What can a woman do? This frontispiece begs the question. On her title page, Mrs. M. L. Rayne features the last verse of the poem “My Rights” by Susan Coolidge: “The fleet foot and the feeble foot / Both seek the self-same goal; / The weakest soldier’s name is writ / On the great army roll; / And God, who made the man’s body strong, made too the woman’s soul.” (Though its last line is omitted.) Rayne’s audience was likely familiar with What Katy Did, a short story by Coolidge about a young girl coming of age into gender norms. Her use of Coolidge’s poetry provides an introduction to Rayne’s vision of ways women’s presence in professional spheres could increase, without sacrificing femininity.

-Lydia Shaw, Franklin & Marshall Class of 2022

This item and more will be featured in the exhibition Women Get Things Done, opening soon at the Library Company of Philadelphia!

Martha Louise Rayne, What Can a Woman Do, or, Her Position in the Business and Literary World (Detroit: F.B. Dickerson & Co., 1884).

In today’s blog post, Graphic Arts Curatorial Fellow Kinaya Hassane discusses her first few months of work at the Library Company, which includes conducting research for Imperfect History. Read more here: https://librarycompany.org/2020/07/17/my-beginnings-at-the-library-company/

Joseph Pennell, Water Street Stairs (Philadelphia).  Etching. From the Jay Snider Collection.

#OnThisDay in 1861, Union and Confederate forces fought in the First Battle of Bull Run in Manassas, Virginia, which was the first major battle of the Civil War. 

This photograph (which was likely taken during the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862) is from a collection of works by renowned Civil War-era photographers including Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O'Sullivan. The advent of photography in the decades before the War meant that American audiences had widespread access to representations of the War’s harsh realities.  

Another Fore-edge Friday is upon us! These beautiful gauffered edges are on a binding presented “as a token of respect to Capt. Samuel Tatem by the crew of the steamer Major Reybold.” The Major Reybold was built in 1853 and served on the Delaware River between Salem and Philadelphia until 1906. 

The comprehensive Bible. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854.)

Gentle reminder to double-check your work. Maybe triple-check.  

Errata slips such as this one were inserted into books to identify and alert the reader to important errors in the text that were noticed after the book was published.  Good thing, too, because last time we checked hands and heads were two very different things. 😳 

From: W.R. Wells. A new theory of disease. (Rochester, NY: Steam Press of C.D. Tracy & Co., 1862.) 

Can you picture yourself here? Women workers in 19th-century bookbinding as portrayed in The Great Industries of the United States (1872). The women wear identical clothing, their hair in identical buns, sitting in rows with robotic posture. One wonders at the uniformity of these women. Was the artist trying to depict the inhumane treatment of factory workers? Or did the artist merely wish to illustrate the growing role of women in the industrial workplace? Women often worked in bookbinding or shoemaking, industries involving sewing, a traditional domestic task.

-Lydia Shaw, Franklin & Marshall Class of 2022

This item and more will be featured in the exhibition Women Get Things Done, opening soon at the Library Company of Philadelphia!

Happy Bastille Day! #OnThisDay in 1789, revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress in Paris which had become a symbol of the Bourbon dynasty’s tyranny and repression.

Pictured here is a song sheet containing the lyrics to La Marseillaise, which was written in 1792 and adopted as the anthem of the Republic in 1795.
 

George Mark Wilson was a Philadelphia photographer who traveled throughout the city in the 1920s to take portraits of the area’s inhabitants. Pictured here is an African American dock worker with his four children. On the back of the photograph, Wilson noted how the man’s wife was in the house “fussing up” and did not want to be photographed in the clothes she was wearing. 

Wilson’s documentation of this woman’s resistance and absence is one of many moments in which Black photographic subjects exercise agency in their representation. 

George Mark Wilson, 2nd and Brown St. A stevedore, a family, ca. 1923. Gelatin silver print.  

“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

Though no longer commonly used as a timekeeper, the hourglass, like this one found on a personalized fore-edge clasp, survives as a recognizable symbol of the passage of time, and the fleeting nature of existence.  

Image of fore-edge clasp engraved  with an hourglass and the initials “A.M.P.” on The English version of the polyglott Bible. (Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1858)

To get you over the Wednesday hump, please enjoy this… camel with no hump?

Image of an unidentified camelid from: Willem Piso. De Indiæ utriusque re naturali et medica. (Amstelædami: Apud Ludovicum et Danielem Elzevirios, [1658])

#HumpDay #Wednesday #WetNoseWednesday #vicuña #RareBooks #SpecialCollections #NaturalHistory #17thCentury #BensLibrary