Around 50 titles from the HBLL’s Rare Japanese Book collection have been scanned and added to the BYU repository on the Internet Archive. The repository contains a number of illustrated books, manuscripts, and scrolls — including the well-known ghost scroll Bakemono no e, a portion of which is shown here. For more information about the library’s collection of Japanese rare books, visit the collections guide on the L. Tom Perry Special Collections website.
We wanted to let anyone who may interested aware of a pair of lectures this week by Peggy Bendroth, executive director of the Congregational Library in Boston, Massachusetts. She will be giving the following lectures related to religious libraries, archives, historical research and careers in history:
These lectures are sponsored by the BYU History Department.
*Note: Place has been changed from the EIZ auditorium.
Joseph Smith Black (1836-1910)
L. Tom Perry Special Collections is pleased to announce the availability of a new digitized collection: Joseph Smith Black autobiography (MSS 742). This is a handwritten autobiography that starts in the year 1877 when Black was living in Deseret, Utah, and gives an account of when he was in the Utah State Penitentiary for polygamy from 1889-1890. He writes about his life in Deseret, his avoidance of federal officials while resisting arrest for polygamy, and his subsequent incarceration in prison.
Joseph Smith Black was born 14 Jul 1836 in Lisburn, Ireland, to William Young Black and Jane Johnston. He was baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in June 1844 by Parley P. Pratt. He married Nancy Cynthia Allred on 12 November 1855 in Ephraim, Utah. They moved to Deseret, Utah, where Black was made bishop in 1877. Black would eventually take three additional wives: Sarah Jane Barney, Caroline Petersen Thompson, and Louis Jane Stocks. He would serve time in the Utah Penitentiary for polygamy. While in Deseret, Black built dams and a canal on the Sevier River and worked on the railroad. During this time he also ran a large mercantile business. Joseph Smith Black died on 13 August 1910 in Deseret, Utah.
Special Collections is featuring the work of eminent Victorian novelist George Eliot (Marian/Mary Anne Evans) in a small case exhibit celebrating the 200th anniversary of her birth on Nov. 22, 1819. “The World of George Eliot” showcases first editions of her major novels, like Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and The Mill on the Floss. The exhibit will be on display in Special Collections’ reference room throughout the month of November.
It’s that time of year again! Our annual “History of Doctrine and Covenants” exhibit is on display now in L. Tom Perry Special Collections. This exhibit takes the viewer through the history of the Doctrine and Covenants, from handwritten manuscripts to being published in book form in 1835. Later editions with significant additions or deletions are also displayed, including the 1845 edition (added the section on the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith in 1844), the 1879 edition (footnotes added by Orson Pratt and added Section 132 on plural marriage), and the 1921 edition (removed the Lectures on Faith, which had been there since 1835). Also shown is an 1835 letter from Oliver Cowdery to Newel K. Whitney regarding original copies of a revelation, and James E. Talmage’s journal where he documents revisions he was asked to make in 1921 as part of the Doctrine and Covenants Committee.
This exhibit will be on display in the Reading Room in Special Collections until the end of 2019. Come see this popular exhibit and learn more about this significant book of modern day scripture!
Hans Christian Sørenson (1864-1925)
L. Tom Perry Special Collections is pleased to announce the availability of a new digitized collection: Hans Christian Sørenson diaries (MSS SC 2502). This collections includes five handwritten diaries and notebooks kept in English while Sørensen served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sørensen was a native of Denmark and spent most of his time working in that country. Sørensen writes of his daily activities and about the condition of The Church of Jesus Christ in Denmark. Dated 1887-1889.
Hans Christian Sørensen was born on November 30, 1864, in Dostrup, Aalborg, Denmark to Mads Sørensen and Kirsten Larsen. He was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 2, 1875. He married Miranda Esplin and they had five children together. While living in Orderville, Utah, Hans was called as a missionary for the Church in May 1887 and served in the Scandinavian Mission, primarily in Denmark. He became bishop of the Mt. Carmel Ward in 1900. Hans Christian Sørensen died on April 3, 1925 in Orderville, Utah.
