Library of Congress's Blog, page 161

Copyright Deposit Sets Record Straight on Noted 20th-Century Song

(The following is a guest post by Wendi A. Maloney, writer-editor in the United States Copyright Office.)

The Library’s “Songs of America” online presentation highlights how copyright records can help to shed light on American culture and history. The exhibit draws on hundreds of thousands of pieces of sheet music and sound recordings registered for copyright since 1820 to explore the American experience through song.

William Grant Still. 1925. Prints and Photographs Division.

One copyright record has an especially interesting story. William Grant Still – cited as the “dean of African American composers” in the Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia – registered his composition “Grief” on June 15, 1953, depositing an original unpublished manuscript with the Copyright Office. He wrote the music for a poem by LeRoy V. Brant.

The Oliver Ditson Music Company first published the song in 1955. A version published afterward, however, introduced an error. The final note of the vocal line in that version does not match the one before it, creating a dissonance that extends a mood of sadness through the song’s end.

“This incorrect version of the song was widely performed and came to be considered authoritative,” said James Wintle, a Music Division reference specialist. “For more than 50 years, the mistake was unknown by the public.”

Still’s family, however, felt certain he did not mean for his composition to end the way it was being performed. Judith Anne Still, William’s daughter, turned to the Library’s Music Division for help in 2009.

“She knew about the copyright registration and wanted to find the deposit to show her father’s intention for the song,” Wintle said.

A search succeeded in locating the deposit and proving Judith Anne Still right. The original composition ends on a consonant note, suggesting a “sense of rest and relief” that resolves grief, Wintle said. “It vastly changed the way an important 20th-century composition is interpreted.”

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“Grief,” by William Grant Still. 1953. Music Division.

After learning of the discovery, baritone Thomas Hampson came to the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium in 2009 to record the original version of the song. A recording of his performance is available online.

“Grief” is but one of many musical accomplishments in the stellar career of Still. He was the first African-American composer to have a symphony performed by a professional orchestra. Wintle notes that the Music Division holds the original handwritten manuscript of Still’s Symphony No. 1, the “Afro-American,” performed at Carnegie Hall in 1935. Still was also the first African- American to have an opera nationally televised and the first African-American symphony- orchestra conductor, according to the Performing Arts Encyclopedia. In addition, he set to music many poems of the Harlem Renaissance, including those of Langston Hughes, and he scored films and arranged commercial music throughout his career. Still died in 1978.

Stay Up With A Good Book

The Library of Congress National Book Festival, as you’ve no doubt heard, is going to a new place in 2014 — the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. — on Saturday, Aug. 30 from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

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“Lydia Reading” by Mary Cassatt

As always, it will be free and open to the public, courtesy of the event’s wonderful sponsors.  And it will be convenient to two subway stations, Mount Vernon Square on the Green and Yellow Lines and Gallery Place/Chinatown on the Red Line.

And that’s not all that’s new about it!

The new venue has made available space for several new genre pavilions. In addition the longtime pavilions History & Biography, Fiction & Mystery, Poetry & Prose, Children’s, Contemporary Life, Teens and Special Programs, this year’s festival also will offer new pavilions focused on Science, the Culinary Arts, Small Press/International and for children, Picture Books.

The popular and the comfortable will still be there — the book-signings, the Library of Congress Pavilion, the Pavilion of the States and our “Let’s Read America” area with sponsors’ activities for kids.  But for the first time in its 14-year history, the festival will offer evening activities between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. including a poetry slam, a panel talk and screening we call  “Great Books to Great Movies,” and a “super-session” for graphic-novel enthusiasts. Hence the theme of this year’s festival, “Stay Up With a Good Book.”

But wherever and whenever you hold it, the Library of Congress National Book Festival is first and foremost about books and their authors.

