements Library Conservator Julie Fremuth detects that the Clements purse appears not to be printed, but hand-painted and embellished with an iron gall ink to add dimension and tone. If not completely unique, it is at the very least distinct.

And thus, more questions arise. Did Angelina receive the purse as a special gift, or did she purchase it as a keepsake on one of her speaking circuits? Did she carry it at her wedding, or did it live in her armoire as a collectible item? What did owning a luxury item like this mean to a woman who lived her life in muted browns, blacks, patterns, and other “plain dress”? How did she understand the political implications of fashion? Even if she didn’t carry it at the wedding, how would she have used it or looked at it? If someone living 100 years from now plucked an item from your closet, could they learn something about you from studying it? Research questions, one and all.

Even as I am frustrated and humbled by the ways in which this particular document won’t speak to me as I wish it did, I realize how productive it is for archives to push back on our preconceived notions of the past, dispelling easy conclusions and adding complexity back into conversations. But this complexity can also sometimes be disappointing. I have questions about what Angelina carried in this purse — questions that I can’t answer. But I also have questions about what I’ve asked this purse to carry, both for me and my students. Thinking that Angelina carried the purse at her wedding gave me license to think about what it could tell me about her, about that day, and about her life. But not knowing whether it was used in this way sends those assumptions sideways. I had asked the purse to carry intellectual baggage that it can’t actually hold. This is a difficult lesson of teaching with archives, but also one of the most important.

Naomi Yu

Clements Library-UMSI Intern

If you go into any family home in the United States where children live, the odds are very high that you will encounter portraits of those children in some form: framed and arranged on a table, attached to the refrigerator with magnets, populating the hallways, etc. The U.S. tradition of displaying portraits of one’s children is a long-standing one. These images often serve two purposes: first, to present children at their best, inviting admiration from visitors; and second, to complement the home’s decor, neatly filling empty spots on the wall. With these familiar motivations in mind, I will focus here on a truly unique example of child portraiture that recently arrived at the Clements Library.

This past July, the Clements was delighted to purchase from noted rare book and periodical dealer Richard West his personal collection of illustrated humor periodicals from the last three decades of the 19th century, a collection that he assembled over the course of over 40 years. The centerpiece of any collection of illustrated humor is Puck, a monthly magazine of satirical political cartoons published by an Austrian immigrant named Joseph Keppler in New York. The magazine was published in German at its inception in 1876, but was subsequently published in English from 1877 onwards. Keppler gained fame for the caustic wit of his political satires and for his pioneering use of chromolithography.

The painted portrait of Joseph Keppler, Jr. measures only 17 x 13 inches. Its incredibly ornate frame more than doubles the size of the portrait, at 37 inches long by 26 inches wide. The carved figure at the top of the frame is almost 6 inches deep.

became a sailor and made his way to the United States, serving in the Civil War before becoming a photographer. By the late 1870s Kurtz was quite well-known as a photographer, and was a pioneer in popularizing the halftone process in the United States, which permitted photographs to be reproduced in print. Both men were German-speaking immigrants and belonged to an affluent German-American singing group known as the Liederkranz that also functioned as a fraternal organization. Though Keppler Sr. was himself a talented artist and could have painted his son himself, commissioning Kurtz may have been a gesture of friendship or professional respect — an act of fraternity within their elite social circle.

Keppler Sr. had risen from modest Austrian immigrant to a man of substantial means, building a large house on top of a hill in Inwood, at the far northern tip of Manhattan. His home would have been richly decorated, filled with luxurious furnishings and objects meant to communicate his family’s status. In the late Victorian era, every item in the household was a statement of social standing. This portrait — likely hung in a formal space such as a parlor or drawing room — would have blended into the surrounding finery. This display of wealth would have been unusual at the time, as cartoonists historically did not make much money. Keppler Sr. was really the first cartoonist in the U.S. to achieve such monumental financial success. True to the spirit of the Gilded Age, even smaller and previously less profitable industries — like cartooning — suddenly found opportunities to expand and thrive on a much larger scale. The frame, as well as the origin of the painting, can be read as a symbol of Gilded Age prosperity and performance, all centered around one golden-haired child.