We are very excited in Special Collections to sponsor Utah Home Movie Day 2019 on October 26th from 12 noon – 4 pm in the Wilkinson Student Center, room 3223.
Come stop by ANYTIME during those hours!
Viewing material together as a community is both very informative and very entertaining. They reveal commonalities that we have across culture and unlock little time machines into the past.
This coincides with the month of October being National Family History Month and the third week in October being National Home Movie Day!
The Center for Home Movies has a wonderful website we invite you to explore. And we have our own specific website for event information.
This celebration is a chance for people to see theirs and others home movies on the projectors they would have originally. We have reconditioned and calibrated some 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8 projectors so that they can show film safely. Old film does sometime shrink, and is not safe for projection on sprocket-driven projectors, so inspection by someone with expertise is absolutely necessary. In order to facilitate this inspection, we invite you to bring in your film during the week leading up to Home Movie Day to Special Collections. We will then have time to test and repair your film so that is it ready for projection on Saturday ( or too far gone for projection, but can still be scanned by a sprocketless scanner!). You can bring things in that day as well, it just helps us to have a head start.
This year we are also entertaining some video formats. We have Hi-8 ready, but let us know your format, and we will work on getting that for the event!
We encourage discussion and narration! We want to hear about who the people are, and what they are doing and a family story as you share your home movie. We will have some brief presentations on:
Come join us for this wonderfully informal event, a celebration of media, memories, and community!
Hiram Mace (1811-1896)
L. Tom Perry Special Collections is pleased to announce the availability of a new digitized collection: Hiram Mace journal (MSS 8734). This leather-bound journal kept by Mace was likely created in approximately 1860. Contents include genealogical information of Mace’s posterity, including birth and death dates. Also includes a brief autobiographical sketch of Mace’s life from his birth until 1885, including his childhood in upstate New York, conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, experiences in Nauvoo, Illinois, travels to Utah and eventual settlement and life in Fillmore, Utah. Also includes some entries of deaths of Hiram’s wife and son added by others up to 1913. The majority of the journal is blank. Dated approximately 1860-1913.
Hiram Mace Sr. was born on May 5, 1811, in Aurelius, New York, to Henry and Clarlia Dewaters Mace. He married Elizabeth Armstrong on April 4, 1837, in Michigan. He converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was among the pioneers travelling west. He was a man of many jobs in Utah, from farmer and orderly seargent, to missionary and mayor of Fillmore, Utah. He died on August 28, 1896, in Fillmore, Utah.
In the 1890s, English bookbinder Cedric Chivers (1853-1929) introduced a new book decoration process which he called the “vellucent” binding. First, an artist would create a painting on a very thin medium. The design might include mother-of-pearl inlays, gold leaf, or other decoration. It would then be overlaid with a specially-treated sheet of vellum — a sheet of animal skin pared so thinly to be translucent. The vellum could be incorporated into a vignette inside a design leather binding or used to bind an entire volume. Vellucent bindings might incorporate gold tooling, mother-of-pearl inlays, and other decoration to achieve the desired effect. While Chivers’ associate H. Granville Fell designed most of these bindings, his shop employed a number of women artists, most frequently Dorothy Carleton Smyth, to paint the scenes.
Special Collections owns a few volumes bound in Chivers’ vellucent method, shown in this small gallery! They are available for study and research — just search the library catalog for the term”vellucent binding.” More information about vellucent bindings can be found in Marianne Tidcombe’s Women Bookbinders 1880-1920 (Oak Knoll, 1996).
For any who missed the lecture by Professor Steven C. Harper, “Putting the First Vision in the Pensieve, or How Joseph Remembered,” given two weeks ago on Thursday, September 12, or if you saw it and want to listen to it again, here is a link to the recording on the BYU Library Lecture YouTube site: