Library of Congress's Blog, page 106

Inquiring Minds: Chinese Opera in North America

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Nancy Rao

In her new book, “Chinatown Opera Theater in North America,” music scholar Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of how Chinatown opera, performed initially to entertain Chinese immigrants, developed into an important part of America’s musical culture.

Drawing on new Chinese- and English-language research—including sources at the Library of Congress—she unmasks the backstage world of Chinese opera while also looking at the role of Chinatown theaters in shaping Chinese-American identities and the birth of modern American music.

Rao is professor of music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She has studied connections between China and the West and published on the ways in which modern composers of Chinese origin draw on the gestures, vocal styles and percussion patterns of Chinese opera. She has also explored other aspects of American music, including the life and contributions of American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger.

In 2012, Rao spent time in residency at the Library of Congress as a recipient of the Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award, established to make the collections of primary ethnographic materials housed at the Library available to researchers. She will discuss her research and her new book at the Library at noon on August 9 in a Benjamin A. Botkin Lecture.

  Tell us a little about your book.

The book is about the world of Chinatown theaters, focusing on iconic theaters in San Francisco and New York but also tracing the transnational networks and migration routes connecting theaters and performers in China, Canada and even Cuba.

It brings together the threads of an enormously complex story: on one hand, the elements outside the theaters—including U.S. government policies on Chinese immigration, dissemination through recordings and print materials of the music performed in the theaters, impresarios competing for performers and audiences and business organizations facilitating the functioning of the theaters—and on the other hand, the world inside the theaters, encompassing individual performers, audiences, repertoire and the adaptation of Chinese performance practices to the American immigrant context.

The book also documents the influence of the theaters on the Chinatown community’s sense of its cultural self. Through the study of Chinese-American music as American music, it seeks to revise understandings of the latter by placing the musical activities of an important immigrant group firmly within the bounds of music identified as “American,” liberating it from the ghetto of exoticism.

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Stage photo of a production of the Chinese opera “Mu Guiying Takes Command” in the collection of Library of Congress. Shown here is the genre of Peking opera.

What inspired you to write about Chinese opera?

I spent many years analyzing American ultramodern music of the 1930s, by composers such as Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and others. The constant reference to the influence of Chinese opera on their music always intrigued me. When I traced the history further, I realized that not only had Chinese opera, Cantonese opera in particular, been performed in the United States since the 1850s (the first troupe came in 1852), but also that there was an important renaissance of its performance in the 1920s, with six theaters opening across the United States in a short span of three years. It is a much neglected chapter of American music history.

Also, I grew up in Taiwan with parents from mainland China. I knew several different Chinese opera genres from following my mother and nanny as a kid. So the issues of opera and diaspora, family, community and fandom are familiar and particularly meaningful to me.

What collections did you use at the Library?

As a Parsons Fellow, I had wonderful access to collections at the Library of Congress. At the American Folklife Center, the field tapes of Chinese immigrants from the Ethnographic Collections allowed me to learn their cultural expression and social activities in several states around the mid-20th century. These tapes might not be directly related to Cantonese opera, but the voices and utterance of the immigrants gave me an important feel for the social context.

At the Asian Division, I studied many boxes of materials from Chinese performing groups in America, as well as many books on Chinese opera. At the Prints and Photographs Division, I found in the Bain Collection many fascinating photos of New York’s Chinatown in the 1910s, including the design of a Chinese theater that never got built! The pictorial collections of early San Francisco souvenirs and books were amazing as well, showing many details about 19th-century Chinese theaters that I had not encountered elsewhere. Other drawings, photos and prints from different cities also contain voluminous images of early Chinese immigrant communities—street views, parades, architecture, pedestrians, interiors, families, crowds at community bulletins—through which I built an understanding of cities where the Chinatown theaters thrived and were embraced by both locals and visitors from afar.

What was the importance of Chinese opera to the Chinese-American immigrant community?

Whether for young children and their families, men and women doing menial work at laundries or merchants and store owners, Cantonese opera was an important form of musical utterance. Few other genres matched opera songs as apt expressions of mood, values and feelings for them. In particular, during the period of renaissance in the 1920s, live performance was still the most important form of entertainment and theaters the largest gathering place in the community.

With many stellar opera performers, Chinatown theaters attracted new audiences to Cantonese opera as well: those who attended because they were the talk of the town, those who were attracted by the Chinese identity they symbolized and, last but not least, those second generation Chinese-Americans for whom the theaters were everything from playground to education in all things Chinese.

