Here’s a fine finispiece to help you usher in what will hopefully be a fine weekend. And in the rare book world fine isn’t just fine, it’s even better than ‘very good.’

Niccolò Machiavelli. Tutte le opere di Niccolò Machiavell. (London, 1747.)

#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.) 

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

These embossed letter specimens are examples of Boston Line Type.  Boston Line Type was developed in 1835 by Samuel Gridley Howe as a raised letter system of printing for the blind. Reading it tactilely, however, was difficult and the embossed alphabet was eventually abandoned for a simpler dot system. 

 commontouch.librarycompany.org

[Collection of samples of raised-letter line types for printing for the blind]

This carte-de-visite depicts a bust-length portrait of Robert Smalls, who achieved national fame after steering himself and fifteen other enslaved people to freedom aboard a Confederate ship, the Planter, in 1862. Small lobbied the Lincoln Administration to recruit African American men to fight for the Union during the Civil War. Small was also elected to the House of Representatives several years after his escape.

McAllister & Brother. Robert Small, pilot of the steamer Planter, Charleston, S.C., ca. 1862. Albumen on carte-de-visite mount.