Library of Congress's Blog, page 26

Picasso, Man Ray and Modernist Wonders on Display! One Night Only!

“The Meeting” by Man Ray, from “Revolving Doors,” 1926. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This is a guest post by Emily Moore, assistant curator of the Aramont Library.

What is a book, exactly? Is it an object, made of paper and ink? Is it a portal to a different reality, an embodiment of memory or a method of communicating across space and time? Can it be art?

“Making the Modern Book: The Aramont Library,” a Jan. 19 symposium in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium, will present some of our treasures to ask just that question. We are thrilled to host this event and introduce the collection to everyone. The afternoon and evening events will treat you to an exploration of the Aramont, a stunning modernist collection of 1,700 volumes that is as much about art as it is about books.

Housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, the Aramont is home to first editions, livres d’artistes (books by artists) and exhibition bindings. It features authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner and Willa Cather, plus giants of the art world including Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst. Speakers at the symposium will include artists, bookmakers, publishers, scholars and book dealers. In two sessions, they will explore the collection’s holdings while examining the intersection of modernism, art and the book. Afternoon lectures will be followed by an evening display of some of the most impressive books, along with roundtable discussions. This event is free and open to the public.

Pablo Picasso, photographed by Man Ray in 1932. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Rare Book Division is home to many strange and beautiful objects. It’s a place where you can find Charles Dickens’ walking stick next to antique paper toys and where obscure medieval manuscripts live alongside Harry Houdini’s scrapbooks.

It’s also home to the Aramont collection, a 2020 donation from a private collector who spent decades assembling it. It’s composed of works from the 17th to the 20th centuries, with an emphasis on livres d’artiste. It’s also a stunning collection of bespoke bindings, featuring works by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, the Doves Bindery and six bindings by Paul Bonet, the most celebrated binder of the 20th century.

As a collection, the Aramont embodies modernism and experimentation, a spirit captured in one of its most beautiful holdings: Man Ray’s “Revolving Doors.”

Self-portrait by Man Ray, 1930. Prints and Photographs Division.

The 10 pochoir (stencil) prints that make up “Revolving Doors” were made in 1926, based on a series of paper collages created by Ray during World War I. First exhibited at the Daniel Gallery in New York, Ray designed the pages to hang from a metal structure. Suspended in the gallery, the prints evoked their title, revolving and responding to the breeze and flow of the room. Viewers were encouraged to move the prints themselves – a gesture of co-authorship that expressed Ray’s interest in challenging traditional power structures, both in the art world and society at large.

His use of line and pigment demonstrates his interest in taking the height/length/width of art and putting it into motion, creating what he called the fourth dimension. His sharp transitions of color combined with lines, squiggles and overlapping shapes that respond and reach to each other in space.

These interactions mimic people passing, sounds of the street and other features of city life. This play between color and line, between machine, environment and form, makes Ray’s work dynamic and exuberant – through stripping objects down to their bare essentials, he uncovers their primal vitality and expression.

“Revolving Doors” is one of the many modernist masterpieces held in the Aramont. The collection’s body of livres d’artistes offer Library visitors the unique opportunity to page through original works of art. Its first editions are often inscribed by the authors and still in their original dustjackets. In many ways, the Aramont is a collection that is bigger than the sum of its parts, offering a sensory experience equal to an intellectual one. And now is your chance to see it.

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Jason Reynolds: Grab the Mic One Last Time

This is the final guest post by Jason Reynolds, who is concluding his third term as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

FIVE WAYS TO SAY GOODBYE  (a farewell newsletter)

