Library of Congress's Blog, page 14

Library Treasures: New Gallery Shows Off Premier Holdings

This piece is adapted from articles in the May-June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

The Library preserves collective memories representing entire societies as well as intimate records of of important moment and rites of passage in individual lives.

This June, the Library will open “Collecting Memories: Treasures from the Library of Congress,” an exhibition that explores the ways cultures preserve memory. The exhibition is the first in the Library’s new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery.

Rubenstein — a co-executive chairman of the Carlyle Group and chair of the James Madison Council, the Library’s philanthropic support group — announced the project four years ago with a $10 million gift to help create the Library’s first permanent treasures gallery.

Since then, Rubenstein has inspired support from a number of other donors, including the Annenberg Foundation, AARP and many members of the council. Together, these donors helped the Library exceed its promise to Congress to raise $20 million toward a greatly reimagined visitor experience for the nearly 2 million people who visit the Jefferson Building each year.

“Collecting Memories,” the opening exhibit, juxtaposes recordings, moving images, scrolls, diaries, manuscripts, photos, maps, books and more to explore how cultures memorialize the past, assemble knowledge of the known world, create collective histories, recall the events of the day or recount a life.

The goal of the Treasures Gallery is to share the rarest, most interesting or significant items drawn from the more than 178 million items (and counting) in the world’s largest library.

Here is Abraham Lincoln’s reading copy of the Gettysburg Address, neatly handwritten on a browned sheet of Executive Mansion stationery. There are the original, stark designs created by Maya Lin for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Comic book panels drawn for the Spider-Man origin story. Oscar Hammerstein’s working drafts of lyrics for “Do-Re-Mi” from “The Sound of Music” — in early versions, “sew” is not a needle pulling thread but something farmers do with wheat. Clay tablets used by students thousands of years ago.  The diary (in Arabic) of Omar Ibn Said, a native of West Africa, who was captured in 1807 and brought to South Carolina as a slave, the only such memoir known to exist. Sigmund Freud’s diaries and notebooks, one with “to remember is to relive” emblazoned in Italian across the front.

Over the next few weeks, we’re showcasing some of the fascinating items featured in the exhibition to give you an online preview. Much of this material can be found in “Collecting Memories: Treasures from the Library of Congress,” the exhibition’s companion volume, and in the May-June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

“Such things collectively tell the story of all of us: our shared culture, our shared history,” writes Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, in a short essay in the magazine.

Rubenstein, when announcing his initial gift: “I am honored to be a part of this important project to enhance the visitor experience and present the Library’s countless treasures in new and creative ways.”

Want to get started? How about a book depicting, in part, the life of the man who built the Taj Mahal?

This is the Pādishāh‘nāmah, also referred to as the Shāhjahān‘nāmah, one of the most beautiful Persian-language books in the Library. It chronicles the reign of Shah Jahan from 1627 to 1658 in Mughal-era India.

The work contains three parts, the first of which was written during the life of Shah Jahan, the monarch best known today for building the Taj Mahal mausoleum, a monument dedicated to immortalizing his love for his queen, Mumtaz Mahal.

The manuscript highlights the esteemed place the Indian Mughal court accorded Persian language and aesthetics in its literary and artistic traditions, bookmaking and in recording history.

The illustration above depicts the emperor, his crown prince and the royal family celebrating a joyous, nighttime Indian festival on the banks of a river with fireworks, music and feasting.

—Hirad Dinavari, a reference specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division, contributed the account of the Pādishāh‘nāmah.

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L.A. As You’ve (Probably) Never Seen It

— This is a guest post by Katherine Blood, a librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division. This story also appears in the May-June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

To retell the history of Los Angeles, artist Barbara Carrasco wove vignette scenes through the flowing tresses of “la Reina de los Ángeles,” based on a portrait of her sister.

Commissioned by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, the mural concept stretched from prehistory (the La Brea Tar Pits) to the imagined future (Los Angeles International Airport’s Space Age Theme Building) with subjects ranging from the inspiring to grievous.

Carrasco included such notable figures as folk hero Joaquin Murrieta Carrillo; Juan Francisco Reyes, the city’s first Hispanic and first Black mayor; Bridget “Biddie” Mason, who founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church; slain journalist Ruben Salazar; and United Farm Workers founders César Chávez and Dolores Huerta.

Historical events included Depression-era breadlines, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the Zoot Suit Riots.