In addition to theaters, Cantonese opera records began to be very popular in late 1920s with the advent of better technology, so opera could be heard everywhere—in stores, on streets and in homes, as well as places far away from any Chinese theaters. The arias were also common in print form as published anthologies of lyrics, pamphlets that came with recordings and playbills on which lyrics were printed. I wrote about a Chinese-American woman growing up in Mississippi listening to Cantonese opera recordings in the back of her family grocery store who felt “at home” when she eventually visited San Francisco’s Chinese theater for the first time! Sonic literacy underpinned her feeling of cultural belonging and triggered a sense of social identity.

When did people from outside the immigrant community start attending performances?

From 1852, when they first appeared in United States (at the American Theater in San Francisco), Chinese opera theaters were entertainment to all at the frontier. In 1868, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle reported that Chinese theater had the fourth highest revenue in San Francisco, out of nine theaters listed. As Chinatowns began to be established, Chinese theaters became an important tourist destination. Many of these audiences from outside the immigrant community were attracted by elaborate and spectacular costumes, tumbling and acrobatic movement. But some were attracted by the performing styles as well, such as members of California’s Bohemian Club, whose own drama drew inspiration and even materials from Chinese opera theaters.

In the Roaring Twenties, many forward-thinking performing artists and composers from outside of Chinese communities attended performances and drew from the aesthetics and expression to craft modern music, theater and dance. Composers such as John Cage and Lou Harrison were famous examples.

How has Chinese opera influenced the broader American musical culture?

In addition to their influence on American modern music, dance and theater of the 1920s and 1930s, Chinatown opera theaters were an important part of urban histories. Many amateur groups or clubs such as the Bohemian Club emulated their performing styles; jazz musicians of the early 20th century commonly adopted a drum used in Chinese opera accompaniment; and Chinese theaters became the basis of plays such as “The Yellow Jacket” and operas like “L’Oracle” and “Fay Yen Fah.” In addition, in the form of social memory, Chinese opera continues to be symbolically significant in the work of our contemporary Asian-American authors and artists, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, Fred Ho, Frank Chin and Amy Tan, among others.

What was it like to work at the Library and with Library staff?

As a Parsons Fellow, I received a great deal of support and generous help from staff members at the Folklife Center. They not only gave me direction in using their collection and dug out obscure materials for my research, even if only tangentially related, but they also introduced me to librarians and staff in other divisions of the Library. I have remained in contact with some of them, and continued to draw on their help from afar when I was writing the book. I remain grateful for the experience.

The Umpire Strikes Out: Baseball Music and Labor

This post is by Katherine Walden, a 2017 summer intern with the Junior Fellows Program . Walden is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies and sport studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also completing a master’s degree in library and information science with a focus on digital humanities and archives. She has a bachelor’s degree in music from Vanderbilt University.

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Katherine Walden at Vanderbilt University’s Hawkins Field. Photo by John Russell, Vanderbilt University.

This summer, I have been updating the Music Division’s 1991 baseball music bibliography, which identifies over 400 baseball-related titles in the division’s holdings. Much like a scavenger hunt, my internship involves thinking about where baseball songs might be in the collection, as well as what keywords or search terms might lead to copyright deposits for previously unknown baseball songs. My goal is to at least double the bibliography’s size to provide a robust resource for Library staff, academic researchers and anyone who wants to know more about baseball.

Among my many interesting finds, songs about umpires especially stand out for me. I research U.S. popular culture and baseball labor history, and umpire songs offer a fascinating glimpse into both.

Today, the umpire is frequently an object of fan ridicule. But long before instant replay destabilized umpires’ authority, early baseball fans—and Tin Pan Alley songwriters—looked for ways to ridicule “the man behind the plate.” I have yet to find a song written from an umpire’s perspective, which suggests songwriters thought depicting umpires as humorous or pitiful would have better popular culture traction than attempts to rehabilitate the umpire.

The chorus to the 1909 title “Let’s Get the Umpire’s Goat,” written by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth (a co-writer of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”), shows how fans expressed their frustration with the umpire:

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“Let’s Get the Umpire’s Goat,” by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth.

Let’s get the Umpire’s goat, goat, goat

Let’s make him go up in the air

We’ll yell, Oh you robber! Go somewhere and die

Back to the bush, You’ve got mud in your eye

Oh, what an awful decision!

Why don’t you put spectacles on?

Let’s holler like sin, and then our side will win,

When the umpire’s nanny is gone.

The 1905 title “The Umpire Is a Most Unhappy Man” suggests that driving a hearse was the only profession worse than being an umpire. The chorus asks

How’d you like to be an umpire

Work like his is merely play

He don’t even have to ask for

All the things that come his way

When the crowd yells, ‘knock his block off’

‘Soak him good,’ says ev’ry fan

Then who wants to be an umpire

The brickbats whiz when he gets his

For the umpire is a most unhappy man.