What a lineup of authors, poets and illustrators we have for you this year! It’s not complete yet, but here it is so far: U.S. Reps. John Lewis and James Clyburn, Alice McDermott, co-authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Peter Baker, Ishmael Beah, Kai Bird, Billy Collins, Kate DiCamillo (the Library’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature), Francisco Goldman, Henry Hodges, Siri Hustvedt, Cynthia Kadohata,  George Packer, Lisa See, Maria Venegas, and Gene Luen Yang — plus the colossally talented illustrator Bob Staake, who’s just finishing up the artwork for this year’s Library of Congress National Book Festival poster, by the way.

Not to mention Bob Adelman, Paul Auster, Andrea Beaty, Eula Biss, Kendare Blake, Paul Bogard, Jeffrey Brown, Peter Brown, Eric H. Cline, Bryan Collier, Raúl Colón, James Conaway, Ilene Cooper, Jerry Craft, H. Allen Day, Liza Donnelly, Margaret Engle, Percival Everett, Jules Feiffer, David Theodore George, Carla Hall, Molly Idle, Peniel E. Joseph, Nick Kotz, Nina Krushcheva, Louisa Lim, Eric Litwin, Adrienne Mayor, Meg Medina, Claire Messud, Anchee Min, Elizabeth Mitchell, Richard Moe, John Moeller, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Alicia Ostriker, Laura Overdeck, Dav Pilkey, Paisley Rekdal, Amanda Ripley, Cokie Roberts, Ilyasah Shabazz, Lynn Sherr, Brando Skyhorse, Vivek Tiwary, David Treuer, Ann Ursu, Lynn Weise, Rita Williams-Garcia, Natasha Wimmer, Jacqueline Woodson and Tiphanie Yanique.

An array of generous sponsors is the reason the festival can be free and open to the public — including our amazing benefactor David M. Rubenstein, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Washington Post, Wells Fargo, the National Endowment for the Arts, PBS KIDS, Scholastic Inc., the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

We’ll be updating the authors and other details about the festival at its website.  Keep an eye on the site, and save that date — Saturday, Aug. 30.

 

 

 

 

 

America At Play

Ty Cobb, Detroit Tigers, baseball card portrait, 1911. Benjamin K. Edwards Collection. Prints and Photographs Division.

As major league baseball prepared to celebrate what it thought was the sport’s centennial in 1939, it relied on a 1907 Mills Commission report that credited Abner Doubleday as the game’s inventor. The commission had accepted a personal account from Abner Graves that placed Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y., where he supposedly spent the summer of 1839 creating the national pastime. Had baseball officials consulted with Library of Congress staff, they might have dug up irrefutable proof that baseball’s tangled roots in America did not originate with Doubleday on a New York farm, but instead lie deep in colonial-era soil and—yes—England.

Two items available to researchers in 1939, and now in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, would have been useful in debunking the Doubleday myth. One is the diary of John Rhea, a student at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton). Writing in his diary on March 22, 1786, Smith noted that it was “A fine day play baste [sic] ball in the campus but am beaten for I miss both catching and striking the Ball.” The other is a copy of the first American edition of , in which a rhyme titled “Base-Ball” is accompanied by a woodcut image of three players at what appear to be short wooden posts, or bases. The work had originally appeared in London 43 years earlier.

In a country as sports-minded as the United States, the nation’s library documents that passion in myriad formats, housed in various divisions, located in three buildings on Capitol Hill and several preservation facilities in Maryland and Virginia.

Two women compete in a roller derby match in Madison Square Garden. 1950. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. Prints and Photographs Division.

“The Library of Congress has the most extensive sports holdings in the country—much of which has been acquired through copyright deposit,” says reference librarian Darren Jones, the Library’s recommending officer for sports and recreation. “It allows us to get things other people don’t have.”

Thus, scholars researching any sport—and especially its presence in American culture—should consider paying a visit to the Library of Congress.

Here one finds scholarly treatises on ancient athletics, early rule books and commentary on the “new” field of “physical culture,” comprehensive 19th-century baseball-card collections, oral histories, memoirs, and municipal and private athletic-club directories.

Game films, photographs, and radio and television broadcasts—including the first televised NFL game, played in 1939 between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Brooklyn Dodgers—chronicle the growth of both American athletic competition and sports media. Sports in the arts can be found in conference and league maps, posters, juvenile literature (starring Jack Standfast and Frank Merriwell), pulp fiction, comic books, original newspaper sports-page artwork and cartoons, and sheet music for fight songs and team anthems.