“This was my chance to show what I wish was in the history books,” Carrasco said.

One scene references the whitewashing of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 1932 mural “América Tropical.” For her own mural, Carrasco was asked to remove elements the CRA deemed controversial. She refused. After decades in storage, the 80-foot mural is now celebrated, and it was displayed in an exhibition, “Sin Censura: A Mural Remembers L.A.,” at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in 2018–2019 before being acquired for the museum’s permanent collection in 2020. Carrasco’s original graphite design, depicting L.A. history flowing through long tresses of hair, now has a home in the Library.

The original graphite design for the Carrasco’s finished print. Prints and Photographs Division.

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Alan Haley, Preservation Specialist

Alan Haley is a preservation specialist in the Conservation Division.

Tell us about your background.

I was born and raised in New Hampshire and attended the University of New Hampshire for my undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Early on, I thought I was destined to be a math major, like my mom. It took me only one semester of college calculus, though, to sour on the idea. I declared a double major in Spanish and Greek because I liked the interactive dynamic of foreign-language classes. I went on to earn an M.A. in Spanish literature and linguistics, then taught Spanish-language classes at the university for several years.

Ready to try something different, I eventually earned a master craftsman’s certification in bookbinding at the North Bennet Street School in Boston. The school encourages students in their second year to seek further training. I applied for a rare book conservation internship at the Library and was accepted in September 1993. I’ve been here ever since.

Describe your work at the Library.

My responsibilities at the Library have morphed over time, but I have been de facto coordinator of the digitization preparation workflow in the Conservation Division for some years now. An amazing team of conservators prepares special collections materials to go under the camera, providing access to their content for Library patrons and the world at large. It is an unbelievable privilege to be part of this program.

What are some of your standout projects?

Working with our incomparable collections so many years makes it hard to choose a standout conservation treatment, and working alongside our conservators who excel in their different specialties is humbling.

Treating the original print transcript of the 1841 Amistad trial was memorable, as was treating the Boulder Dam photo album, which documents the dam’s construction in the 1930s. Last October, I worked on a Chinese scroll from around 600 A.D., the oldest artifact I have ever treated.

Every day brings a new surprise. Perhaps most impactful for me have been the preservation outreach assignments I have undertaken at the Library’s behest to advise on preservation of cultural heritage materials.

The assignments are always challenging, but the reception we experience representing the Library can differ greatly depending on where in the world we are asked to go and why we are there. Usually, the reception is warm (El Salvador and Moldova have my heart always). But sometimes the environment is more tense — Cairo during the Tahrir Square protests in 2013 and Baghdad in 2003 were daunting.

It isn’t about how your host institutions receive you; it is more about how they are functioning under duress and how I as an outsider should navigate those waters. I try to bring focus to what we have in common, a concern for the preservation of cultural heritage that may be under threat.

Currently, I am delighted to be assisting the New York City-based W.E.B. Du Bois Museum Foundation to implement a preservation plan for Du Bois’ personal library in Ghana, which suffers from climate-caused deterioration. We hope to make training Ghanaian students in collections care a part of our preservation outreach.

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Jefferson’s Secret Cipher for the Lewis and Clark Expedition

This article also appears in the March/April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

In May 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off into the great unknown of the Louisiana Territory, far from help and far from home. Ahead lay vast prairies, endless mountain ranges, uncharted streams, untold dangers.

Their mission: lead the Corps of Discovery across the continent, establish relations with Native peoples they met along the way, document plant and animal life and, most importantly, find a practical water route to the Pacific.

President Thomas Jefferson, who had ordered the expedition, expected no regular communication from the corps. But he did hope that traders or Natives might help get occasional messages back to Washington. Some of those communications, he believed, might contain sensitive information best kept secret.

Long fascinated by encryption, Jefferson devised a special cipher for use by the expedition and sent it to Lewis. Only they would understand any messages encoded with it.

“Avail yourself of these means to communicate to us, at seasonable intervals, a copy of your journal, notes & observations of every kind,” Jefferson wrote to Lewis on June 20, 1803, “putting into cypher whatever might do injury if betrayed.”

Two versions of the cipher, handwritten by the president, are preserved in the Jefferson papers held by the Library’s Manuscript Division. Both used grids of letters, numbers and symbols to encrypt and decode messages.

A portion of Jefferson’s cipher. Manuscript Division.

In the earlier version, Jefferson proposed two different methods to use the cipher, one employing a previously agreed-upon keyword to encode letters of the alphabet.

At the very bottom of the page, he provided an example:

Jsfjwawpmfsxxiawprjjlxxzpwqxweudvsdmf&gmlibexpxu&izxpseer

Using the keyword “artichoke,” the incomprehensible string of letters and symbols reveals its hidden message: “I am at the head of the Missouri. All well, and the Indians so far friendly.”

Jefferson made a second, slightly revised version of the cipher and sent it to Lewis to carry west. Lewis never found the opportunity to use the cipher, which today remains a curious relic of a bold mission across a wild continent.

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Blondie’s “Parallel Lines” Hits the National Recording Registry

Blondie was a New York band finding its way in the mid 1970s, deeply enmeshed in the city’s arts scene but having more success in Europe after two albums than in the States.

Lead singer Debbie Harry and guitarist Chris Stein, then a couple in and outside the band, counted the young artist Jean-Michel Basquiat as a friend; the pair bought his first painting on canvas for a couple hundred bucks. They lived just off the Bowery and a few doors down from CBGB, the epicenter of punk rock.

“It was a great, decrepit atmosphere,” Stein laughed in a recent interview with the Library, with Harry joining in the conversation from a different location.

Then came “Parallel Lines,” their 1978 album that went platinum in multiple countries and helped define New Wave music. The production was crisp. The songs were short, tight and just a bit paranoid. There was “One Way or Another,” the sweet-but-cynical “Sunday Girl,” the hard-driving “11:59” and the sublimely strange “Fade Away and Radiate.”  All very New York, all very punchy and all very edgy. But it was “Heart of Glass” that sent disco lights spinning and propelled the band into the pop music stratosphere.

Today, fashion boutiques and high-end grocery stores fill the old neighborhood. Basquiat’s paintings sell for tens of millions (he died in 1988; Harry and Stein sold their painting of his long ago). Blondie was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.

And, just a few weeks ago, that landmark album, “Parallel Lines,” was enshrined in the National Recording Registry at the Library, cementing the band’s legacy as a key part of American pop culture in the last years of the 20th century.

“‘Heart of Glass’ was the turning point,” Stein said. The song, finally released as a single in early 1979, was a megahit, particularly in the U.K.

But what set that album apart? The band had been performing for years, after all, with different versions of “Glass” in their live sets long before it was recorded.

In their interview with the Library, Stein and Harry broke it down into several key parts.

First, the group was paired for the first time with veteran producer Mike Chapman.

Chapman, an Australian native, achieved phenomenal success as a producer and songwriter in Britain in the mid-1970s. He had far more experience than anyone in the band and a sharp ear for radio singles.

Not only did he produce “Parallel Lines,” but in 1978 and 1979, he also produced the Knack’s No. 1 album “Get the Knack” (and it’s No 1 hit, “My Sharona,”) and co-wrote and produced Exile’s No. 1 hit “Kiss You All Over.” He co-wrote “The Best” and “Better Be Good to Me,” huge hits for Tina Turner, and “Love Is a Battlefield,” a No. 1 hit for Pat Benatar. He also produced Blondie’s run of hits in the 1980s.

So in a New York recording studio in the summer of 1978, he took charge. He didn’t have them play together as they had recorded in the past, but had them play individually (often after intense rehearsals), then stacked the tracks on top of another. It built a bigger, punchier sound and made the group much more “precise,” Harry said. Stein and Harry wrote most of the songs, and Chapman confidently tightened up the production, making the album sound like a unified set.

Disco was king at the time — the charts were dominated that year by the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack  — but there was a new, post-punk sound taking shape, too. The Cars debut album came out a couple of months before “Parallel,” with hits like “Just What I Needed” and “My Best Friend’s Girl.” (That album was also inducted into the NRR this year.)

“Parallel Lines” fit this new mold perfectly, with the disco-inflected “Heart” finding the sweet spot. Released as a single early in 1979, it became one of the year’s 20 biggest selling singles.

Then there was that iconic album cover.

Broad black and white stripes filled the backdrop. The band’s five male members, all laughing or smiling, wore black suits and ties with white shirts. Harry, the lone woman, stood in the middle in a white dress, a scowl on her face and hands on her hips. It fit the attitude of the times perfectly — cool new wave, danceable pop. (The band hated the cover and weren’t aware it was going to be used. “We wanted to look like brooding rock stars,” Stein said.)

