Return of the Blog, and new series

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It’s been some time since the Easton Library Database team has been active on this space, but we’re returning for another summer’s dive into the archive with a new series of blog posts.

This series, which we’re calling “Shadows of the Library,” is in the spirit of Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow (a collective favorite among the team) in which we share some history-inspired fiction based on the discoveries we make. Many discoveries in archival research, as those who have done this kind of work know, lead to dead ends, missing connections, and puzzles that can’t be solved. Matthew Pearl is a master at taking these research dead ends and imagining plausible ways to fill in the gaps—and offer some wisdom about how little we know about history. (Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties is another fine example of this approach to historical research and writing.)

We’ll continue to write about discoveries, questions for readers, and other matters, but these “Shadows” pieces will offer an imaginative channel for some of the intriguing—and often frustrating—finds we’re making among these materials.

And just a quick update on the project: We’re deep into the third of five ledgers, which puts us in the neighborhood of 1830 or twenty years into the borrowing records for the ELC. We’re still transcribing the ledgers, and this summer we plan to start adding biographical data on the patrons and making progress on finally getting this database live and available to the public. Thanks for your patience, all who have been following this project in various venues, and stay tuned for more to come.

Layout of the Ledgers, and Issues: names

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I’ve been working through the first ELC ledger for a few weeks now, and am starting to get more and more comfortable with the format of the pages.  I thought this first post would be a good opportunity for me to explain exactly how I “read” a ledger page, and how I work around some of the obstacles that arise in the process.

At first glance, everything in these tomes appears to be self-explanatory. At the top of any ledger page is the name of the individual shareholder in question, alongside the number of library shares that person owns (note – sometimes account transfers are recorded in this space as well). The librarians wisely decided to organize these books in pages of two, so that each shareholder has enough “horizontal space” to display his/her book records.

Below, we have 8 columns that divide up the pages into these criteria: name of book, book number, time when (book was) taken out of library, time when (book is) to be returned without damages, acknowledgement of the reading by signature, when they (the books) were returned, and in what condition the books were returned. The volume of the selected book is usually recorded in the “name” column, and fines are usually recorded in the “condition” column.

The “acknowledgement of the reading by signature” is where things start to become tricky. This space is supposed to be filled by the person who physically picks up the book from the desk, which is not necessarily the titular shareholder. It may be his wife, his neighbor, his best friend, etc. However, there’s no consistency for these entires. One space might appear as “Sarah,” while another reads “daughter Sarah,” yet another as simply “his daughter.” More often than not though, a name will simply appear out of the blue – say, Azariah G. Orton – with no further elaboration on how the person is aquainted with the shareholder. Such entries will entail hours of genealogical research in the future; sleuthing to uncover how the shareholder and representative were related.

Things are further complicated by preceding phrases such as “by” “for” and “per order to.” Likewise, abbreviations make distinguishing the name William (abbreviated as Wm.) from honorifics (Mr. and Mrs.) challenging, and will prove frustrating for those interested in research. A “J. Miller” entry, for example, is far less helpful to someone looking through death records than one that reads “Josiah T. Miller.” Last – but by no means least – is the issue of penmanship, spelling, and legibility. If a signature is recorded in haste, or the individual just has bad handwriting, the name can be nearly impossible to discern (this occurs with book titles as well – refer to Knickerbottom post). You can imagine how many of these issues compound, and slow down the transcription process considerably.

P.S. – If you have a few spare hours, you might want to rack you brain with this entry. My guess…. Matthias Fiznourand. Your help is much obliged.

 

 

Knickerbottom (ahem)

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F. O. C. Darley drawing of Diedrich Knickerbocker, from Wikipedia

Gavin and I ran into a strange transcription problem this week: how to match a book to the one-word entry “Knickerbottom” given for a loan on George Washington Arndt’s account? WorldCat has no matches; a Google search gives…well, no books published before 1811, let’s just say that.

Based on the cataloging number associated with the record, it turns out that the book the librarian was recording was Washington Irving’s breakthrough work, A History of New-York (1809), often referred to as Knickerbocker’s History after the fictional author-figure that Irving invented for the book and that would return in The Sketch-Book (1819) as the narrator of Irving’s most famous stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”

Like those stories, which are almost the only American material in what is more or less a fictionalized travelogue of Europe, the ELC’s early loan records show Irving as one of the few popular American choices.  Even in the first year of the library’s existence, the “Knickerbottom” record marked the second time that Arndt took out the book (signed for with a sloppy signature—19c readers would likely have connected it to the dissipated lifestyle that Arndt’s brother, Benjamin Franklin Arndt, accused his brother of leading in the family memoir), and Irving shows up in many of the other records in the first ledger as well.

This popularity in Easton was part of a wave that helped to cement both Irving and his cranky antiquarian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, as American icons, and the term “Knickerbocker” became synonymous for “New Yorker” with such tenacity that everything from a 19c literary magazine to NYC’s current NBA team have carried the name (yes, “Knicks” is short for “Knickerbockers”).  But in 1811, nobody had heard of Diedrich Knickerbocker before, unless they were up on their belletristic reading, and the ELC’s librarians, who misspelled German names all over the place, were clearly having trouble with the Dutchified spelling of Irving’s character.  At least the earlier entry had a more benign error: “Knickerbacker.”  And now, we’ve gotten to the, er, bottom of this mystery.

ELC—First Post

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This is the first entry in a blog dedicated to tracking and commenting on the Easton Library Company database project.  In case you’re wondering what the project is, here are the basics.

The first public library in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley was the Easton Library Company, a shareholding institution modeled on the Library Company of Philadelphia.  It opened in 1811 with 100 shareholders, and from that day until 1862, all the ELC’s loan activity was recorded in five folio ledgers that still survive in the current Easton Area Public Library, a descendent institution of the ELC.

Those five ledgers have been digitized by staff at Lafayette College’s Skillman Library, and a research team is currently working on transcribing, interpreting, and entering the ELC’s loan records into a database that will be available for free to the public on the Web once completed.

An earlier phase of this project involved transcribing, verifying, and correcting the ELC’s printed 1855 catalog, the latest of three catalogs produced by ELC librarians (the others, in manuscript only, were made in 1816 and 1832).  Please email Prof. Chris Phillips if you’re interested in gaining access to the spreadsheet we’ve generated from the 1855 catalog.

As we work toward transcribing the loan records and moving the database closer to launch, members of the research team and other collaborators will contribute posts discussing methods, findings, interesting background information, and (hint, hint) answers to any questions that readers might have.  Anyone is welcome to post a comment, subject to moderation by the site’s administrator, Prof. Chris Phillips of Lafayette College.

Please also check out the “about” page for further information, and watch for more pages to be developed providing more details about the ELC, its members, and its books as the project continues.