summer research
It took a really long time to get over being sick, but I am mostly better now. I just wheeze when I'm in very overly-air-conditioned places, like the U Penn Special Collections reading room where I spend most of the week.
Central air conditioning can produce very odd results in large buildings where the air doesn't circulate fully through all the different spaces. We are supposed to be having a heat wave this week, so I wonder whether that means the weather in the reading room will be chilly with a chance of frost. Last time there were a few hot days outside, the reading room became so cold that the girl at the desk had a space heater for her feet, and I stood by it trying to warm my numb hands enough to continue typing.
On a more normal day, the reading room is a reasonably warm, nice, quiet place to work. Most of the time it is just me and the person at the desk (who is supposed to be watching me to make sure I don't steal or damage the books I am handling). The staff, which mostly consists of undergrads earning money for the summer, has taken to referring to the reading room as "chez Donna" since I'm the only reader in there a lot of the time.
So what am I doing in the reading room? I am examining a very large collection of books published by the Elzeviers, one of the most famous publishers in Europe in the 17th century. I have looked at approximately 1100 books so far, and there are approximately 1600 in the collection in total.
Mostly I am looking for dedicatory letters signed by the Elzeviers that appear at the start of a few of these books. There is very little information remaining about the way the Elzeviers ran their business--we don't have many of their financial records, and only a few of their "private" letters to their contemporaries are left--so I am trying to look systematically at these letters, which have not been studied as a group before. Along the way I have had the chance to look at all sorts of Elzevier-printed books: plays, cookbooks, Bibles, law reference books, classics, travel books, and scientific books.
One of the books I saw just a few days ago belonged to King Louis XIII of France (you could tell because of the special binding with his monogram). But for most of the other books, most of which are more simply bound, you can learn a little bit about their history from names written in them. Some of the books were given from fathers to their sons, others were presents from friends, and a few were book prizes awarded for doing well in school. Most of the books are pretty clean other than the names written in them (in fact it looks like no one ever read them)--but there are a few with a lot of notes, and a couple with drawings in them. I even saw one where it looks like the guy planned his own epitaph on the blank pages in the back...
posted by d @ 9:22 PM