Listen at the Library’s National Jukebox:

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Even the famous “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” includes a passing reference to umpires. The song’s main character, Katie Casey, “saw all the games” and “told the umpire he was wrong, all along good and strong.”

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“Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer.

Though entertaining, early 20th-century songs about umpires also reflect changes in popular culture and a period in American labor history rife with worker strikes and labor activism.

Early baseball in the United States existed primarily in upscale gentlemen’s clubs, but after the Civil War and into the 20th century, entrepreneurs like Albert Spaulding and Henry Chadwick made strategic efforts to market the game to working class fans, from mass-produced baseball equipment to inexpensive annual baseball guides.

As baseball infiltrated popular culture, labor in professional baseball became a contentious issue, just as it was in other realms. The American Federation of Labor had formed in 1886, the Western Federation of Miners was established in 1893, and the Pullman railway strike took place in 1894. Also occurring were a variety of coal strikes and movements advocating living wages, child labor laws and safe working conditions.

In baseball, it was team owners and league officials who were most often in tension with players in labor debates. But the umpire was an easier target, and composers continued writing songs about umpires past World War II.

Want to see more songs about baseball umpires? Check out umpire-related titles in the Library’s digitized sheet music collections.

To learn more about baseball songs in the era of sheet music, visit the Library’s exhibition “Baseball’s Greatest Hits: The Music of Our National Game.”

Pic of the Week: Library Fellows Display Treasures

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Participants in the Library’s Junior Fellows Program displayed items from the collections on July 26 in the Jefferson Building. Photo by Shawn Miller.

This week, interns participating in the Library’s Junior Fellows Program presented more than 150 rare and unique items they researched and processed over the summer. For the first time since the program’s launch in 1991, “display day” was open to the public.

Items on view included blueprints for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, a letter handwritten by Abraham Lincoln about William Shakespeare, a postcard from Jacqueline Kennedy to architect I.M. Pei, a stage manager’s copy of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” and more.

Working under the direction of Library curators and specialists, the interns—selected from among more than 900 applicants across the country—explored the institution’s unparalleled collections and resources.

To view the complete list of display items, visit this Library link.

Inquiring Minds: Finding Gems in the Jazz Collections

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John Szwed (left) and Larry Appelbaum of the Library’s Music Division. Photo by Larry Appelbaum.

John Szwed has many accomplishments to his name. To name a few, he directed the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, taught anthropology and African American studies for 26 years at Yale University, played jazz professionally for more than a decade, and wrote or edited 18 books, including “So What: The Life of Miles Davis”; “Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra”; and “Jazz 101.” His book “Doctor Jazz,” included with the CD set “Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax,” won a Grammy Award in 2005.

For much of 2016–17, Szwed was a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress, where he conducted research in the Music Division’s jazz collections. He did so under the auspices of the Jazz Scholar Program, a collaborative effort of the Library and the Reva and David Logan Foundation. It was not Szwed’s first experience at the Library: over many years, he has consulted the Library’s collections for his research. Here Szwed answers questions about his experiences at the Library.

Why did you want to be jazz scholar at Library this past year?

I was anxious to catch up with recent acquisitions in the Music Division and to see what might suggest to me a subject for a new book.

You wrote in a separate blog that you spent a lot of time exploring the papers of jazz drummer Max Roach. What drew you to his papers?

Max Roach was an exceptional musician in many ways. In addition to being a world-known percussionist and composer, he was an author, lecturer, professor, producer and advocate for human rights. Since many of his activities were not as well documented as his music, I wanted to see what was available in the Library. Fortunately, his archive is one of the largest ever kept by a musician.

Why was Roach such an important figure in jazz?

In the early 1940s, he was one of the creators of bebop, one of the most radical and serious forms of jazz. But unlike most other jazz musicians, he was an important figure in every new form of jazz developed after the 1940s. Given that the second half of the 20th century was the most innovative period of the music, with shifts in style and form occurring every 5 to 10 years, his ability to stay creative throughout the era was unprecedented.

Roach was a tireless advocate for social justice. What do his papers reveal about that aspect of his life?

He was a careful writer, one who edited, re-edited and reformulated his writings and lectures and thoughtfully kept copies of all of his work. For a person interested in the politics and history of an era, his writings are very important, especially as they cover everything from the day-to-day problems of surviving as a musician to the larger struggles for the dignity of jazz, for civil rights and for the decolonization of Africa. Throughout his writings, you see not only an advocate, but also a leading figure in the various causes he espoused, and an individual whose own life was directly affected by the results of those efforts.

What details about the economics of the music business did you find in the Roach papers?