Poster promoting the Summer Olympics in Moscow. 1980. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library also holds official International Olympic Committee reports and an unmatched selection of sports periodicals, such as “Spirit of the Times,” which debuted in 1831 and favored horseracing.

And there are books from A to Z—”Aborigines in Sport” (1987) to “Zinger: A Champion’s Story of Determination, Courage, and Charging Back” (1995), the autobiography of golfer Paul Azinger. In between are such items as “The Art of Swimming” third edition (1789), “The Game of Croquet: Its Appointments and Laws” (1865), “Hold ‘Em Girls! An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Men and Football” (1936) and “Roaring Game: A Sweeping Saga of Curling” (2008).

Notable sports holdings in the Library’s Manuscript Division include the Branch Rickey Papers and the Jack Kemp Papers. Rickey made history in 1945 when he broke the Major League Baseball color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. His papers include his scouting reports of Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays as well as a large collection of Robinson material. Kemp, star quarterback for the Buffalo Bills before he became a New York congressman, cabinet member and vice-presidential candidate, held onto his high school game programs and professional football contracts. Harry Blackmun’s papers include his college diary, in which the future U.S. Supreme Court associate justice chronicled his adventures during Prohibition as an usher and ticket-taker at Harvard football games, where, as he observed, “the liquor flew muchly.”

Several recently acquired sports broadcasting collections, featuring sportscasts from the 1920s to the early 21st century, continue to enhance the depth and variety of the Library’s holdings.

Champion golfer Katherine Harley, Chevy Chase, Md. 1908. George Grantham Bain Collection. Prints and Photographs Division.

And there’s more for sports enthusiasts to cheer about. The Library is currently selecting and digitizing approximately 600 sports books published before 1923 that will soon be available to researchers online.

MORE INFORMATION

Research Sports, Recreation and Leisure on the Library’s website 

This article, written by Susan Reyburn, writer-editor in the Publishing Office at the Library of Congress, is featured in the March-April 2014 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM, now available for download here. You can also view the archives of the Library’s former publication from 1993 to 2011.

The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial

(The following is a guest post by Audrey Fischer, editor of the Library of Congress Magazine.)

As the Library of Congress prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with a new exhibition (opening June 19), it’s worth remembering a moment in history when the specter of segregation still loomed large.

Washington’s prominent figures listen to Marian Anderson’s singing. April 9, 1939. Prints and Photographs Division.

On April 9, 1939, renowned contralto Marian Anderson (1897-1993) performed an Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The event, which was broadcast nationally by radio and drew an integrated audience of more than 75,000, almost didn’t take place.

Several months earlier, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) barred the African- American singer from performing her Howard University-sponsored spring concert at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.

Anderson, who had begun singing in church at the age of six, had already toured Europe to rave reviews, performed with the New York Philharmonic and had sung at Carnegie Hall.  (She would, in 1955, become the first African-American to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House). Nonetheless, the DAR would not budge on its “whites only” clause governing use of the concert hall.

Marian Anderson singing at Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., April 9 before 75,000 persons. Prints and Photographs Division.

Reaction was swift. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) rallied support for the singer and worked to secure another venue. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest. She worked with NAACP Secretary Walter White and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange the outdoor concert. The performance, which coincided with the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, became a symbol of the struggle for racial equality. Anderson’s repertoire began with the patriotic “My Country , Tis of Thee” and included three Negro spirituals. She closed with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

Housed in the Library of Congress, the NAACP Records include a letter from Walter White to Mrs. Roosevelt, dated April 12, 1939, thanking her for her role in making the Anderson concert possible. He also expresses his delight that the First Lady agreed to present Anderson with the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal at the organization’s annual convention in July. The letter was on display in the Library’s 2009 exhibition commemorating the NAACP’s centennial.

In 1943, a mural by Mitchell Jamieson commemorating the 1939 concert was presented by Interior Secretary Ickes at an event honoring Anderson. That year, Anderson made her first appearance in Constitution Hall at the invitation of the DAR. Her concert benefited United China Relief.

