Things that Make You Go "Hmmm"

Moses Williams, attributed to Raphaelle Peale

When I first began working at the Library Company more than a decade ago, one of the first Print Department treasures I handled was the silhouette attributed to Raphaelle Peale showing the noted African American silhouettist Moses Williams. Since then I have pulled many items from our silhouette collection, but not until recently have I truly looked at these unique portraits. There are certainly silhouettes of great skill, many from the Peale Museum, included in the hundreds we hold--but then there are some that make you go "hmmm" or "oh, no." 

Silhouettes could enhance physical flaws, not really noticeable until in profile, like the double chin of this possibly unsuspecting woman.

And surely this younger woman was wearing a headpiece when she sat for her portrait, but in silhouette the accessory has morphed into what resembles a grotesque growth.

Other fashionable ladies appear to have an arm or what looks like a plunger protruding from the back of their well-coifed heads. The opposite sex did not always fair better.

Necks and heads seem to merge and the silhouette of this bald fellow brings the image of a sci-fi monster, rather than a gentleman, to the mind's eye. 

Although chuckle-producing on occasion, these less-finessed pieces make me appreciate all the more the skills needed to create the seemingly simple cutout or inked silhouettes in our holdings.

Erika Piola

Associate Curator, Prints and Photographs

Library Company Collections on Flickr

Ca. 1906 Horn and Hardart’s Automat Postcard from the Library Company’s Postcard Collection on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library-company-of-philadelphia/6648420107/in/photostream

I’m an intern at the Library Company, working here for the first two weeks of January in the Print Department, doing various tasks relating to the Library Company’s collections of lithographs, drawings, cartoons, photographs, and other types of graphical images.

One of my largest tasks has been with several collections of ephemera which the Library Company has been digitizing, with help from a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Ephemera—printed material not intended to be preserved—can include items like paper dolls, playbills, movie tickets, playing cards, or even airsickness bags. The collections of ephemera that I am working with, though, consist of postcards and trade cards.

            The Library Company’s postcard collection includes the George Brightbill Collection and separately received postcards housed as the Library Company Collection.  Brightbill, a retired archivist at Temple University, gave his collection of 6,500 postcard images of Philadelphia, including many one-of-a-kind photograph postcards, to the Library Company in 2000. The Library Company Collection includes various views in and around the Philadelphia region. 

Trade cards are small cards, the size of a postcard or smaller, that feature advertisements for businesses. The Library Company’s trade card collection consists of more than 1,000 early advertising cards for Philadelphia businesses and manufacturers, and products made by Philadelphia firms.  The trade cards were primarily collected by Emily Phillips (1822-1909), who collected trade cards for local stores and businesses and presented them to the Library Company in 1882.

Through the funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, both of these collections have been scanned at high resolution. My task is to remove the extraneous parts of the image (consisting of technical information used in the scanning process) and to make each image a standard size. Eventually, these images will all be uploaded to ImPAC, the Library Company’s online database of images.   I also posted a selection of images from the collections I was working with onto flickr.

Ca. 1910 Postcard of Woodside Park from the George Brightbill Postcard Collection on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library-company-of-philadelphia/6642937717/in/photostream

While the cropping can sometimes get tedious, the cards themselves are fascinating. The postcards offer images of everything from automats, where five cents would buy you a full meal from a complex vending machine, to early amusement parks. Some of the trade cards, too, are unique. One offered a before-and-after image of the users of its product, Buckingham’s Dye for the Whiskers (see below). The poor fellow’s whiskers had improbably gone entirely white, while the hair on top of his head remained brown. As a remedy, he turns to the dye, which is “easy of application, safe and effectual, and is rapidly growing in public favor,” according to the advertising copy.

Buckingham’s dye for the whiskers. Ca. 1885 tradecard on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library-company-of-philadelphia/6669220303/in/photostream

Check out these cards and others at the Library Company’s flickr page, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/library-company-of-philadelphia/.