His archive documents his efforts to control the publishing of his own music, something rare for a musician in those days and even now. He was the co-founder of a recording company, again, something almost unheard of at the time. What you see in his business letters, his applications for licenses and his negotiations is a musician’s view of the world of arts commerce. Almost everything in his business papers is a revelation.

What surprised you the most in the Library’s collections?

There are surprises everywhere, but I suppose it was the originals of manuscripts of music that were most fascinating. Just to see the writing in the hand of the original composer was something, but to also see the changes that took place between the writing and the recording of many works was especially surprising.

Did you learn anything about other prominent figures that you didn’t know before?

Almost every file of material was a learning experience: the care taken by composers to produce readable manuscripts; a composer’s works not known by the public, not even by scholars; and the passion of many musicians in their defense of their music.

You’ve used the Library’s collections in the past. What are some of your notable discoveries?

Among my biggest surprises were stumbling across an unknown recording by jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz made for a Haitian record company; learning that the Library has a copy of “The Experimenters,” a rare 1965 NET television program on which Ralph Ellison introduced the avant-jazz of Cecil Taylor and Charles Mingus, only to then express his misgivings about what he saw as the intrusion of European art music into jazz; discovering that novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston had once written blues songs; seeing a microphone used by early jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton when he recorded in the Library of Congress in 1938; finding that playwright Arthur Miller had written scripts and collected folksongs for the Library’s radio programs in 1945; and seeing unknown artworks by the folklorist, filmmaker and painter Harry Smith.

What is it like to work at the Library?

It’s always a pleasure and a learning experience to come to the Library of Congress, whether it’s my own discoveries or what I learn from the staff. A large part of my education has been gained from the specialized knowledge and generosity of librarians.

What is value to scholars, and the public, of the Library acquiring collections like those you’ve consulted and making them accessible?

Personal collections and archives may at least sound interesting in the abstract, but once you delve into them you discover they often contain information and personal insights that are literally history changing, whether by finding an unknown manuscript, or something contained in just a single sentence that reverses what we think we knew.

New Acquisition: 1783 Petition of a Revolutionary War Loyalist

This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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Portrait of Revolutionary War loyalist Isaac Low by David McNeely Stauffer. From New York Public Library: https://tinyurl.com/yax3pmap.

During the American Revolution, as many as one-third of American colonists remained loyal to Britain. These are the Tories we learned about in grade school, also known as loyalists.

Why did these Americans choose to remain British, and what did their decision cost them? The story told by a petition the Library recently acquired—addressed by New York loyalist Isaac Low on November 21, 1783, to the Loyalist Claims Commission in London—shows how one divided family struggled with these questions.

Born in New Jersey in 1735, Isaac Low was a prosperous New York City merchant. In the 1760s, as Americans became restive under British taxation and restrictions on trade, Low became active in the opposition. In 1774, he was a New York delegate to the first Continental Congress. As a merchant, Low was affected by the restrictions on trade, but he warned: “We ought not to deny the just Rights of our Mother Country. We have too much Reason in this Congress, to suspect that Independency is aimed at.”

When the Second Continental Congress met, the one that drafted the Declaration of Independence, Low did not attend. But he did participate ambivalently in several other patriotic bodies. The Manuscript Division has minutes of one of these, the New York City Committee of Sixty, which communicated with similar committees in other colonies and enforced boycotts of British goods. Low chaired this committee, but one of its members was suspicious of his loyalties. At a meeting held in April 1775, this unnamed member commented bitterly: “Mr. Lows non-attendance I ascribe to advices from England.” John Adams similarly believed that Low “will profess Attachment to the Cause of Liberty but his Sincerity is doubted.”

By the time the British occupied New York City in fall 1776, Low had made his allegiances clear and declared his loyalty to Britain. He remained in the occupied city, but when the British evacuated New York in 1783 and sailed for England, Low and his wife, Margaret, sailed too, joining their son Isaac Jr., who was already in London.

Low’s sisters, Gertrude and Sarah, had married two Irish-born brothers, Alexander and Hugh Wallace. Gertrude Low Wallace and Alexander Wallace, together with Hugh Wallace, left for Britain after the Revolution, but Sarah Low Wallace, Hugh’s wife, stayed behind, as did Nicholas Low, the brother of Isaac, Gertrude and Sarah. The Low and Wallace families preserved their bonds despite their political differences and wrote to each other for decades thereafter. Their letters are in the Nicholas Low Papers in the Manuscript Division.

Like other loyalists, Isaac Low’s property was confiscated by the Americans when he declared his loyalty to Britain during the revolution. The British parliament established the Loyalist Claims Commission to compensate loyalists for their American losses. Just before he left for England, Isaac Low drafted a petition to the commission—the one the Library recently acquired.