The portrait is a well-executed likeness, showing the young boy’s cheeks glowing with health, a full head of fluffy, golden curls. He wears a white suit with a blue necktie, accessorized with a fine gold necklace. This child is obviously well cared for, raised in comfort. The 19th century is commonly known as the birth of childhood, the first period in which children were seen as innocent and set apart, deserving of care and special attention. Before this era, children were often seen as small adults, and children from the lower classes were put to work at a very young age and expected to shoulder the responsibility of financially contributing to the household. With this context in mind, we can observe that not only is the frame a display of wealth, but also a display of care. Practically, frames are meant to protect paintings from harm. They are also tools to contain the visual field, and enhance it. They have a remarkable ability to elevate or lower a visual moment, acting as a strong signal to the viewer. For instance, if this portrait had been put in a plain, cheap frame, our viewing experience would immediately change, and we would come to different conclusions about the painting. We would assume, for instance, that this was not a precious painting, and therefore perhaps the child was not especially valued. The frame provides an emotional, cultural, and socioeconomic context that fundamentally changes the viewing experience, and this portrait of young Keppler is an excellent example of these contexts and signals.

In the end, the portrait of young Joseph Keppler Jr. — lavishly framed and lovingly rendered — fits squarely into the social and cultural context of a Gilded Age Manhattan mansion. It is the product of a father who had risen swiftly from immigrant beginnings to the peak of professional and social success, eager to surround himself with symbols of both status and sentiment. What might seem garish by today’s standards was, in its time, a potent expression of pride: in wealth, in artistic networks, and, most poignantly, in one’s children. The ornate frame does more than simply house a likeness — it magnifies the message of care, identity, and arrival. Though we will never fully know the emotional dynamics between Joseph Keppler Sr. and his son, the legacy speaks for itself: the younger Keppler honored his father by not only adopting his name but also following his artistic path, continuing the family’s imprint on American satire. This portrait, then, is more than decorative — it is a statement of lineage, ambition, and perhaps an enduring familial bond.

Cheney J. Schopieray

Curator of Manuscripts

The word “baggage” carries with it a sense of weight, bulk, and burden. Travelers’ trunks, barrels, and bags were filled with toiletries, changes of clothing for different social and practical needs, and much else. Moving them required careful packing, management, and manual labor. When Lena Smith planned a Nebraska-to-California trip in November 1904, she contemplated taking the Burlington railroad from Omaha, which had a local ticket opportunity to see friends southwest of Lincoln. This required that she send her luggage separately on a noon train through Lincoln, visit quickly, secure a carriage ride to Fairmont in time to catch the “Flyer,” which would then allow her to meet up with her luggage at McCook, Nebraska, before continuing west to California. After assessing a flurry of potential options sent by a friend, she abandoned her social calls at Lincoln, avoided the complexity of connecting modes of transport, and took the Union Pacific overland directly to Sacramento instead.

Many soldiers, immigrants, indentured and other laborers, itinerant educators and ministers, and homeless people traveled with much less. Their knapsacks, haversacks, parcels, and bags carried what they needed to get to the next town, next bed, next meal, next job. Without the privilege of carriage drivers, porters, or servants, the weight of even a few rudimentary necessities becomes heavy over time. When George Starbird went off to fight in the Civil War in July 1862, he kept it light, with few extras: only needles, thread, labels, pharmaceutical pills, and medical salve.

By the time the Clements Library staff first removed Frederick Hubbard’s x 24 cm (~9.5″) x 108 cm (~42.5″) passport from its tin tube, it suffered from split seams; tears bit into its edges, small sections were missing, and the different types of adhesives had in places lost their hold. In 2014 Clements Library Conservator Julie Fremuth carefully addressed its many issues, and now it is safely accessible (outside its container!) in the Thomas, Robert, and Frederick Hubbard Family Papers, 1803-1902.

Travel documents and clothing and other personal effects took material forms that dictated the shape of the items that carried them. Trunks, suitcases, barrels, slipcases — all were designed to hold and protect particular things, and all required different forms of labor to move them around.