Marian Anderson, (lower left), standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with back to camera, facing the Washington Monument and a crowd of thousands. 1939. Prints and Photographs Division.

Anderson, who performed at the inaugurations of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, returned to the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, to perform at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – another event in the long struggle for civil rights. That same year she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Kennedy.

In 2001, the Librarian of Congress selected footage of Anderson’s 1939 concert for inclusion in its National Film Registry, and in 2008, the radio broadcast of the event was included in the National Recording Registry.

A concert marking the 75th anniversary of Anderson’s 1939 concert will be held April 12, 2014, at DAR Constitution Hall, hosted by Grammy-award-winning opera singer Jessye Norman.

InRetrospect: March 2014 Blogging Edition

March came in like a lion with lots of interesting posts in the Library of Congress blogosphere. Check out this selection:

Inside Adams: Science, Technology and Business

Carl Sagan, Imagination, Science, and Mentorship: An interview with David Grinspoon

Guest blogger Trevor Owens interviews astrobiologist David Grinspoon, who knew Carl Sagan as a child.

In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress

Works by Leon Battista Alberti – Pic of the Week

The Law Library recently acquired a compilation of Alberti’s lesser-known works.

The Signal: Digital Preservation

Happy Birthday, Web!

The Signal celebrates the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web.

Teaching with the Library of Congress

Bringing History and Dance Together: The World of Katherine Dunham

Students can use to dance to study history.

Picture This: Library of Congress Prints and Photos

St. Patrick’s Day in the Army

Kristi Finefield looks at how Union soldiers celebrated March 17.

From the Catbird Seat: Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress

In Praise of Detective Peter, or How We Get By With a Little Help from Our Friends

A Library reference librarian solves a literary mystery.

Folklife Today

Narratives of Women and Girls: the Center for Applied Linguistics Collection

Stephanie Hall highlights interviews by women in honor of Women’s History Month.

Library in the News: March 2014 Edition

March news headlines included a variety of stories about the Library of Congress. Of particular interest was a 10,000-item milestone – with the addition of a set of priceless manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum of Baltimore to the online Library-cosponsored World Digital Library, which now holds more than 10,000 items following its 2009 launch.

The Baltimore Sun and the Associated Press ran stories.

As a leader in audio-visual conservation, the Library continued to be spotlighted on its efforts in sound and film preservation.

“Ever since the first identifiable recording in 1860, sound has added captivating and significant context to history,” reported Emily Siner for National Public Radio. “The Library of Congress is one of thousands of institutions, large and small, trying to make sure that future historians — and even future archaeologists — have access to those recordings.”

The March/April issue of American Libraries Magazine highlighted institutions at the forefront of collecting and preserving films, including the Library, UCLA and The Louis B. Mayer Library at the American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles.

“The declining state of America’s film heritage is a widely discussed topic among film industry professionals, film librarians, and archivists,” wrote Phil Morehart. “LC sits at the forefront of film preservation and collection.”

Also continuing the make news is the Library’s Carl Sagan collection. Writing a story for Cornell Alumni Magazine was Bill Sternberg, who who took Sagan’s Astronomy 102 class at the university in 1975.

“During his nearly three decades at Cornell, Carl Sagan became the best-known scientist on the planet. Unlike previous celebrity researchers, Sagan didn’t achieve fame from a singular breakthrough such as Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine or Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity,” wrote Sternberg. “Sagan’s papers, open to the public at the Library of Congress since November, range over topics as majestic as outer space and as mundane as office space. (If you took Astronomy 102/104 in 1977, your grades are in Box 254.)”

From time to time, news outlets report on discoveries made within the Library’s Prints and Photographs collections – particularly when previously unidentified images receive biographical data that was unknown before. Recently, a Civil War tintype in the Library’s collection showing a group of Union soldiers was identified.

“Last month, a New York high school teacher spotted the photo on a Civil War Facebook page and recognized the image,” wrote Michael E. Ruane for The Washington Post. “Now the library, which has a digital version on its website, has names and stories to go with the faces.”