In it, he explains his history of shifting loyalties. He had always, he told the commissioners, “been warmly attached to the British Constitution.” For that reason, and to “continue a Member of the British Empire in America,” he had agreed to attend the Continental Congress as a delegate. He had believed that the “most worthy and respectable” of his fellow delegates wanted to “accommodate the unhappy Difference that then subsisted” between Britain and the colonies. But, to his “great Mortification and Grief,” his “Hopes and Expectations were all frustrated.”

Low details his service to the crown in occupied New York and gives a list of prominent men who can vouch for him. He describes his losses in a 1778 fire that caused great destruction in the occupied city. He was forced to throw goods “into the open Streets to preserve them from the Flames” and the fire consumed “several Thousand Pounds Sterling value in Anatta” (a red dye) that had been stored near the customs house dock waiting to be shipped to London. No longer bound by the boycotts he had once helped to enforce, Low was now trading with Britain from within the sanctuary of occupied New York.

After the war, Nicholas Low, in New York, provided material and moral support to his refugee relatives. He sent Isaac a pamphlet titled A Letter from Phocion. Phocion was Alexander Hamilton, as both brothers knew, since Hamilton was Nicholas’s lawyer.

Hamilton-as-Phocion argued that New York’s confiscation of loyalists’ property violated the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Isaac replied in an April 7, 1784, letter that the pamphlet did “honor to his [Hamilton’s] head and heart” but put him in danger of being “suspected of having changed his sentiments for what they will call Tory money.”

The progress of Isaac’s application to the commission can be traced in his letters to his brother in the Nicholas Low Papers. It took two years for the commissioners to decide on his application. When they did, he felt that the £1,700 they awarded him was “very scanty”—even though it was more than many others received, as historian Maya Jasanoff points out.

Isaac complained to Nicholas in an August 15, 1786, letter, “I must for the first time set myself down for a ruined man.” He blamed the commission’s decision on “malice whispered” by his enemies in a September 7, 1786, letter but also believed that “my having been in Committee and Congress, was a great stumbling block.”

When Isaac died in 1791, Isaac Jr. wrote to Nicholas on September 5 of that year that the “cruell treatment he experienced on both sides the Atlantic brought on an anxious mind, which hurried him to the grave.”

Gertrude Wallace appears to have been more resilient. On June 7, 1787, three years after arriving in Britain, she told Nicholas she was becoming accustomed to life there. “I could wish for a few of my old acquaintances,” she wrote, “but if it can’t be I must be content.”

Sports Broadcasting Legend Bob Wolff (1920–2017) Remembered

This is a guest post by Matthew Barton, the recorded sound curator in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Bob Wolff, the subject of the post, died on July 15 at age 96.

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Bob Wolff at the Library of Congress in 2013.

In spring 2013, the Packard Campus for Audiovisual Conservation of the Library of Congress, was honored to add the personal collection of the late sportscaster Bob Wolff to its holdings. Included were complete recordings of the two games that feature Wolff’s best-known work: Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series and the legendary sudden-death overtime 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants.

Bob was feted in the Member’s Room of the Library of Congress when we acquired his collection and honored with a special video tribute on the Jumbotron at that evening’s Washington National’s game. We also hosted a screening of the baseball musical fantasy “Damn Yankees” at the Packard Theater in Culpeper, Va.

The Bob Wolff Collection reflects the longevity and versatility of one of the greatest practitioners of the announcer’s art that sports broadcasting has known. From 1946 on, Wolff worked in both radio and television, covering collegiate and professional sports, including baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, boxing, tennis and track and field. Somehow, he also found time to announce the annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden for 33 years.

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Bob Wolff (right) with the Singing Senators, a group he formed with players from Washington’s major-league team. The players in uniform are (from left) Truman Clevenger, Jim Lemon, Albie Pearson, Russ Kemmerer and Roy Sievers.

In the 1940s, few believed that such broadcasts amounted to anything lasting; at that time, it was neither easy nor cheap for an individual broadcaster to make personal professional-quality recordings of his work. Wolff used recordings mainly as a production aid that enabled him to capture an interview during the day for use during his evening sports news programs. He soon started a “mystery guest” feature in which he would replay a clip from an old interview along with a few hints as to the guest’s identity, and invite listeners to send their guesses to him on postcards. Perhaps this practice convinced him to record and save his work when he could, for he continued to do it for decades to come.

For some interviewees, such as Babe Ruth, one can imagine Wolff keeping a recording in any case. But preserving an interview with the young coach of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks franchise of the fledgling National Basketball Association seems much less likely, no matter how good a talker future Boston Celtics coaching legend Red Auerbach may have been in that 1949–50 season.