If the band didn’t like the look of the album, the executives at Chrysalis Records weren’t thrilled with how it sounded.

“They didn’t hear any hits,” Harry said.

Despite the drama, the album went No. 1 in the U.K. with three Top 10 hits. It peaked at No. 6 in the U.S. “Glass” was omnipresent on the radio and in clubs. It launched the band on a four-year run of hit records and concert tours that would ultimately land them in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

The cover, meanwhile, became instantly identifiable with the band. It still shows up as a pop culture meme, with casts of TV shows or other groups donning the suits, poses and backdrop.

The band had later hits such as “Call Me,” from the soundtrack of “American Gigolo,” and the No. 1 hits, “The Tide Is High” and “Rapture, but they broke up in 1982.

Most members pursued other music ventures, while Harry branched out as an actress, often starring in offbeat films such as John Waters “Hairspray” (now in the National Film Registry) and David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome.” (She’s continued film work ever since.)

The band reunited in the 1990s, and with drummer Clem Burke as a stalwart, Harry and Stein have kept the band going. Their most recent album, “Pollinator,” in 2017, showed them to be precise as they had been in the late ’70s with danceable tracks such as “Long Time” and “Already Naked.” They’re now on a summer-long tour that will carry them to Europe and back to the States.

Harry and Stein both say that Blondie’s existence has always been more about pushing artistic boundaries than just the pursuit of hits. Stein says that while the band achieved a spot in history, it’s not quite like they dominated the charts, the Grammys or arena-sized concert venues. They do some mass market business, but they’re not a mass market band.

“The old problems of art and commerce are sometimes very restrictive,” Harry said, “and I think that we, somehow being a bit of a fringe element, got to do some things that were groundbreaking.”

“We’re still big in CVS,” Stein joked. ” ‘Tide Is High’ is on almost every time I go in there.”

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Researcher Story: Cormac Ó hAodha & the Heart of Irish Music

 Cormac Ó hAodha, a resident fellow in the John W. Kluge Center, is taking a deep dive into the American Folklife Center’s Alan Lomax Collection. Ó hAodha is looking at field recordings that Lomax, a major figure in 20th-century folklore and ethnomusicology, made in the Múscraí region of County Cork, Ireland. A native of Múscraí, Ó hAodha is now completing his Ph.D. dissertation on the Múscraí song tradition in the Department of Folklore and Ethnology at University College Cork.

Tell us about the Múscraí singing tradition.

The Múscraí Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) region is a recognized heartland of the Irish language and traditional Irish-language singing.

There are hundreds and hundreds of songs in the tradition, and they relate to all kinds of things — from lullabies to love songs to songs praising place, the people, nature, the rivers and the mountains.

There really is no limit to the kinds of songs — they can be about loss and mourning as well as about celebration and happiness, the entire range of human experience.

Many songs describe the beauty of a woman who the poet meets in a dream. In these songs, this woman represents Ireland with her features recounted in verse, her long tresses of hair sweeping the dew from the grass as she walks at dawn and so on.

A singer’s individual delivery and skill in deploying stylistic ornamentation and musical decoration to the words is what, I believe, makes a good traditional Irish-language, or “sean-nós,” singer.

The “sean-nós” style is a cappella, ideally for an audience that understands and speaks the Irish language. The location can be anywhere, in the pub or at a house party.

I would describe what’s happening as the singer guiding, not dictating, the audience through a series of images described in the poetry of the words.

How did you come to perform?

Personally, I always found singing appealing, and I wanted to join the singers, both in my extended family as well as those in the community, in singing our songs.

I sang “Baile Bhuirne,” which is the name of the village where I live, at the Library’s 2024 Botkin Folklife Lecture Series in March.

It was made, or composed, around 1901 by Micheál Ó Murchadha and Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire. I learned it from the singing of my mother’s first cousin, Diarmuid Ó Súilleabháin.

Diarmuidín, as he was known locally, was among the finest traditional singers of his generation. He died in a car accident in 1991 at age 44. The next year, an annual traditional singing and music festival, Éigse Dhiarmuid Uí Shúilleabháin, was established in his native Cúil Aodha to honor him.

In 2022, the festival issued an album of his singing, also on Spotify, entitled “Diarmuidín.” For anyone who is interested in hearing the best of Irish traditional singing (songs in Irish, songs in English and even bilingual songs), I would highly recommend listening to Diarmuidín.