SEE YOU SOON. This is not the same as, See you later. I repeat, this is not the same as, See you later. “See you later” lacks urgency. It lacks seriousness and commitment. But my time as your National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature was certainly very serious to me and I was relentlessly committed. So to walk away from it, to bow out with a cavalier, See you later, is like throwing my hand up and waving goodbye while already turned away. Instead, I’ll say, See you soon. Because soon implies effort. That I’ll work to still be a light, partially to shine on the next ambassador, and always to shine on you.No words. Just the involuntary vibration our bodies experience whenever we feel joy, and sometimes anxiety. In this case, both fit the bill. We spent so much time joking around, finding new things to laugh about, new ways to find spiked moments of bliss in such a complicated time, and we’ll need the laughter to linger as we part. I met a lot of you who were nervous to talk to me at first, and there would be nervous laughter. But by the end of our time, I’d like to think even if some of the nerves were still there, most of our hooting became rooted in relationship. That we got the joke. And still get it. So we get each other.KEEP TRYING. As I take a step back, as I take off my medal, remove myself from this incredible position, I want us, you and me, to make a promise to each other. I promise to keep trying, if you do.THANK YOU. One of the best ways to say goodbye. It can be interchanged with, I love you. They both work, and they typically have the same effect. You should know, I have been forever changed. Serving you these last three years has confirmed everything I already thought about the young folks of this country. That they love. And love big and wide and deep and high and whole. That they love enough to cry for their peers—I’ve seen it—or to cheer for them as if they are already famous. I’ve seen this, too. So, I could say I love you, but you already know that. Instead, in this moment, I’m going to offer some gratitude. Thank you for reminding what it is to be human. And for trying. And laughing. With effort and urgency.DON’T. That’s all. Just don’t. Instead, say, hi. Reach out and let me know when you’ve dunked for the first time, or when you’ve written your first poem, or got your first pair of Jordans, or got your learner’s permit, or booked the role, or got into college, or made the team, or passed that class, or finally finally finally finished reading your first book. And I’ll tell you, hopefully, that I’ve just woken up from a sweet, sweet nap. My first in a while.

“The Master of Mysteries,” Latest in Library’s Crime Classics Series

“The Man of Mysteries,” the newest title in the Library’s Crime Classics series.

This is a guest post by Polina Lopez, Widening the Path intern in the Library’s  Publishing Office .

Can one detective successfully solve kidnapping, espionage and murder cases, uncover social poseurs and secret love affairs, all while maintaining the guise of psychic powers? In the newest addition to the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, Gelett Burgess’ Astro the Seer does all that and more, proving he is “The Master of Mysteries.”

In this collection of short stories, victims bring their troubles to Astro, who, they believe, finds solutions by consulting their auras and vibrations. In reality, as soon as his clients leave, Astro sheds his turban and robe and assumes the role of a private detective. He interviews witnesses, follows suspects, stakes out hideouts and uses scientific methods of the day. However, Astro’s most effective weapon is his attention to minute details of his clients’ appearance and behavior.

Astro’s methods bring to mind another fictional sleuth: Sherlock Holmes, the creation of Arthur Conan Doyle. The appearance of Doyle’s genre-defining detective launched what Crime Classics editor Leslie S. Klinger calls “a tsunami of Holmes imitators,” of which Astro is a notable representative. Like Holmes, Astro demonstrates a wealth of expertise in many fields, employs a specific meditating method to organize his thoughts and heavily relies on his companion, Valeska Wynne. Unlike Holmes, however, Astro trusts his sidekick with serious tasks and occasionally gives Valeska credit, though he never misses a chance to tease her.

Gelett Burgess, 1910. Photo: Unknown. Public domain from The Bancroft Library Portrait Collection.

Given Burgess’s background, such humor is not unexpected. Born in 1866 into a conservative Boston family, he was educated at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology before fleeing for the artistic freedoms of San Francisco. He worked as a draftsman for a railroad and taught technical drawing at the University of California, Berkeley. He resigned after apparently taking part in the silliness of knocking over a campus statue of a temperance leader. In 1895, he launched a humorous literary magazine, The Lark. The first issue featured Burgess’s famous nonsense verse, “The Purple Cow”:

I never saw a Purple Cow,

I never hope to see one;

But I can tell you, anyhow,

I’d rather see than be one.

Burgess also invented the Goops, quirky little creatures who exemplified ill-mannered children; he produced five books about them. Another literary bon mot: He coined the the term “blurb,” a short testimonial for book advertising. His papers are at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

Burgess ventured into crime writing, producing more than 20 tales about Astro the Seer for the Associated Sunday Magazine between 1908 and 1909 under the pen name of Alan Braghampton. The series achieved success, but when in 1912 the Astro stories were produced in book form, titled “The Master of Mysteries,” Burgess published it anonymously.

These stories, consciously or not, played upon a key debate of the day: Were psychic powers a new frontier that humanity was just beginning to tap into, or were they so much stuff and nonsense?

While Astro used his mystical persona to disguise his shoe-leather detective work, his contemporary, the real-life magician Harry Houdini, not only rejected any claims that he possessed supernatural powers, but debunked fraudulent mediums and their ilk.

