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TINY THINGS

No. 60 (Fall/Winter 2024)

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On Pins and Needles

Jayne Ptolemy

Associate Curator of Manuscripts

Bah humbug! A quick perusal of daguerreotypes will yield any number of severe-looking portraits that hide any sense of humor the subjects might have possessed.

Above, left: [Older man], by Moses Sutton, daguerreotype. Detroit: [approximately 1851 to 1857]. David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography. The majority portion donated by David B. Walters in honor of Harold L. Walters, UM class of 1947 and Marilyn S. Walters, UM class of 1950.

Above, right: [Young woman], daguerreotype. [Kalamazoo, Michigan?]: [approximately 1855 to 1860]. David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography. The majority portion donated by David B. Walters in honor of Harold L. Walters, UM class of 1947 and Marilyn S. Walters, UM class of 1950.

The archetypical librarian has their hair severely styled, lips pursed, and a cranky “Shhhhh!” at the ready. But if you’ve spent any time amongst the staff at the Clements Library, you’ll know there’s far more chatter and laughter than shushing going on. Likewise, ask most people what they think of 18th- or 19th-century Americans, and they’ll likely describe some version of a dour, tight-laced party pooper. Black and white photographs often do little to dispel this myth.

The note accompanying the shad, written at a later date, reads, “Sarah Heaton Stiles and Polly Bishop Mansfield had a bet on and Polly was to give Sarah a shad, in payment. And she (Polly) made this shad, perhaps about 1850–2. They were young women.” Polly C. Bishop Mansfield Collection.

Once you start to look closely at the collections, however, all kinds of mirth, joy, and lightheartedness rise to the surface, painting a much rosier picture. By being attuned to the little things, whether at work or in the archival record, we begin to note moments of laughter and humor that counteract stereotypes.

Take, for example, these very traditional mid-19th century poems penned by a young Polly Bishop Mansfield on themes of friendship, remembrance, and perseverance. “Through all the changing scenes of life / Of sunshine or of sadness / Amid temptations, dangers, strife / Or in the hours of gladness / I ask one single boon from thee / My friend — wilt thou Remember me [?]”

While there’s a tenderness to the lines, there is admittedly also something rather anonymous about it. It feels like any number of young women might have written them, and you get little sense of Polly Bishop Mansfield as an actual person. If I’m being honest, I likely wouldn’t remember this on its own. It’s only the presence of a small, inside joke that elevates this collection to great heights. The poems, you see, are accompanied by a fish.

You’ll also see how someone—maybe Sarah Heaton Stiles or a descendant—loved it enough to not just save it, but to document the story behind its creation. In some ways it’s the smallest of things—two girls joking around, likely using remnants of materials they had on hand for more serious affairs to prank each other. But in other ways, it’s enormous. We get to see the light and humor of this friendship. Polly Bishop Mansfield’s more formal plea, “I ask one single boon from thee / My friend – wilt thou Remember me” carries a new weight, when we realize her friend absolutely did remember her and passed along her story, but for a delightfully unexpected reason. What actually makes someone memorable can be those shared moments of levity that make up a day or a cherished friendship. You often hold onto those tiny things tightest of all. Thinking about inside jokes and how women have quite literally used their needles to needle their friends, I was reminded of a collection of straight pins a former Curator of Manuscripts collected.
Zoomed-in image of the shad, showing the individual fibers that are part of a worn-down patch of the fabric.

Look even closer, and you’ll see just how much care Polly put into this silly shad—the smallest of stitches sewn, scales and eyes drawn on in ink, all of it carefully stuffed. 

Used to hold pieces of paper together, pins like these were handmade before the invention of automated pin machines around 1818. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, even called out pin manufacturing for the complexity of the task—“One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations.” These sharp little pieces of metal represent a specific moment in time, a particular manufacturing problem, and a surprisingly fascinating pre-history of staples and paperclips. But the Clements’ staff-created collection of tiny pins affixed to sheets of whatever paper was on hand always felt like it extended beyond the curatorial pack-rat impulse to save all of the scraps in service of telling even the smallest of tales.
An addendum to an account book that reads, "19 = 8 = 5"

This little addendum was pinned into one of Anthony Wayne’s account books. Notice all the other pinholes in the margin, suggesting there were many others like it, in this age before Post-It notes.

Pins from Croker Correspondence Collection (1830) and the Masten Family Papers (1869)

The collection of pins which were removed from documents throughout the Clements Library’s holdings for more than a decade remains uncataloged and still awaits a finding aid.

And indeed, this transfer of tiny things started as a joke about how we as colleagues collaborate . . . and sometimes give each other headaches. Differing views about what types of materials were under the purview of which collecting division have periodically caused tension, and this playful jab brought that distinction down to the tiniest of elements.  Because metal rusts and cuts, for the safety of readers and papers alike, straight pins like these might have to be removed. If we’re inclined to split hairs to make a point about categorical distinctions, what happens if we claim straight pins are ephemera or realia, and thus should be transferred to the Graphics Division for safekeeping? What happens if a Graphics Curator plays along and prints a label, safely houses them, and formally incorporates them into a very real collection? We end up not only having on hand a small sampling of pins that do, in fact, tell us something about manuscript culture, but we also gain a demonstration of curatorial humor that hints at tongue-in-cheek workplace politics.
Whether it’s a miniature fish or the smallest of pins, at the Clements you can uncover evidence of how we all needle each other in small ways. Sibling rivalries, inside jokes, and workplace pranks are all rooted in the tiny ways we express ourselves in relationships and refuse to take ourselves too seriously . . . no matter how straight-faced we might appear in a daguerreotype.