Collection Connections: “Twelve Years a Slave”

(The following is a guest post by Cheryl Fox, Library of Congress Archives collection specialist in the Manuscript Division.) 

Daniel A. P. Murray (1852 -1925). Photographer unknown. Photograph, undated.

Solomon Northup’s account of his kidnapping in Washington, D.C., sale to a plantation owner in Louisiana and subsequent escape was first published in 1853, the year he regained his freedom. The Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds an 1859 edition of “Twelve Years a Slave,” which you can read about in this previous blog post.

Daniel A. P. Murray included the book in his 1900 bibliography,  – a project he produced while working at the Library of Congress.

Murray, born in 1852 in Baltimore, worked at the Library from 1871 to 1925. U.S. Special Agent on Negro Education Thomas J. Calloway contacted then Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam in January 1900 to request books or pamphlets written by African American authors for a display at the upcoming Exposition Universelle in Paris. Within a few months, Murray had compiled a preliminary list of 300 works. He credited former Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford’s “amazing foresight” in collecting many of the books and pamphlets he found in the Library’s collection.

Murray also appealed to the public by traveling to African American communities, including Baltimore and Philadelphia, to find more books. He composed a letter that was printed and widely circulated, requesting materials or information that could be sent to the Library at no postage charge.

Murray’s list grew to 1,100 titles and became the core of the Library’s “Colored Authors’ Collection.”

Exhibit of American Negroes at the Paris Exposition. Photographer unknown. Photograph undated, in Review of Reviews, vol. 22.

The Paris Exposition attracted more than 48 million visitors. Murray’s bibliography and several hundred books in the Palace of Social Economy were part of an exhibit curated by W.E.B. DuBois, “The American Negro.” Read more about the exhibit here.

W.E.B. DuBois paid special attention to Murray’s work in his description of the exhibit:

“Perhaps the most unique and striking exhibit is that of American Negro literature. The development of Negro thought – the view of themselves which these millions of freedmen have taken – is of intense psychological and practical interest. There are many who have scarcely heard of a Negro book, much less read one; still here is a bibliography made by the Library of Congress containing 1,400 titles of works written by Negroes; 200 of these books are exhibited on the shelves.” (Du Bois, W.E. Burghardt. 1900. “The American Negro at Paris.” The American Monthly Review of Reviews, vol.XXII, no.5 (November): pp.575-577. )

Judges for the Paris Exposition awarded the American Negro exhibit several medals; by popular demand, it was immediately sent on to the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y.

After the Paris Exposition, the works collected by Murray and displayed in the exhibition were placed in the Library. At his death in 1925, Murray bequeathed his personal library of more than 1,400 volumes and pamphlets to the Library as well. The resulting collection of materials, many of them unique, provides a rich catalog of information on African-American life around the turn of the century.

In addition to the books and pamphlets Murray collected, portions of the “American Negro” exhibit W.E.B. Du Bois and special agent Thomas J. Calloway compiled are housed in the Prints and Photographs Division. A description of these materials is found here.

Someone Who Outdrew You

The Librarian of Congress and the National Recording Preservation Board have released this year’s choices for the prestigious National Recording Registry — and as always, it’s a veritable sonic smorgasbord of terrific stuff, from many genres.  The selections are made to ensure the preservation for posterity of sound recordings with cultural, artistic or historical merit.

George Washington Johnson, recording

Some highlights:

The haunting Jeff Buckley version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Buckley’s 1994 take is remarkable; the song itself has gone around the world several times, sung by its author, by John Cale, even by contestants on American Idol. Like many songs written by Cohen, it has arresting lyrics (“It goes like this – the fourth, the fifth – the minor fall, the major lift …”) Another verse notes, “All I ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. “


“The Laughing Song” by George Washington  Johnson, who in addition to having an infectious laugh that made his recording into a nationwide bestseller was a key figure in recording history as the first African-American recording artist. (You can hear this song, recorded in 1903, on the Library’s National Jukebox website.)