Why did you seek a Kluge Center fellowship?

I knew Lomax was in Múscraí in 1951 and that he had collected songs from Múscraí singers. When I saw the opportunity to come to the Library and work on the Alan Lomax Collection, I went for it.

Have you discovered anything unexpected so far?

I have discovered quite a lot, especially about initiatives and practices already underway at the Library and elsewhere to “repatriate,” or digitally return, culturally important artifacts and records to the creative sites from which they were collected.

In the case of my own work, that would be songs that are in national repositories in Dublin that need to be repatriated to the community in Múscraí in County Cork. I find all of this fascinating and hope to bring some of these ideas and approaches into practice on my return to Ireland.

What will be the end product of your research at the Library?

I’ll be promoting the notion of “slow archiving” — prioritizing collaborative relationships with community stakeholders when it comes to artifacts in the care of national institutions in Ireland, the majority of which are in Dublin, a seven-hour round trip by road from Múscraí.

Anything else you’d like to share about your time at the Library?

It has been an opportunity that rarely comes in an entire lifetime, and I am very conscious of that.

With the help of the wonderful staff in AFC’s reading room, I have had the privilege of listening to all of the radio programs on folksongs that Lomax made and that were broadcast in the 1950s and 1960s on American radio and, in the case of Irish folksongs, on BBC radio.

I simply cannot praise the staff of the Library enough. I am grateful to all of the specialists I have come into contact with at the Kluge Center, AFC and the Performing Arts Reading Room. My thanks also to my fellow Kluge scholars.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir (thank you all).

Read more about the Lomax collection.

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National Recording Registry 2024! Green Day, Blondie, Doug E. Fresh, Juan Gabriel!

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-Brett Zongker, the Library’s chief of media relations, contributed to this story.

Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer and songwriter for Green Day, said that the youthful band wasn’t thinking of making a generation-defining album when they starting work on “Dookie,” their breakout record of 1994. They just wanted to keep rocking.

Still, the record that produced hits such as “Longview,” “Basket Case” and “Welcome to Paradise” is still relevant 30 years later, and that makes it one of the headline entries of the 2024 National Recording Registry class, announced today by Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress.

“I think in the back of our minds was to be able to play music together for the rest of our lives,” Armstrong said in an interview with the Library. “That’s quite a goal when you’re 20 or 21 years old. But, you know, we’ve managed to do it, and it’s just been an amazing journey.”

“Dookie,” Green Day’s breakout 1994 album.

Other headliners: ABBA’s “Arrival” album, Blondie’s “Parallel Lines,” The Notorious B.I.G.’s landmark “Ready to Die,” and The Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces.” They’re among the 25 songs, albums, broadcasts or other recordings that were selected by the National Recording Preservation Board and the Librarian to join the registry this year.

“We have selected audio treasures worthy of preservation with our partners this year, including a wide range of music from the past 100 years,” Hayden said. “We were thrilled to receive a record number of public nominations, and we welcome the public’s input on what we should preserve next.”

The 2024 class also includes Gene Autry’s “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” The Cars’ debut album, Juan Gabriel’s “Amor Eterno,” Héctor Lavoe’s salsa hit “El Cantante,” Kronos Quartet’s “Pieces of Africa,” Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are,” Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” and Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.”

There are now 650 recordings in the registry, a miniscule fraction of the Library’s holdings of nearly 4 million recordings. The registry, begun in 2002, holds items from the beginning of recorded sound in the 1850s to things created as recently as 10 years ago, the cutoff point for consideration.

A record 2,899 nominations were made by the public this year. (You can nominate additions for next year’s class until Oct. 1, 2024.)

Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow” launched the band into pop-culture fame.

Jefferson Airplane brought the San Francisco hippie scene of the mid-1960s to the rest of the nation, knocking out psychedelic hits such as “White Rabbit” even as tour buses trundled through their Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to get a glimpse of the wild side.

Their second album, “Surrealistic Pillow,” made an indelible mark on the era, with “Somebody to Love” joining “Rabbit” as a major hit. The band would go on to play at both the Woodstock and Altamont music festivals and become synonymous with rock music of the day.

“We thought that we invented sex, drugs and rock and roll, and we might have invented some rock and roll, but I don’t think we had much to do with inventing the other two,” Jorma Kaukonen, the band’s lead guitarist, told the Library in recent interview.