Wolff’s broadcasting career began while he was still a student at Duke University in 1939. He was a fixture of the airways in his native New York from the 1960s on, but it was in Washington, D.C., that Wolff really learned his trade. Although the Washington Senators had been a contending ball club in the war years, they went from bad to worse while Wolff covered them from 1946 to 1960. They finished last five times, next to last four times and over .500 only once. Nevertheless, Wolff called their games enthusiastically, strummed his ukulele with the “Singing Senators” group he formed and gave airtime to everyone from upper management to stadium peanut vendors.

Wolff’s announcing performance for the 1956 All Star Game in D.C. earned him a spot in the booth for Mutual Network’s broadcasts of that year’s World Series, when Don Larsen pitched his perfect game. After that, his career highlights become too numerous to list here, but include three more World Series, national broadcasts for NBC and ABC and a stint as the New York Knicks’ announcer that included its two championship seasons in the early 1970s. He joined News 12 Long Island in 1986, where his commentary was a regular feature until early this year.

This short blog post can only begin to describe Bob Wolff’s career, art and achievement. Soon, examples of his preserved work will be available on the Library’s website. For now, I’ll leave you with a short recording from the Bob Wolff Collection. It is a 1947 interview by two reporters of Jackie Robinson (1919–1972), the first African American to play baseball on a major league team in the modern era.

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Inquiring Minds: The Unheralded Story of the Card Catalog

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Peter Devereaux, author of “The Card Catalog: Books, Cards and Literary Treasures.” Photo by Shawn Miller.

The library card catalog was one of the most versatile and durable technologies in history—a veritable road map for navigating a “wilderness of books”—says Peter Devereaux of the Library’s Publishing Office. His new book on the subject, “The Card Catalog: Books, Cards and Literary Treasures,” explores the history of this once-revolutionary system and celebrates literary gems and artifacts from Library of Congress collections.

This is a reprint of an interview with Devereaux that first appeared in the Library of Congress Gazette.

Why did you write this book?

This book was a great opportunity to tell the story about an unheralded, yet extremely important, part of libraries—the card catalog—one of the most versatile and durable technologies in history. I wanted people to see what a massive and unprecedented undertaking it was, so I hope the book sheds some light on its history and the continued importance of cataloging here at the Library of Congress.

What are the ancient roots of card catalogs?

When I started research for this book, I struggled a little with finding a starting point that made sense. After reading about Sumerian historian S. N. Kramer, I understood the story really started at the dawn of civilization. He clearly identified one cuneiform tablet, found near the ruins of Nippur and dated around 2000 B.C., as being used for cataloging purposes. At just 2½ by 1½ inches, the tablet foreshadowed the use of small index cards.

What system did libraries use just before the invention of the card catalog?

Most libraries used some form of a shelf list or bound catalog. The drawback was while the titles were listed in the order they appeared on the shelf, they were virtually useless if you wanted to search by author or subject. The title-author-subject access points that the card catalog affords was really a game changer.

Who were the key figures in the development of the card catalog?

Although there were some important contributions by librarians in Europe, on this side of the Atlantic, major developments were happening by the mid-1800s. They were led by Smithsonian librarian Charles Jewett, who advocated for centralized cataloging. At Harvard, Ezra Abbot created the first modern card catalog designed for readers. His associate, Charles Cutter, who became the librarian at the Boston Athenaeum in 1868, created a new scheme that later was the basis for the Library of Congress classification system. Though Cutter’s cataloging rules were adopted by many libraries, he is overshadowed by Melvil Dewey, whose approach to cataloging was based on a controlled vocabulary, represented by numerical values that could be subdivided by decimals.

How did the card catalog revolutionize libraries?

It really came down to providing quick, reliable access to a library’s collection. Before Dewey, Cutter and American Library Association libraries were essentially left to their own devices when it came to organizing their books. What you see emerge with the card catalog is not only an effective way to catalog a library but also a set a standards shared by most libraries.

What was role of Library of Congress in this?

It started to come together during Ainsworth Rand Spofford’s tenure as Librarian of Congress. With the copyright law of 1870, which required materials registered for copyright to be deposited with the Library, the collections started growing fast. The antiquated catalog and classification system dating back to Thomas Jefferson wasn’t able to keep up. After the opening of a new Library building, Herbert Putnam became Librarian in 1899, and J.C.M. Hanson and Charles Martel were appointed to lead the new cataloging division. They confronted a collection of more than 800,000 books, hardly any of which had been cataloged by subject. With a larger staff, catalogers created a new classification system, as well as integrating a new system of subject headings.

What was the impact of the Library’s decision to print and distribute cards to other libraries?