In 1927, through Houdini’s bequest, the Library received nearly 4,000 items from his personal library, forming the Harry Houdini Collection.

Another day at the office for Harry Houdini in 1906. Photo: Unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

Houdini had become famous in the late 1890s as an escape artist, magician and stunt performer. In one of his stunts, he had himself bound into a straitjacket and suspended by his ankles from a tall structure, escaping in full view of fascinated onlookers. Proud of his craft, he readily revealed his methods.

As a professional tradesman, he ridiculed fellow magicians who professed special powers or psychic gifts. He loathed those who capitalized on the distressed and grief-stricken. In the 1920s, Houdini embarked on a mission to debunk psychics and put them out of business. He published books and articles, naming the charlatans and exposing their tricks. He testified before Congress in support of criminalizing fortune-telling for fees in the District of Columbia, and he sacrificed friendships for his cause (for example, with the aforementioned Arthur Conan Doyle, an ardent spiritualist).

Houdini (seated, left) exposes techniques used by fraudulent mediums on the stage of the New York Hippodrome. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Houdini delivered his final piece of evidence posthumously. Bess, his wife, held annual séances for ten years after his death, attempting to contact him, waiting for a secret message they had agreed on before his death. No such message arrived,  thereby confirming, anecdotally, that spirits could not communicate with the living.

A 1909 poster advertising Harry Houdini’s exposé performance. McManus-Young Collection, Prints & Photographs Division.

With “The Master of Mysteries,” the Library’s Crime Classics series continues its mission of bringing back to light some of the finest, albeit lesser-known, American crime writing from the 1860s to the 1960s. Drawn from the Library’s collections, each volume includes the original text, an introduction, author biography, notes, recommendations for further reading and suggested discussion questions from mystery expert Leslie S. Klinger.

Crime Classics are published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the Library of Congress. “The Master of Mysteries,” published on January 3, is available in softcover ($14.99) from booksellers worldwide, including the Library of Congress shop.

My Job: Monica Varner in Rare Books

Monica Varner, taking some time off work. Photo courtesy of the subject.

Monica Varner is collections manager for the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.This article appeared in  the  Library’s Gazette.

Tell us about your background.

I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and went to H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program (“Hippie High”) before heading down to Lynchburg, Virginia, to study art history at Randolph College. During college, I spent a year at Reading University in England.

On returning to the Washington, D.C., area, I enrolled in the museum studies master’s program at George Washington University. I interned at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Scottish Rite Temple in D.C., and I worked in various museum or library-adjacent jobs, including as a circulation manager at the public library system in Alexandria, Virginia.

My coursework and experiences in fine arts, archaeology and conservation, historic preservation, fashion history, exhibit design and collections management made working at the Library a natural fit — it’s all here.

What brought you to the Library, and what do you do?

I’ve wanted to work at the Library since I was very young. During an early, formative visit here with family, my aunt reports that I was furious that despite the Library reportedly having every book in the world, I, a small child, was not allowed to go into the stacks and start reading.

In 2018, I started with the Serial and Government Publications Division as a newspaper deck attendant and was introduced to the wild world of rare comic books, colonial newspapers and the mysteries of the overseas acquisition departments. I also used a microfilm reader for the first time.

The following year, I joined Rare Book and Special Collections, and I recently became collections manager for the division. I help organize and make room for incoming and outgoing special collections, monitor the environmental conditions of the stacks, answer reference questions and assist with special tours and displays of our material. Baby E would be thrilled to know I ended up here!

What are some of your standout projects?

I love helping plan themed displays using our material, such as a Disney Cinderella gala a couple years ago and a recent class on the history of structure in architecture.

I’ve also slowly been organizing the division’s materials in a size-based system to maximize our stack space and improve storage conditions for the books. I’ve stumbled upon some great finds in that process. As a large public institution, the Library has become the final resting place for books from all over the world and from all different types of owners.

It’s fascinating to make connections across our material — for example, to learn that two books once in the same medieval monastery but dispersed after its dissolution ended up here together again after hundreds of years.

And any time someone finds a mysterious signature or stamp in a book, I pop up behind the researcher’s chair in the reading room to do some detective work. I love researching the people who read and used the books in our collections, especially children’s doodles.