But the things that travelers in the past packed into containers were not always transported by strong backs, seasoned arms, and muscled legs. “Emotional baggage” is a modern term — its earliest currently known use in print is from around the time of Lena Smith’s trip from Omaha to Sacramento. Terms such as “intellectual baggage” and “political baggage,” with similar figurative concepts, reach back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. They express how a person’s past actions, experiences, knowledge, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs encumber them in internal, interpersonal, and community relationships in the present.

Sometime in the 1850s, a young man — perhaps James R. Reeves of Kennebec County, Maine, or a family member — took a partially printed volume of blank receipts and turned it into a combination scrapbook, drawing pad, and handwritten storybook. The narrative portion follows the adventures of Ezekial and Hezekiah, both young scouts, and focuses on Ezekial as he wends his way through life’s challenges. Our protagonist suffers from despair and heartbreak as he and Hezekiah court the same young woman, Flora. The illustrator visualizes loss of hope through a remarkable yellow hat that spews “gas of hope” from the head of the despairing. This page shows the “Poor old maniac,

but once powerful scout, now dwindled away with sorrow for the lost Flora.” His bent body and tattered clothes are weighted down by the “grief bag” he shoulders, also presumably leaking hope from a tear in its fabric. His rival Hezekiah reaches out to offer the beleaguered young man something to eat, attempting to offer some solace. “Poor old fellow you must be hungry. Can I do anything for you, you seem to be weary of life. I guess I take you to a place of safety at once.” Ezekial responds “with great vigor”: “I’m not hungry it is grief that gnaws like hunger at my very vitals. No never. You are the man that ruined me, if I was a smart man as I … I would kill you.”

Horace P. Bigelow peppered his correspondence with illustrations, including this parcel of “regrets” offered to the recipient. His correspondence, along with a wealth of sources pertinent to the intermarried Bigelows, Huntingtons, Van Vechtens, Christies, and Danns are available for research thanks to gifts from family member and former Clements Library Director John C. Dann.

Angela Oonk

Director of Development

James Sayer produced this etching in 1788 of Alderman John Sawbridge holding out his hat in supplication with a paper inscribed, “Motion for a Reform in the Representation.”

The tradition of passing the hat reflects the power of grassroots fundraising. Now, we can be part of a community like the Clements Library Associates even when we are too far apart to place our contributions into a physical hat. As new needs arise at the Clements, online crowdfunding campaigns have brought people near and far together as they pool their resources in a virtual contribution box.

We invited you to throw your hat in the ring by participating in a recent crowdfunding campaign, “Bit by Bit: Digitizing Clements Collections.” These donations help make invaluable primary sources available online, anytime, anywhere, for free. To do this critical work, we need specialized, state-of-the-art digitization equipment that costs $50,000. This machine is specifically designed to be safe enough to work with fragile and valuable collections like those at the Clements. This is just one example of the power of coming together and passing the hat to bolster the work at the Clements Library. Hats off to our supporters and friends!

As you may know, I wear many hats in my role at the Clements. Once a month, I look forward to hosting The Clements Bookworm gathering together on Zoom to discuss books and historical topics. The virtual circle is further strengthened through engaging conversations and thought-provoking questions among participants. Our west coast friends deserve a feather in their caps for arising at the crack of dawn to join us for the live broadcast. We’re not talking through our hat — this year, the registrations for the Bookworm surpassed 2,500.

In other news, hold on to your hats, because we have begun marking important milestones in celebrating the U.S. Semiquincentennial like the upcoming student-curated exhibit marking the 250th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. The Clements collections offer a rich array of materials to better understand the conflict and follow the variety of individuals impacted.

Please invite your friends to visit the Clements — there is no reason to keep the information under your hat. (As an aside, do you know that Abraham Lincoln kept important papers in his top hat?) After all, it’s not too late to visit even if you graduated and threw your cap in the air!

Longtime Head of Reader Services Terese Murphy retired in early August. Terese first joined the Clements as a volunteer, and then later joined the staff, processing and cataloguing maps before spending fifteen years managing the library’s reading room and remote reference requests. Of more relevance to readers of this publication, she also served as editor of The Quarto. She has been succeeded by Joshua Sulser, who joined the staff in late August. Josh previously served as the Librarian of the Ingalls Library at the Cleveland Museum of Art. An Ohio native, Josh received his BA from Ohio Wesleyan University and his MLIS from Kent State University. We’re delighted to have Josh as a member of the Clements Library team! And congratulations to Terese on her retirement!

