Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Henri Bendel 2012 Getty Images

The Bendel Fashion Sketch collection is one of many special collections held in our Libraries.

Art books have an advantage over other books since they offer many components that have an intrinsic quality. Hand colored images, good paper quality, innovative typography, overall design, types of binding—these are all elements that make art books a physical experience ranging from touching, holding, reading, smelling and of course understanding the message that the author intends. We are very fortunate to have many wonderful examples of the art book in the Museum Libraries and to have the opportunity to showcase some of these in exhibitions both held inside and outside the Museum walls.

Three great examples of the art book—ranging in dates from 1692 to 2011—are on view in Connecting Cultures and they each offer an opportunity for us to think about what the physical book offers in terms of textual and visual information (credible or not). Let’s start in 1692 with the Atlas nouveau : contenant toutes les parties du monde … (Paris: Chez Hubert Iaillot …,1692).

Atlas nouveau : contenant toutes les parties du monde ou sont exactement remarquès les empires, monarchies, royaumes, estats, republiques & peuples qui sy trouuent á present.

Known as the father of French cartography, Nicolas Sanson (1600-1667), was the patriarch of a famous mapmaking family who dominated map publishing in the seventeenth century. Hubert Jaillot, another most important French cartographer had a partnership with the Sanson family and re-published and re-engraved many of their maps. This rare atlas had been in the collection of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library Association founded in 1823 and the first free and circulating library in Brooklyn. The Library was the nucleus of the Brooklyn Museum and this book is an excellent example of the original institutional vision as it documents a need to know about the world and the desire to share information. This book documents a view of the world in 1692 through French eyes and is a powerful example of how information has been created and circulated over time.

Sanson map is used as background imagery on one of the walls in Connecting Cultures.

In addition to being on view in a specially designed low light case, one of the maps has been reproduced on the gallery wall. This is one of many examples of how the Libraries and Archives add to the life of exhibitions here at the Brooklyn Museum!

Fifty books, periodical articles and other primary documents have been received from this major donation and several items are now featured in the Library Display Cases at the entrance of the Museum Library. On display are rare books such as the catalog for the seminal exhibition entitled The Negro artist comes of age; a national survey of contemporary American artists which was held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1945. According to the Brooklyn Museum Bulletin (November 1945, No. 2), the exhibition consisted of fifty-three paintings and nine sculptures “by the leading young Negro artists of the United States. A few of these, such as Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin, have been widely shown but the work of the large majority is only now beginning to be recognized as an integral segment of our native art.”

Pause Play Play Prev | Next

The Camille and Luther Clark donation has greatly enhanced the Brooklyn Museum Library’s documentation on African American art and we are honored to have these important research materials here.

We’ve now embarked on another project with Pratt Institute, also funded by IMLS, entitled CHART that is focused on digitizing historic photographs of Brooklyn. Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research and Technology), is a cross-institutional collaboration between Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Public Library and us. At the end of this 3-year grant funded project, Project CHART will provide online access to historical documentary photographs of Brooklyn that were previously only available on-site at each institution.

Views: U.S., Brooklyn. Brooklyn, Packer Institute. View 007: Packer - view from the garden in winter. Lantern slide, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, CHART_2011. (S10_21_US_Brooklyn_Brooklyn_Packer_Institute007.jpg)

You can follow along and see some of the images the Brooklyn Museum CHART interns have already scanned which are presented on the Museum’s website.  We are uploading new images almost daily and eventually these images will be linked to others being digitized by the collaborating institutions.

We will be reporting on the progress of our CHART Project as it progresses. We hope that this project, already beneficial to the interns as a learning experience, will become a digital resource to the local, national and international research community and anyone else interested in the history and preservation of Brooklyn’s history.

We just had that opportunity when Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, came looking for objects to support a small installation built around a wonderful new acquisition.

Skylar Fein (American, born 1968). Black Lincoln for Dooky Chase, 2010. Acrylic on plaster and wood , 68 x 44 in. (172.7 x 111.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, 2010.66. © Skylar Fein. Image: Jonathan Ferrara Gallery

The new work is entitled Black Lincoln for Dooky Chase by Skylar Fein acquired through a purchase gift from Stephanie Ingrassia (a Brooklyn Museum Board Member) and her husband Tim. As the Museum Librarian, I was delighted when Eugenie selected three items from the Library collection to be included in this installation. Here was a great way to showcase seldom seen rare items from the Library collection and we jumped at the chance!

I encourage you all to come see this interesting installation located in the Special Exhibition Gallery on the Fifth Floor of the Museum. In addition to the Skylar Fein, you will see a small carte de visite of Abraham Lincoln with his son Tad looking at a photo album in Matthew Brady’s studio. The image, dated Feb. 9, 1864, was widely published and distributed especially after Lincoln was assasinated in April 1865.

One of my favorite magazines in the Library collection is Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Included in the installation is an issue of Harper’s dated June 1865 opened to Abraham Lincoln at Home. The beautiful wood engraving is surrounded by interesting text and advertisements that reflect what was happening when the magazine was published.