Lead singer Grace Slick wrote “White Rabbit” based on Lewis Carroll’s children’s novel, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” The Victorian story became a classic, Slick read it as a child and, as many others had, took Alice’s surreal experiences “down the rabbit hole” (with a fussy white rabbit as her guide) as a metaphor for drug use. “Go ask Alice,” she intones over the song’s march-like bass line, referring to an incident in the book, “when she’s 10 feet tall.”

The song was “a shot” at her parents’ generation, she said, who thought little of their own alcohol use but excoriated ’60s kids for smoking marijuana and dropping acid.

Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is in the registry.

Juan Gabriel’s “Amor Eterno,” a heartrending ballad he started performing in the 1990s in memory of his deceased mother, has long been a staple in the singer’s native Mexico and across Latin America, and this year it joins the registry.

Gabriel died in 2016 at the age of 66, but his son, Ivan Aguilera, said his father would have been thrilled to see one of his most famous songs be enshrined in the registry.

“He would always say that ‘as long as the public, people, keep singing my music, Juan Gabriel will never die,’ and it’s nice to see that happening here,” Aguilera said.

Lily Tomlin’s trademark character, “Ernestine,” made it into the registry with her comic album, “This is a Recording.”

Here’s the complete 2024 list, in chronological order:

“Clarinet Marmalade” – Lt. James Reese Europe’s 369thS. Infantry Band (1919)“Kauhavan Polkka” – Viola Turpeinen and John Rosendahl (1928)Wisconsin Folksong Collection (1937-1946)“Rose Room” – Benny Goodman Sextet with Charlie Christian (1939)“Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” – Gene Autry (1949)“Tennessee Waltz” – Patti Page (1950)“Rocket ‘88’” – Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (1951)“Catch a Falling Star” / “Magic Moments” – Perry Como (1957)“Chances Are” – Johnny Mathis (1957)“The Sidewinder” – Lee Morgan (1964)“Surrealistic Pillow” – Jefferson Airplane (1967)“Ain’t No Sunshine” – Bill Withers (1971)“This Is a Recording” – Lily Tomlin (1971)“J.D. Crowe & the New South” – J.D. Crowe & the New South (1975)“Arrival” – ABBA (1976)“El Cantante” – Héctor Lavoe (1978)“The Cars” – The Cars (1978)“Parallel Lines” – Blondie (1978)“La-Di-Da-Di” – Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick (MC Ricky D) (1985)“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” – Bobby McFerrin (1988)“Amor Eterno” – Juan Gabriel (1990)“Pieces of Africa” – Kronos Quartet (1992)“Dookie” – Green Day (1994)“Ready to Die” – The Notorious B.I.G. (1994)“Wide Open Spaces” – The Chicks (1998)

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The Adams Building Turns 85!

-This is a guest post by Jennifer Harbster, head of the science section.

The year was 1939. Pan American Airways’ Yankee Clipper made its first transatlantic passenger flight. The technology company Hewlett-Packard was founded in a garage in Palo Alto, California. Scientists at Iowa State College developed the prototype for the first digital computer.

And at the Library, the John Adams Building  opened just three days into the year. Boasting elevators, pneumatic tubes and air-conditioning, the building was available to researchers in April.

To celebrate this 85th anniversary, the Science and Business Reading Room is hosting a “A Night at the Adams,” on April 18 from 5 to 8 p.m. The event, which is sold out, will feature tours of the stunning reading room, curated displays and a scavenger hunt.

The Adams Building. Photo: Shawn Miller

The building was proposed to Congress in 1928. It was orginally known as “the Annex” to the adjacent Thomas Jefferson Buildling and funding was appropriated in 1930 and 1935. David Lynn, then the Architect of the Capitol, commissioned a design from the architectural firm of Pierson and Wilson. The result was an elegant building that today complements its next-door neighbor, the Folger Shakespeare Library. It was renamed for the second U.S. president in 1980.

The Adams incorporates traditional beaux arts architectural styles, including Italian Renaissance and classical Greco-Roman details, along with fashionable art deco designs. This mixture of styles was popular in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s and is today referred to as “Greco deco,” an architectural term coined by art historian James M. Goode.

Beautifully selected marble, stone and other materials from around the country grace the building at every turn. The exterior is faced in Georgia white marble with a skirt of North Carolina pink granite around the base. Inside, St. Genevieve rose marble from Missouri, Travertine limestone from Montana and Cardiff green marble from Maryland are featured.