Written by Jon William Sweitzer-Lamme

Library Company of Philadelphia Volunteer Intern

Six Degrees of Shellenberger

Do you remember the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?" I’ll bet you do, and I’ll bet you did not always need six steps to trace a relationship to this Philly native. I often make similar connections between historical figures in my work at the Library Company and it always tickles me. I even curated a one-case exhibition on the theme when the Print Department's Arcadia book Center City in the Nineteenth Century came out in 2006. Consequently, when Curator Sarah Weatherwax pointed out the ties between a 2010 acquisition and my blog post about J. Monroe Shellenberger from a few weeks ago, I could not resist a sequel posting. Despite wanting to delude myself that I remember every graphic that we acquire, I had not made the connection to this print of the 1886 architectural drawing of our infamous friend's residence in Doylestown. Designed by Philadelphia architect Charles M. Burns, Jr., the dwelling, according to the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings website, was built by H. D. Livezey and James Flack circa 1886. Perhaps Shellenberger's embezzling helped pay for it? 

Erika Piola

Associate Curator, Prints and Photographs

The Ubiquitous Corrugated Clamshell Box - An Anniversary

Not many people realize that the corrugated clamshell box (as shown above) was actually developed here at the Library Company. As many of you know, these boxes are very useful in rare book libraries because they are an efficient way to protect and contain books that are in poor condition. Back in the 1980s, the conservation staff was making boxes out of folder stock that had long flaps that had to be folded together just right so that they could be closed with a string wound around a plastic button. They were not particularly popular with the rest of the staff. Acid-free corrugated board was still relatively new and conservators were coming up with all kinds of uses for it. Thinking outside the box, so to speak, Conservator Andrea Krupp (with some help from former conservation staff member Lillian Greenberg) came up with the brilliant idea of de-laminating the corrugated board so that the resulting flaps could be glued to create a box. The first prototypes were time-consuming because in order to beautify them the edges were wrapped with marbled paper strips. We soon realized that the beauty of these boxes is their simplicity and also their quick fabrication. Then in 1991, after making the phase boxes for several years, Andrea decided to share the box plans with other conservators and published a short article in the (now defunct) Abby Newsletter. ( To see the article, click here) Conservators had been looking for an easy, fast, and inexpensive container for their collections and the box plans caught on. 

Books in need of boxing.

Books after boxing.

Since 1990 (when we began keeping digital statistics) we have made over 5,000 corrugated clamshell boxes of all sizes at the Library Company. We are still making the same box today, as are many other  conservators. We would like to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the corrugated clamshell’s formal introduction to the conservation world!

Jennifer Rosner

Chief of Conservation

Andrea Krupp still makes the same boxes today!

James Rush and the Siamese Twins

Recently, I was preparing a display of materials for a visitor who had a particular interest in Shakespeare.  Library Company benefactor James Rush (1786-1869), son of Declaration of Independence signer and famed doctor Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), created a work that I thought might be of some interest: Hamlet, a Dramatic Prelude; in Five Acts (Philadelphia, 1834).  The work was most vociferously panned upon publication, but was clearly a labor of love for Rush, who was better known for his more well-received Philosophy of the Human Voice.  In our collection of Rush Family Papers, we have several of Rush’s volumes of notes, drafts, and printer’s proofs for his Prelude, and it was one of these that I pulled for our visitor: a blank leather-bound volume that Rush apparently used to make notes from the inception of his idea for the Prelude in May 1827 until at least September 1829.

On the last page of this volume, I found a drawing of two males in profile under the manuscript caption “The Siamese boys exhibited in Philadelphia October 10th 1829.”  The “Siamese boys,” of course, were Chang and Eng Bunker, the famous conjoined twins who first came to the public’s attention in 1829, when they left Siam for a tour of Europe and North America.  

The drawing immediately produced in my mind an image of James Rush sitting in the audience as the Bunkers were first exhibited.  Perhaps he found himself so taken by them that he immediately created this drawing on the only paper he had ready to hand, the volume he had used for two and a half years to create the work that would still take him another five years to complete.  The original Siamese twins were a true sensation when they first came to America, and to stumble upon a piece like this, which puts us in the audience the very first time they were seen by Philadelphians, creates a vivid connection to the history we strive to preserve.

Currently two pieces from our collection that relate to Chang and Eng Bunker are  included in the  Through the Weeping Glass exhibition at the Mutter Museum, where they are displayed with several other items relating to the Siamese twins.

Rachel A. D'Agostino
Curator of Printed Books