Pages from Copperheads by Moyra Davey. Images Bywater Bros. Editions.

The third item from the Library collection is a more recent publication—an artists’ book entitled Copperheads by Moyra Davey. Davey’s book presents close-up photographs of pennies found in the street. Her images highlight the oxidation and degradation of the coins, contrasting the effects of their daily use as currency with the ideals embodied by the image of Lincoln. “Copperhead” is slang for a penny, but it also refers to the term used in the nineteenth century for Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and the policies of Lincoln’s administration.

There are many more objects to be seen including wonderful silhouettes from the Museum’s Decorative Arts collection and a Kara Walker entitled Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War.

This installation is visually and intellectually challenging as it shows how ideas and images have been communicated through time. A topic we can so easily build on through the extensive collections held here at the Brooklyn Museum!

Library records reveal early interest in this area with the acquisition of many titles we consider to be important today including George Catlin’s Illustrations of the manners, customs & condition of the North American Indians.

Native American art and culture has been an area of keen interest for this institution dating to the 1820’s with the Brooklyn Apprentices Library, the predecessor of the Brooklyn Museum. As this institution evolved from a library into a museum, plans were laid to develop an encyclopedic collection representing art and culture from around the world to be viewed by the citizens of Brooklyn and other local, national and international visitors. 1903 marked a new era for this institution with the establishment of a Department of Ethnology for “building up great ethnological collections, sending out expeditions for the acquiring of antiquities, first over all America, then over the entire world.”

Stewart Culin was hired as the first Curator of Ethnology and he quickly began to acquire collections representing Native American as well as African, Oceanic and Asian art and cultures. Culin worked alongside William Henry Goodyear, first Curator of Fine Arts, and Susan Hutchinson, founding Museum Librarian. The acquisitive force of these three long time Museum employees laid the foundation of the collections under the care of the Museum today.

Culin kept meticulous records on the people and places he visited in his travels across Native America and his Expedition Reports and research files embedded with images.

In the days before 35mm slides were available, glass lantern slides were collected by the Museum to supplement lectures given by curators and educators. Today many of these images are rare or unique.

Also on view in the Library Display cases located on the second floor of the Museum, we are showcasing a set of newly scanned images from the lantern slide collection. In addition, you’ll find several rare items related to the Tipi exhibition there including a set of silk-screened images of painted tipis.

We also have many books on tipis available in the Library, so come visit and learn more about Native American culture!

Keith DuQuette, Library Preservation Associate here, has created some wonderful “bookshelves” from the cards which are sold for the benefit of the Library.

The cards have an interesting history and were previously housed in sturdy, many drawered cabinets that were so long such a familiar part of the library landscape. The Catalogs were started somewhere around 1904 and were closed in 1994 and during that time held thousands of cards created over the course of many decades. Susan Hutchinson, the Museum’s Founding Librarian, reported in the Brooklyn Museum Annual Report for 1904 that there were 20,567 cards in the Library Catalog.  She also noted that there were 3,116 cards added and 3,677 cards revised for that year which was a massive undertaking since all the cards were handwritten at that time.

Over the years the card catalogs expanded as did research collections in both the Art Reference Library and the Wilbour Library of Egyptology. The cards reveal how the research collections grew and closely paralleled the building of the Museum’s object collections. Indeed there is an intellectual link between the Museum Library and the art collections since the Library very often reveals who made the objects, when, where and how.

The cards also reflect the current technology available at the time of their creation. Handwritten cards were created by the Library Staff until a typewriter became available; the typewriter was invented in 1873, but we do not have a fixed date for when one first began to be used by the Brooklyn Museum Library staff to generate cards for the catalogs. Despite this many of the cards continued to be annotated by hand since signs and symbols such as hieroglyphs could not be replicated on a typewriter. The Brooklyn Museum Library staff began to use Library of Congress printed cards in the 1940s. These cards were often enhanced with hand or type written annotations providing additional information specific to the item being cataloged such as edition size or other important details.

In 1984 the Brooklyn Museum became a special member of the Research Libraries Group and records representing the Library collections began to be entered into the Research Libraries Information Network, an international bibliographic database. Since then a massive effort has taken place to enter online records for the entire research collection to facilitate greater knowledge of all that could be found in the Libraries and Archives.  The Library Online Catalog was launched on the Internet in 2002.

If you visit the museum during hours when the Libraries and Archives are open (Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.), we are celebrating the history of these cards with a small display mounted on the Library Reading Room wall.  On view are fascinating pieces of taxonomic history—ranging from handwritten to typewritten to computer generated cards—reflecting the growth of the Brooklyn Museum Library collections.

I’m delighted to report that on March 6^th we had a well attended talk in the Library as part of a series of lectures presented in memory of Evelyn Ortner, a beloved Library Donor and Museum Guide who gave tours of the Egyptian collections. Our speaker was Dr. John Lundquist, former Curator of Asian and Middle Eastern Collections at the New York Public Library, who discussed nineteenth century references on Ancient Egypt. We own  several of the rare books that were discussed such as Belzoni’s Narrative of the Operations and Rosellini’s Monumenti dell’Egitto—you can even see one of the Rosellini volumes in the To Live Forever exhibition here. We also looked at several volumes of the Description de l’Egypte, the subject of a previous blog.

These rare books were from the personal library of Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833-1896) remembered today as a scholar, collector and accurate copyist. Indeed the collections he assembled  became the foundation of the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian antiquities collection and the Wilbour Library of Egyptology. Captivated by Egypt and its monuments, Wilbour spent every winter in Egypt starting in 1880 until his death in 1896.

He used his houseboat, named “The Seven Hathors,” as a place to entertain his fellow Egyptologists, family and friends. Wilbour acquired all of the important texts published on ancient Egypt available at that time and used his personal library as a way to educate himself. He kept key works with him in Egypt so that he could carry the books to specific sites to compare the texts with the inscriptions on the monuments. His unique annotations to these texts are important to researchers especially since they document monuments that have deteriorated significantly since Wilbour’s time. According to his son-in-law, the artist Edwin H. Blashfield (1848-1936), his passion for Egypt was tireless:

“In the center of the space was his steamer trunk, on the same was the huge folio of Lepsius and behind it on a camp-stool was the Egyptologist comparing texts. He stood discomfort wonderfully – with the mercury at one hundred Fahrenheit in February, he could spend long hours some twenty-five feet above the pavement, with his folio propped somehow between ladder and Egyptian gods in incised relief, upon the outer wall of Edfou or some other temple. Very heavy boxes of books accompanied him everywhere …”

After Wilbour’s death his children offered his antiquities and library collection to the Brooklyn Museum as a memorial to their father. Wilbour’s heirs continued to donate objects to the Museum and in 1932, the Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund was set up by Victor Wilbour to support both the Library and the Egyptian collections here at the Brooklyn Museum.

Stay tuned as Tom Hardwick, an Egyptologist who is volunteering here, blogs about letters Wilbour wrote while he was in Egypt and if you are in the museum, drop by to see a selection of photographs, letters and books documenting Wilbour’s work and his family interests on view in the library display cases on the second floor. If you would like to visit the Wilbour Library of Egyptology just send us an e-mail—we’d love to see you!

This panel discussion, held Saturday June 13, 2009 at the Brooklyn Museum, addressed the production, collection, and display of Sufi-inspired artist books. Zahra Partovi, whose artist book Fragments of Light II is featured in the special exhibition Light of the Sufis, discussed her art in conversation with collaborating book artist Kelly Driscoll, Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art Ladan Akbarnia, and Principal Librarian Deirdre Lawrence.

Vincent has been the primary leader in the overall conception, design and production of these books, pulling together incredibly talented artists and artisans to create them. The books, all inspired by the Sufi poetry of Rumi as translated by Zahra Partovi, are a jewel in the crown of our artists’ book collection and remain wonderful examples of how contemporary art can carry on the essence of traditional art.

How did these wonderful books come into the Brooklyn Museum collection?

Back in October 1998 the Brooklyn Museum held an exhibition entitled Royal Persian Paintings, The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925 curated by Dr. Layla Diba. This exhibition was one of several that Brooklyn has featured over the years and an example of the Museum’s long standing interest in Islamic art. The Library collection is also rich in this area due to a series of grants from the Hagop Kevorkian Fund and donations such as the personal library of noted Islamic scholar Charles K. Wilkinson whose selected acquisitions are on view in the newly reinstalled Islamic Art galleries.The Library has a collection of artists’ books, ranging from multiples to limited editions to unique works, many of which relate to the cultures represented by the Museum’s object collections. Many of the books published by Vincent FitzGerald & Co. fall into this latter category as they resonate so well with the Islamic collections here.

I first met Vincent FitzGerald and Zahra Partovi in the Dieu Donne Galleries in 1999 at an exhibition entitled Dialogues in Collaboration: the publications of Vincent FitzGerald & Co. I remember being swept off my feet by the books on view and wanted to bring some of these books into the Brooklyn Museum collection.  Both Vincent and Zahra recognized the Museum’s longstanding interest in Islamic art and knew their books would fit in well with our collections.

Through the generosity of anonymous donors and guidance from Vincent we were given nine books created by Vincent FitzGerald & Co. The books demonstrate in a beautiful way that thirteenth-century Persian poetry can be made intellectually accessible to a present-day audience. Since we acquired these books we have featured them in exhibitions such as Working in Brooklyn: Artists Books in 2000 and they have been a favorite of visiting teachers, students and artists in the Library Reading Room. Both visually challenging and intellectually stimulating, these books speak to the future of the book as a vibrant tool for communication while being works of art in themselves. The Fragments of Light series is the most recent example of innovative ways Vincent and his collaborators challenge the definition of the book.

Come visit and see these great books in person!