Underfoot are beautifully crafted terrazzo and mosaic floors produced by the National Mosaic Company of Washington, D.C., the same company responsible for the floors of many of the city’s federal buildings.

Advertisements and articles in the Federal Architect and Modern Plastics magazines from the late 1930s tout the Adams’ architecture and design achievements — the building incorporates examples of industrial arts and materials science considered exceptional at the time.

Tiles made of Vitrolite, a shiny structural pigmented glass popular in art deco designs, cover stairwell walls and other surfaces. Aluminum, bronze and nickel are used in metalwork details.

The use of Formica, in particular, is noteworthy. The building won awards for it. A laminated plastic material used in decorative applications, Formica features in the reading room’s green wall paneling and study tables.

At its core, the Adams Building contains 12 tiers of bookstacks extending from the basement to the fourth floor. Each tier covers 13 acres of space; together, the tiers can hold up to 10 million books. Staff offices and workspaces encircle the bookstacks.

Topping everything off on the fifth floor are two high-ceilinged reading rooms adorned with murals by artist Ezra Winters and art deco designs by sculptor Lee Lawrie.

Winters was commissioned to paint murals in the South Reading Room, the current home of the Science and Business Reading Room, as a tribute to Jefferson — the space was known fondly as the Jefferson Reading Room for many years.

Panels highlight individuals from Colonial and Federalist America and quotations from Jefferson’s letters on the themes of freedom, labor, education and democratic government. In a lunette above the book services desk, a stately dedication depicts Jefferson in front of his Monticello, Virginia, residence.

In the North Reading Room, now a collection management space accessible only to staff members, Winters painted a colorful and animated procession of characters from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”

The east and west walls depict pilgrims as they are introduced in the prologue with the west wall also showcasing a cameo of Chaucer himself. The north clock wall illustrates the opening lines of the prologue, while the south wall lunette, inspired by the prologue of “The Franklin’s Tale,” shows three musicians.

A sculpted owl gazes out from the Adams Building entrance on Independence Avenue. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith.

Architectural sculptor Lee Lawrie, a notable artist of the time, adorned the Adams Building with an array of modernist details and deco designs. His standout works include the sculpture “Atlas” at Rockefeller Center in New York City and “The Sower” and other sculptures decorating the Nebraska state capitol in Lincoln.

Ground-floor bronze doors in the Adams Building feature sculptural reliefs Lawrie designed to symbolize the history of the written word, and exterior friezes tell stories from antiquity and ancient civilizations.

Elsewhere, Lawrie’s artistic touch is visible in beautiful grille work on reading room doors and on elevator doors that take staff members to the stacks. His plant motifs in metal and stone appear in elevator lobbies and on doors, water fountains and walls. Owls he designed with geometric shapes and dressed in nickel, aluminum or stone, nest about the reading room and on the exterior of the building.

The intricate and highly symbolic designs and wealth of detail Winter and Lawrie incorporated into the Adams Building —  along with the artistry of many others — make the Adams much more than an annex: It is truly a worthy a companion to its older sibling, the Jefferson Building.

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My Job: Alan Gevinson

Alan Gevinson will retire later this year as special assistant to the chief of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

Tell us about your background.

I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, during the ’50s and ’60s. After getting my driver’s license at age 16, I discovered a world of foreign films and classic Hollywood movies screened at funky Washington, D.C., repertory houses that no longer exist. I was hooked.

Later, I went to a small liberal arts college, where I was able to run the film society for a year. Afterward, I spent two years at New York University’s Graduate Institute of Film and Television learning the craft of filmmaking. I wanted both to make and study films, but after working on a few television documentaries, my filmmaking career path came to a dead end.

I was fortunate, though, to land a job with the American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films project in Los Angeles, researching, editing, writing and viewing films for a series of reference books. It was really a dream job, especially because of the collegiality of my fellow AFI catalogers.

After 12 years, I went back to school, this time in cultural studies at George Mason University. A couple of years later, I migrated to a Ph.D. program in history at Johns Hopkins University. I then did adjunct teaching in GMU’s graduate history program before beginning my current job at the Library in 2011.

What brought you to the Library?

In 1980, after my first year at NYU, I worked in a summer job in the Prints and Photographs Division helping Beverly Brannan organize the Alexander Graham Bell and Toni Frissell collections. When I’ve mentored interns in recent years, I’ve told them I hope the experience of immersing themselves in a sea of primary sources and learning ways to make sense of them is as rewarding for them as it was for me 40 years ago.