In 1901, when Putnam sent a memo to more than 400 libraries announcing the sale of its printed catalog cards, it was really a turning point for the greater library community. The card service was an immediate success, providing either complete sets or individual cards to thousands of public libraries at a reasonable cost. The mass distribution of catalog cards made the Library the standard bearer, allowing smaller libraries across the country to possess the same quality catalog as the greatest libraries in the world and really solidified the Library’s standing as the nation’s library.

In the book, you state that the card catalog was “destined from the start to collapse under its own weight.” Why?

By the 1950s, as the main card catalog at the Library surged to more than 9 million cards in 10,500 trays, staff grew increasingly concerned. In the annual report, the administration worried about “the space-consuming growth of the public card catalogue.” Many university and major public libraries were also facing a severe shortage of space as card catalogs continued to grow year after year.

Many librarians weren’t sad to say goodbye.  Why, and how did they bid farewell?

For librarians, there was a lot of excitement about a new technology, the computer, mixed with a little sadness about dumping the reliable and sturdy card catalog. In the 1970s, libraries nationwide embraced MARC and the computer catalog. Card catalogs quickly began to disappear. A few libraries held mock funerals. But the most interesting example I read about was one library that tied its cards to balloons, then let them float away.

What interesting tidbits did you learn that you didn’t know before?

What many consider the first attempt at a national library card catalog happened during the chaos of the French Revolution, which I find fascinating. In 1791, instructions were issued to local officials to begin cataloging libraries that had been confiscated from exiled or executed aristocrats. The method relied on playing cards, which then were blank on one side. Playing cards were a perfect choice: They were sturdy and roughly the same size, no matter what brand, and could easily be interfiled. Within three years, over a million cards were sent to overwhelmed offices in Paris.

“The Card Catalog,” published by the Library in association with Chronicle Books, is available in the Library of Congress shop or online.

Featured: Summertime Is Here!

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On the beach at Coney Island, 1902.

Sunshine, long days, trips to the mountains or beaches—we’re now well into the season many people anticipate long in advance of its arrival. A quick online search of the Library’s prints and photographs reveals that enthusiasm for the lazy days of summer is nothing new: the term “summer” elicits thousands of images dating from as long ago as the 18th century.

We’re featuring one such image, a 1902 view of the beach on Coney Island, intermittently on our home page this month.  It shows a large crowd of children and adults—wearing significantly more attire than is the norm for beach-goers today—enjoying the sand and sun. Although the richly colored picture looks like a photograph, it is actually an ink-based photolithograph—or photochrom print.

The Library has more than 400 photochrom prints of sites in the United States—and thousands more of locations in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. Hans Jakob Schmid (1856–1924), working for the Swiss firm Orell Füssli, invented the technique for making photochrom prints in the 1880s. It involves the direct photographic transfer of an original negative onto litho- and chromographic printing plates.

Even though the prints look deceptively like color photographs, when viewed with a magnifying glass, the small dots that make up the ink-based photomechanical image are visible. The photomechanical process permitted mass production of the vivid color prints. At a time when color photography was still rare, demand for them was high. Monochromatic prints were also issued, including a view of Pikes Peak in Colorado.

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Pikes Peak, a monochromatic photochrom print.

Photochrom prints were sold at tourist sites and through mail order catalogs to globe trotters, armchair travelers, educators and others to preserve in albums or put on display. Produced between the late 1880s well into the 1900s, they reached the height of their popularity in the 1890s and early 1900s.

 

Learning the Backstory to “Rent”

This post is by Emily Hauck, a summer intern in the Library’s Communications Office. A version of this post was first published in the Library of Congress Gazette.

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Members of the national tour cast of “Rent” examine original items from the Jonathan Larson Collection. Photo by Shawn Miller.

No matter how much you think you know about a topic, there is always more to discover. I found that out during my internship with the Library’s Office of Communications this summer.

One of my first assignments was to write a story for the Library of Congress Gazette about a June 22 visit to the Library by the 20th anniversary national tour cast of “Rent.” Cast members came to view the papers of Jonathan Larson, creator of the hit Broadway musical. I have a deep love of musical theater that spans back to my early childhood, so I jumped at the chance to interview them.

I learned more than I anticipated about the show from covering the event, and I consider myself to be a musical theater enthusiast. I wasn’t alone—even the cast that performs the show night after night expressed surprise and delight at materials in the collection.

The Larson Collection consists of approximately 15,000 items donated to the Library by his family, after his untimely death in 1996. The materials include lyric sketches, handwritten scripts, 400 recordings, personal correspondence, handwritten notes and more.

“What’s extraordinary about it is how much he wrote down. He’s somebody who sort of took notes about everything,” said Mark Horowitz of the Music Division, curator of the Larson Collection. “When he was writing a show, he would pose questions to himself—should I do this, can I make that clearer—and then he would answer them . . . in writing.”