During COVID, the division started recording videos about our collections, and I’ve enjoyed showcasing particularly interesting items in that way. The Multimedia Group has done an amazing job helping translate our research into this recorded format in an engaging way.

What do you enjoy doing outside work?

I just finished an October horror movie marathon we do annually in my home, and I’m almost done knitting a complex sweater vest (that I may or may not actually wear). Some friends and I meet once in a while for “Bad Book Club,” where we read goofy contemporary suspense novels.

My partner is an architectural historian, so during the summer I join him in Italy and help document 13th-century construction techniques. We both grew up in or near D.C. and enjoy walking around downtown seeing old sights in new ways. My dad was an architect, and I love visiting the buildings he worked on.

I also enjoy taking weekend trips in the area, visiting my family in the Pacific Northwest and hitting up yard sales and thrift stores to stock my ever-expanding cabinet of curiosities.

What is something your co-workers may not know about you?

I have never been pulled over and never used a card catalog until I worked at the Library. I also play the cello (but am way out of practice).

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The Soldier’s Letter: The Civil War from the Western Frontier

The Soldier’s Letter, issue No. 15. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Oliver V. Wallace was neither a great soldier of the Civil War nor an imposing man of his era. He was a private in the 2nd Colorado Cavalry and spent most of the conflict on the third floor of the Union Hotel in Kansas City.

Still, he found a place in history. It was from that perch that he created, edited and wrote much of the Soldier’s Letter, the unofficial newspaper of his regiment, that ran for 50 editions between 1864 and 1865. The four-page paper, printed on notebook-sized pulp, formed a loose diary of Union soldiers who were — although far removed from the war’s epic battles — “instrumental to the Civil War-fueled expansion of the American empire across the West,” writes military historian Christopher Rein in 2020’s “The Second Colorado Cavalry.”

The Library recently acquired a bound copy of the full print run of Wallace’s paper, an extremely rare find. It is a hardbound if unpretentious presentation copy, given to the regiment’s commander, James Hobart Ford, after the war as a memento. It is the size of a notebook, unlabeled, weathered, with the editions of the paper inside printed on pulp stock.

Though there is a long-standing national obsession with the Civil War, regimental newspapers never quite caught on as something to be preserved. More than 200 such papers in at least 32 states printed at least one edition, according to historian Earle Lutz, but they had mostly vanished by the time he surveyed the nation’s libraries, museums and major private collections in the early 1950s.

“A large number simply do not exist, and, in many, many instances, there is only one copy held anywhere,” he wrote in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1952. “It would be far easier to assemble a collection of the signers of the Declaration of Independence than to make up a collection of just one-half of the soldier publications that I have on my list.”

More recent scholarship has helped document the history of the military papers, and the national Library leaped at the chance to get the Soldier’s Letter from a dealer in rare manuscripts.

“I was struck by its uniqueness: a complete run of an American Civil War regimental newspaper and a specially collected set presented to the regimental commander,” said Georgia Higley, head of the Physical Collections Services in the Serial and Government Publications Division, who recommended the acquisition of the paper. “Researchers and Civil War enthusiasts value regimental newspapers for the honesty expressed by the men and their descriptions of life on the front lines — both at times at odds with mainstream newspapers.”

Three pages in each edition were devoted to a narrative history of the regiment, war news, local gossip, rumors and jokes. The fourth was left blank for soldiers to write letters or notes to family and then mail home. Each copy cost 10 cents. Much of the war was over by the time Wallace started his paper, but he and his unnamed correspondents did note Lincoln’s assassination, accounts of skirmishes and the general tenor of the last days of the Confederacy.

“The rebels have taken to smuggling in bacon past the blockage,” a short item noted in one edition near the end of the war. “The evidences multiply that they are on their last legs.”

There were asides about eligible women — some wrote in, looking for marriage — but Wallace admonished his peers not to date Confederate women. Charming as they were, he noted, they were traitors to the Union cause at best and spies at worst.

The Union cause was a particular focus for the regiment, as Colorado was a territory whose white citizens longed to join the United States. Wallace surveyed his peers and published the results, providing a clear snapshot of the regiment’s demographics: Nearly all of them rushed west after an 1859 gold strike in the Rocky Mountains, and nearly all were working as miners or farmers when they signed up. The unit was composed of men from nearly two dozen states (primarily Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania), with a smattering of European immigrants. A few had been born at sea.