Over the ensuing years, I worked in a variety of temp and contract jobs for the Library. When my current position was created in 2011, I jumped at the opportunity to bring a cultural history perspective to NAVCC projects.

What achievements are you most proud of?

Over the past 10 years, I’ve worked with fantastic colleagues at the Library and GBH, Boston’s public broadcaster, on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting project. To date, we have digitally preserved more than 160,000 public television and radio programs from more than 500 stations, producers and archives at NAVCC and made more than 100,000 available online for free on the project’s website, americanarchive.org. It is managed by GBH but co-branded by both institutions.

The collection includes a wealth of local programming from all over that now is accessible nationwide for the first time. AAPB offers many programs produced by Black, Latino, Asian and Native American communities who long have advocated for the public broadcasting system to live up to its foundational goal of diversity.

And we make available online tens of thousands of nationally acclaimed news and public affairs shows, like the Bill Moyers and PBS NewsHour collections and 40 years of Harry Shearer’s wickedly clever weekly satirical radio program “Le Show,” which I listened to on Sunday mornings in the 1980s when I lived in LA.

It’s been immensely rewarding to work with hundreds of people throughout the nation who respect the mission of public broadcasting and with talented Library interns who have created wonderfully engaging exhibits for the AAPB website on a variety of salient topics.

What are some standout moments from your time at the Library?

I was honored to show Rep. John Lewis clips of himself from a 1960 television documentary on the Nashville sit-ins at the opening of “The Civil Rights Act of 1964” exhibit, curated by Manuscript Division historian Adrienne Cannon.

In conjunction with an exhibit in the Library’s Bob Hope Gallery of American Entertainment, I gave tours to Norman Lear and his family, Gary Sinise and his daughter and Paula Poundstone and her daughter. I also gave a presentation to the Military Officers Association of America, where almost all hands in the packed house went up when I asked how many had actually seen Bob Hope at a Christmas show during tours of duty in Vietnam. The indelible impact of entertainment in wartime really hit home to me that instant.

But my most memorable moment occurred during a research trip to the Library in the early 1990s when I still worked for the AFI. As I was viewing a 35mm film, a hand tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and looked for the very first time into the face of the woman who would become my wife, Nancy Seeger, then a recorded sound cataloger. She had been told by our mutual friend, Sam Brylawski, that she should meet me. Nancy retired from the Library a few years ago, and I’ll join her in retirement in the spring.

What’s next for you?

When I met Bill Moyers at a Library event a few months ago, he gave me a word of advice about what to do once I retired. Read, he said. I look forward to taking that advice.

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An 800-Year-Old (Tiny) Book of Hours

— This is a guest post by Marianna Stell, a reference specialist in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. It also appears in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

In the medieval world, impossibly small, cleverly constructed objects made of precious materials were appreciated for their craftsmanship and their inherent miraculous quality.

The Edith Book of Hours, a handwritten 14th-century volume of prayers, is such an object, one that today still prompts viewers to ask: How could anyone create something so small?

The book, which measures just 25/8 inches tall and 17/8 inches wide, contains more than 300 pages. It is a masterpiece of Gothic illumination, with its many lovely leaves containing delicate, scrolling border designs and flawless miniatures crafted in the style of Parisian artist Jean Pucelle.

Renowned collector Lessing J. Rosenwald presented the book to his wife, Edith, on her birthday in 1951 — along with a custom case and a small magnifying glass to make viewing easier. Edith donated the book to the Library in 1981 in commemoration of her husband, who had passed away two years earlier.

Today, the Edith Book of Hours is part of the Library’s Rosenwald Collection and the beauty and meaning found in its pages still amazes.

The Edith Book of Hours with its magnifying glass. Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

In a miniature rendering of the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary holds a book in her hand and a centrally placed scroll highlights the moment when, in the Christian tradition, the “Word became flesh” in a verbal exchange between Mary and the angel Gabriel. “Ave maria gratia plena,” the scroll reads: “Hail Mary, full of grace.”

The scene, and the book itself, invites its readers to experience the miracle of just how small words can be: tiny letters written on a tiny scroll within a tiny miniature within a tiny book.

Recently digitized, the volume now can be appreciated by more than one person at a time, allowing people everywhere to experience the smallness of the Edith Book of Hours. Centuries after the book was created, it still feels nothing short of miraculous.

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