Members of the cast expressed their fascination with the handwritten aspect of the collection as well. “Just being able to see the handwriting, the human behind the goliath of the show that we know,” said Christian Thompson, who plays Benjamin Coffin III. “It’s breathtaking.”

The display, spread over four tables in the Whittall Pavilion, included Larson’s notes and ideas, character biographies and his own biography through items such as his resume. “It’s so personal,” Horowitz said. “Not only is some of his stuff about the shows, but he also writes very personal things like: what are my goals in life, what do I want to do, how am I going to accomplish it?”

One item in particular that stood out to cast members was Larson’s biographies for the characters in “Rent.”

“Right now, I’m going through the biographies of the characters, and it’s quite interesting, some of the backstory that isn’t necessarily in the show,” Thompson said. “I’m actually just about to turn to the ‘Benny’ page, so I’m about to read about myself. Hopefully, my director doesn’t hate it if I add a couple of things in the next few days.”

“Knowing who each character is and why they act a certain way and to see that he went through so much trying to develop them—that’s amazing,” added Alexis Young, who is a swing of the production, the understudy for all the female roles.

Of all the items in the collection, one that stood out most to the cast and the curator was the handwritten math worksheet for “Seasons of Love” from “Rent” where Larson calculated that “525,600 minutes . . . measure a year” in the song’s lyric.

“I think the coolest thing, the thing that everybody likes, is the math for ‘Seasons of Love,’ it’s so remarkable and people really get that,” Horowitz said.

Though “Rent” is now over 20 years old, it is still relevant today, and this collection is proof of that.

“The story is kind of timeless,” Young said, “because it deals with wanting to live in the present and wanting to love. You know, who can’t relate to that?”

A New Website and More: Expanding Our Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

This is a guest post by Karen Keninger, director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS).

The NLS has a couple years of adventures ahead of it—adventures that sound chiefly technological but are really about meeting our patrons’ needs as reliably, easily and responsibly as possible. Technology is exciting in itself—but much more exciting is how it advances the ability of NLS and its network of cooperating libraries to serve our patrons who cannot read in conventional formats.

Let’s start with the new public gateway into our adventures—the NLS website. Our previous website, a solid workhorse for years, was starting to look a bit, shall we say, 1993-ish to sighted visitors. In 2017, with smart information architecture and navigation that’s been tested and retested with screen readers, we can provide a website that serves our blind patrons wonderfully—but that also has visual meaning and appeal for the sighted family, support assistants and staff members who use it alongside them. We also added tools and features for sighted visitors who may need to adjust what is on a monitor for their varying levels of visual acuity. It’s high time.

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The newly redesigned NLS home page.

On to the heart of our adventures: four pilots that will help ease the burden on our network of cooperating libraries and get more NLS materials to more patrons faster than ever before.

Duplication-on-Demand. To reduce wait times for talking books, NLS is testing a system allowing network libraries to duplicate talking-book files onto digital cartridges at their own state-based locations. And patrons would get to say what favorites they want loaded on a given cartridge from the entire NLS collection! Our libraries would no longer need to forecast what will be most popular and order preduplicated cartridges from the central NLS-managed distribution centers.

Synthetic Speech. Annoying robot voices are a thing of the past. In-person voice recording is still our gold standard, and we won’t change that. But synthetic speech can help us make available material we couldn’t easily record—think bibliographies, endnotes and recipes! Synthetic speech can also help us make “breaking news” or time-sensitive materials available more quickly.

Wireless Download. We’re exploring wireless transmission of talking-book files directly to simple devices in patrons’ home, allowing them to load the files from their devices onto cartridges themselves. Think of the ease of obtaining an album from iTunes or Amazon. And think, too, of the logistical and financial burdens this would take off our frontline network libraries.

Braille eReader. Picture the Times Square news ticker with its flow of words. Now picture those words in braille—that’s easy to do, since braille was (in a certain sense) the first widespread digitization format for words. Braille eReaders can turn a digital file instantaneously into braille for tactile reading, and a new generation of braille eReaders has brought the price point of such readers down to where NLS—working with the renowned Perkins Library in Watertown, Mass.—can now study the viability of providing eReaders to our patrons, just as we loan digital talking-book players.

These are the adventures that lie before NLS over the next two years. We’re already measuring our offerings to our patrons in terabytes of data rather than solely in linear shelf feet of braille volumes and hours of audio. Petabytes are on the horizon. And that horizon—whether of materials to offer, of technologies to use, of services to offer patrons, and, above all, of patrons to serve—is widening every day. We’re happy to be rolling up our sleeves for all this and more.