Curator of Books and Digital Projects Librarian Emiko Hastings published a review of Kate Ozment’s The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors in the September 2025 issue of The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.

Curator of Maps and Graphics Sierra Laddusaw attended the 2025 annual meeting of the Western Association of Map Libraries (WAML) in Moscow, Idaho. She co-led a pre-conference session on the future of the Online Guide to U.S. Map Collections. She also gave a presentation titled “Come to dwell among us”: Maps, Monsters, and a First Year Literature Course.” The presentation focused on how map librarians can adapt techniques students are learning in class for thinking about and critiquing literature to cartographic materials.

Associate Curator of Manuscripts Jayne Ptolemy presented at the Organization of American Historians conference in Chicago in April. Jayne was part of a panel called “Joy and Pleasure in the Early Republic,” organized by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Her paper, “Interrupted Histories,” looked at evidence of interruption in manuscript sources to consider how people overcame (or at least acknowledged) the ever-present reality of distraction, and showed how irritating annoyances can shift into moments of community and connection.

Librarian for Instruction and Engagement Maggie Vanderford was awarded the University Librarian Recognition Award at the annual faculty awards ceremony on October 30. The award recognizes active and innovative early career achievement in library, archival or curatorial services. The award is a wonderful recognition of Maggie’s standing as a campus leader in library instruction.

This fall semester, the Clements Library has fourteen student workers and interns working at the library—an all-time high. (You can read about them on the Clements Chronicles blog.) They include undergraduates (majoring in fields from public policy to statistics to German) as well as graduate students in U-M’s School of Information. Thanks to all of the members of the Clements Library Associates whose gifts have helped support these important work opportunities.

Brian Leigh Dunnigan

Many members of the Clements Library community will share our deep sadness at the passing of Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Curator Emeritus of Maps. Brian passed away in Spring Arbor, Michigan on April 10, 2025, following a struggle with Parkinson’s disease.

Born in Detroit in 1949, Brian developed a lifelong passion for early American history—especially the French and Indian War, the Great Lakes, and the War of 1812. He was the son of Dorothy and James Dunnigan, one of Mackinac Island’s longest serving State Park Commissioners.

Brian spent his childhood and many summers on Mackinac Island, where he worked for ten seasons as a historic interpreter at Fort Mackinac and conducted research on the fort’s special collections related to the history of the island and its military outpost.

Brian earned both his undergraduate and graduate degrees in history from the University of Michigan, followed by a second graduate degree in museum management from Cooperstown Graduate Program in Cooperstown, New York.

He became the first Director of Historic Fort Wayne in Fort Wayne, Indiana, before moving on to direct and oversee the development of Old Fort Niagara in Youngstown, New York. During his tenure, Brian established numerous historical reenactment programs and publications, and fostered cross-border collaborations with Fort George in Niagara-on-the- Lake, Ontario, and Fort York in Toronto. He also served as an adjunct faculty member at the University at Buffalo.

Among his many accomplishments at Old Fort Niagara, one of the most significant was the return and restoration of the fort’s historic War of 1812 flag from Megginch Castle in Scotland to its home in Youngstown, New York. In 1996, Brian joined the Clements Library as the Curator of Maps.

In addition to caring for the map collections and pursuing his own research, Brian expanded his responsibilities to serve as the Clements’ Interim Director from 2007 to 2008 and was appointed Associate Director in 2010. He also provided leadership for the library’s fellowship programs and served as editor of The Quarto

His scholarly achievements were numerous, but among his most notable publications are Frontier Metropolis (2001) and A Picturesque Situation (2008), both of which reflect his deep expertise and enduring passion for early American history and cartography.

Brian retired from the Clements in July of 2019. In recognition of his many contributions, the Clements Library established the Brian Leigh Dunnigan Fellowship in the History of Cartography to support researchers using the library’s collections of maps. Brian is deeply missed by all of his former colleagues for his vast knowledge of the library’s map collection, as well as his thoughtfulness, generosity, and good humor.