Art Blakey’s 1954 jazz album, “A Night at Birdland.”

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Vol. 1 of Art Blakey’s “Night at Birdland”

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 song “Fortunate Son.”  I remember smiling when I first took in this song’s opening lyric: “Some folks are born, made to wave the flag, ooh, they’re red white and blue! /  And when the band plays ‘Hail to the Chief,’ ooh, they point the cannon at you! / It ain’t me – it ain’t me – I ain’t no senator’s son.”


Slide guitarist Elmore James’ 1951 version of the blues classic “Dust My Broom.” I defy you not to be moving around to the music, even if you’re sitting in a chair, by the fourth bar of this one.


The 1974 composer-conducted recording of Aaron Copland’s classical-music classic, “Appalachian Spring” (the musical component of a dance presentation choreographed by Martha Graham and premiered right here at the Library of Congress in 1944).


U2’s 1987 album “The Joshua Tree.”


Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 album “Heart Like A Wheel.”


Isaac Hayes’ 1971 soundtrack album, including the “Theme From Shaft,”  now part of the vernacular.


The 1966 Carnegie Hall concert by Buck Owens and his Buckaroos.

The full list of 25 new selections, with background on all of the artists, is here.

You can, and should, nominate sound recordings (all kinds are eligible) to the National Recording Registry.  To find out more, look here.

 

 

Trending: A Hallowed Legend

Nearly two centuries after its publication, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is as popular as ever.

Washington Irving. 1861. Photo by Matthew Brady. Prints and Photographs Division.

Fox TV has a hit on its hands this season with its retelling of the 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by American author Washington Irving (1783-1859). The new drama series—one of many with supernatural themes—premiered Sept. 16, 2013, to 10 million viewers with 3.5 rating/9 share, making it the network’s highest rated fall drama premiere in the past eight seasons. Several weeks after the first episode aired, Fox renewed “Sleepy Hollow” for a second season.

Written while the itinerant Irving was living abroad in England, the popular tale was one of 34 essays and short stories—including “Rip Van Winkle”—comprising “The Sketch Book,” which Irving wrote under the pseudonym of “Geoffrey Crayon.”

One might argue that the post-Revolutionary- War tale of Connecticut schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and the dreaded Headless Horseman in the Dutch enclave in New York State known as Sleepy Hollow has never been far from the American imagination.

According to American University professor Lewis Grossman, the Headless Horseman has remained one of America’s favorite ghosts, in a roster that includes Casper, Freddie Kruger and Charles Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas. Grossman based his conclusion on his research in Google’s Ngram Viewer, a phrase-usage graphing tool that charts the yearly count of selected words and phrases. Grossman also used the tool to monitor the author’s popularity.

“The American-born Washington Irving was, at one time, more popular in England than Charles Dickens,” said Grossman, who spoke at the Library as part of American University’s “Books That Shaped America” lecture series. The series was inspired by the Library’s selection and exhibition of influential American works, including Irving’s ghost tale.

The Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds several copies of the first New York edition of “The Sketch Book” (1820). The division also holds eight 19th-century editions, including this 1899 edition featuring artwork by Margaret Armstrong (1867–1944), the pre-eminent designer of decorated cloth publishers’ bindings between 1890 and 1913.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was one of the first works of fiction by an American author to become popular outside of the United States. Regarded as the first American to earn a living by his pen, Irving argued for stronger laws to protect writers from copyright infringement. In the January 1840 issue of the New York literary magazine “Knickerbocker,” Irving endorsed legislation pending in the U.S. Congress that would offer stronger protection for American copyrights abroad. The copyright legislation was not enacted.

Long in the public domain, Irving’s tale has been immortalized on stage and film, most notably by Walt Disney in 1949 (with tunes sung by Bing Crosby) and 50 years later by director Tim Burton in his 1999 film starring Johnny Depp.

Located on the historic Hudson River, the real-life Sleepy Hollow remains a popular tourist destination, especially during Halloween. The town boasts Irving’s home (“Sunnyside”) and his gravesite in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Village administrator Anthony Giaccio recently reported a spike in visits to the town and its tourism website, which he attributes to the Fox show. Although the show is filmed in Wilmington, N.C., Giaccio hopes its popularity will do for Sleepy Hollow what the hit television series “The Office” did for Scranton, Pa.