They first fought slave-holding Texans to prevent them from expanding into New Mexico, then moved to Oklahoma and eventually Kansas and Missouri. They were primarily “guerilla hunters,” both of Confederate bushwhackers and Native Americans, and relegated to an “obscure theater of the war,” Rein writes.

The paper was devoutly against slavery, and a few times units fought alongside the freed Black slaves of the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry. The editorial columns repudiated Confederates and Copperheads (Northern sympathizers).

But as historians have noted, the regiment was part of the bridge between the Civil War and the Indian wars that followed, and there is little doubt that the soldiers identified Native Americans as their most hated enemy. This becomes clear in their reaction to the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, one of the worst atrocities against Native Americans in U.S. history.

Throughout 1864, while most of the nation was focused on the Civil War, white settlers in Colorado were advancing rail and wagon-train lines through the lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, attempting to connect themselves more concretely to the United States.

Native American war parties attacked the settlers making those routes, killing and raiding as they went. Peace talks ensued and by late November, some 750 Native American non-combatants were camped outside a U.S. fort, waiting to turn themselves over for protection from the hostilities. It’s a remote spot in eastern Colorado, flat and featureless, about 175 miles southeast of Denver, not far from the Kansas state line.

On Nov. 29, 1864, without warning or provocation, units of the 1st Colorado Infantry and the 3rd Colorado Cavalry, led by Col. John Chivington, attacked them at dawn.

“Over the course of eight hours the American troops killed around 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people composed mostly of women, children and the elderly,” the National Park Service writes in its official history of the place, now a National Historic Site. “During the afternoon and the following day, the soldiers wandered over the field committing atrocities on the dead.”

Capt. Silas Soule of the  1st Colorado vehemently protested plans for the attack, held his men out of the conflict and later testified against Chivington as a war criminal. “I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized,” he wrote to a friend weeks after the attack.

Soule was shot and killed in Denver less than a year later, an unsolved attack widely viewed as retribution for his testimony. Chivington escaped legal punishment but resigned from the military and was socially and politically ostracized.

Strikingly different from the rest of the nation’s reaction, the Soldier’s Letter editorialized the massacre wasn’t vicious enough to suit their taste.

“The only fault we have to find with Colonel Chivington and his troops is that they did not sweep the last ‘red skin’ in that part of the country, from the face of the earth! …. nothing short of annihilation will protect our brothers, sisters and parents, on the frontier, from their savage cruelties,” the paper wrote in January 1865 (original italics and punctuation).

It’s a stark paragraph or two, lost in a small sea of other type about quotidian details of camp life. More than a century and a half later, it’s a reminder that the Civil War was, on the Great Plains, only one of two conflicts that would define the nation.

The final edition of the Soldier’s Letter sums up its history. The top item at far right notes there were 20 copies of the full run of the paper on hand, all 50 editions. The Library’s copy is the only one known to still survive. Photo: Shawn Miller.

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How “It’s a Wonderful Life” Almost Never Happened

James Stewart and Donna Reed, center, in a famous scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Photo: RKO publicity still.

Elizabeth Brown is a reference librarian in the Researcher and Reference Services Division. This article appears in the Library of Congress Magzine , Nov.-Dec. 2022.

Perhaps the most beloved Christmas film of all time got its start during a morning shave.

Philip Van Doren Stern, while getting ready for work one day in 1938, had an idea for a story: A stranger appears from nowhere to save a husband and father from a suicide attempt on Christmas Eve, restoring his joy of living by helping him realize his value to others.

Stern, an author and editor, eventually wrote a draft that he polished periodically and, in 1943, shared with his literary agent. It didn’t sell.

But Stern still liked the little story, so he had 200 copies printed as a pamphlet titled “The Greatest Gift: A Christmas Tale” and sent most of them out as holiday cards — and two to the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress.

Good Housekeeping ran this short story in January 1945, “The Man Who Was Never Born,” which became the basis for the film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Serial and Government Publications Division.

The next year, RKO Radio Pictures bought the film rights for $10,000 as a vehicle for Cary Grant. Film rights helped: The story was published by two magazines and as a book in 1944 and 1945.

But film scripts proved unworkable, and RKO sold the rights to Frank Capra’s newly formed Liberty Films. With a new script, a new star in Jimmy Stewart and a new title in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the film finally got made.