This article, written by editor Audrey Fischer, is featured in the March-April 2014 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM, now available for download here. You can also view the archives of the Library’s former publication from 1993 to 2011.

A Millennium of Persian Literature

(The following is guest post by Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library of Congress staff newsletter, The Gazette.)

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“The Book of Shah Jahan” explores the life of the 17th-century ruler of India during whose reign the Taj Mahal was built. African and Middle Eastern Division.

Persian first gained prominence a thousand years ago, a language of literature, poetry and folklore that connected people across vast stretches of Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

The Library of Congress today opens “A Thousand Years of the Persian Book,” the first major U.S. exhibition to make such a wide-ranging study of the Persian language and literature. The landmark exhibition features 75 items drawn primarily from the Persian collection of the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division, one of the most important such collections assembled outside of Iran.

“A Thousand Years of the Persian Book” will take visitors on a visual journey of the rich literary history of Persian language,” said Cynthia Wayne, a senior exhibits director in the Interpretive Programs Office. “Materials that will be on display have been rarely seen by the public. The show gives visitors an exciting opportunity to learn about the depth and breadth of the Library’s extensive Persian collections, which hopefully will lead to a greater understanding and appreciation of the important contributions of Persian literary achievements.”

The exhibition is made possible through the support of the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans, former Iranian Ambassador to the United States Hushang Ansary, Jawad Kamel, Nazie Eftekhari and other donors.

Twentieth-century religious text shows the Farvahar, a man and winged disc that symbolize the Zoroastrian faith. African and Middle Eastern Division.

The Library marks the opening — timed to coincide with the Persian new year season of Nowruz — with a lecture and panel discussion about Persian manuscripts and the tradition of manuscript-making in Persian-speaking lands. Those programs kick off a lecture series of 13 events, hosted by the Library and the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, that explore aspects of Persian literature. The series is made possible by the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute in Hawaii.

Persian gained prominence as a common cultural language across Central and South Asia and parts of the Middle East about 1,000 years ago. Just as French at one time served as the common language for educated elites across Europe, so Persian served as the preferred tongue for writers of literature and history from what is now Turkey to India.

“Persian had a similar role: It was a language of poetry and history,” said curator Hirad Dinavari of the African and Middle Eastern Division. “Persianate courts taught Arabic for religious material, for science, for philosophy. But Persian was often used for literature and history.”

The exhibition opens and closes with the seminal work of Persian literature: the “Shahnameh,” an epic 10th-century tale of kings, heroes and devils told in 50,000 rhyming couplets that took poet Ferdowsi 33 years to complete.

“‘Shahnameh’ is our ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey,’” Dinavari said. “It shows the world the legacy of the Persian kings and civilizations. All stories come from the pre-Islamic era – the era of Cyrus and Darius and the ancient kings.”

In between early and modern versions of “Shahnameh,” the exhibition explores works of religion, science, modern literature, children’s books, women’s literature and the highly illustrated masterpieces of classical poetry for which Persian literature is most famous. From the 10th through the 16th centuries, poets such as Omar Khayyám, Rumi and Sa’di produced works that resonated down through the ages.

Shahnameh, or “Book of Kings.” African and Middle Eastern Division.

“The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it,” Khayyám wrote in “Rubaiyat,” a work that centuries later still would inspire artists from Eugene O’Neill to Agatha Christie, from Woody Guthrie to Van Morrison.

Persian has evolved somewhat over the centuries, Dinavari said, but not so much that it can’t be easily understood today – as might be the case with Shakespearean English. Thus, Persian speakers still can appreciate the words of the poet Rumi as readily as his 13th-century audience: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

The language of Rumi, Khayyám and Ferdowsi served, and still serves, as a unifying cultural force in a vast region of many faiths, ethnicities and ideas.

“You had these amazing crossroads, philosophically and religiously,” Dinavari said. “That adds to the richness.”