Despite earning five Oscar nominations, “Wonderful Life” lost money and, in 1948, Capra sold Liberty Films to Paramount. Ownership of the film changed a few more times and, in 1974, National Telefilm Associates failed to renew its copyright. With no royalty fees required, TV stations aired the film repeatedly, and “Wonderful Life” became a holiday favorite — while earning nothing for its owner. In 1994, its next owner, Republic Pictures, restored the copyright through court action, and Paramount bought it back in 1998.

Today, Library collections hold items that chronicle the “Wonderful Life” story: the original Stern pamphlet, magazines that published early versions of the tale, the continuity script from the film, promotional posters for the movie and more.

What a wonderful life it has been for a story that nobody wanted to publish. (You can read more about the life of “It’s a Wonderful Life” in this post by Samantha Kosarzycki, a former legal intern in the Copyright Office.)

 The first page of the script of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Motion Picture, Film & Recorded Sound Division.

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Library Acquires Rare Codex from Central Mexico

This drawing from the San Salvador Codex shows the portraits and names of Indigenous workers next to the amount in pesos (red circles) they were underpaid. Geography and Maps Division.

Theft, fraud, harassment, withholding of payment — courts around the world hear these charges all the time. Yet, they’re far from modern. The Library’s newly acquired San Salvador Huejotzingo Codex, for example, documents a legal proceeding from 1571 in which Indigenous Nahuatl officials in central Mexico accused their village’s Spanish administrator of these very same crimes.

The Library purchased the rare codex this fall. It contains new details about the earliest legal structures in Mexico after Spanish colonization and the way Indigenous people used Spanish laws to defend their rights. The codex is one of only six 16th-century pictorial manuscripts from central Mexico known to still exist. With its acquisition, the Library now holds three of the six manuscripts.

“The San Salvador Codex adds significantly to the Library’s collection of Indigenous manuscripts from the early contact period,” said John Hessler, recently retired from the Geography and Map Division. “It is by any measure a world-class acquisition.”

The manuscript has 96 pages on 48 folios and includes six foldout drawings in Mixtec and Nahuatl hieroglyphs in red, yellow, coffee, green, blue and black carbon ink. Written by at least two different Indigenous hands, the hieroglyphs illustrate charges against Alonso Jiménez, the canon of San Salvador, a village to the south of Mexico City. Jiménez, a church official, administered the village on behalf of Spanish colonial authorities.

Two lawsuits arose after a colonial inspector arrived in San Salvador unannounced in 1570 to assess how well it was being managed. The Indigenous people reported mistreatment and harassment of their nobles and accused Jiménez of charges including refusing to pay for the services of artisans, charging for woolen blankets meant to be free, taking more corn than the church was entitled to and stealing textiles.

“It gives you insight into this village, what life was like in this village,” Hessler said. “People are helping the canon make his furniture. They’re farming corn and getting woolen blankets, and they’re also being exploited. We get a real sense of the everyday out of this document, which makes it so important.”

One drawing depicts different amounts of maize, tortillas and other foodstuffs provided to Jiménez as tribute from 1570 to 1571. Another drawing features the faces and names of carpenters not paid for constructing the local church and making Jiménez’s furniture. Yet another represents the value of paintings done for him in tortillas — it shows how many tortillas each painting was worth.

Robert Morris, a G&M acquisitions specialist, alerted Hessler that the codex was available for purchase in 2019. The news came as a complete surprise.

Before the codex came on the market, scholars didn’t know of its existence. “It does not appear on any of the inventories of Mesoamerican manuscripts or Indigenous drawings,” Hessler said.

On top of that, only three colonial-era manuscripts with Indigenous drawings, plans or maps have come up for sale in the past century.

“It is a super-rare opportunity when one gets a chance to buy something like this,” Hessler said. “We have been so lucky in the last five years to purchase two of these, the Codex Quetzalecatzin and also this one.” The Library acquired the 1593 Codex Quetzalecatzin in 2017.

After learning of the San Salvador Codex’s availability, Hessler set out to investigate its authenticity and provenance. He consulted experts, the most prominent being Baltazar Brito Guadarrama, director of Mexico’s National Anthropology Library. Early on, Guadarrama examined a digital copy of the codex provided by the Basil, Switzerland, antiquarian manuscripts dealer conducting the sale.

Hessler traced the provenance of the codex to 19th-century France, where an aristocratic family long owned it. More recently, a Texas collector purchased it, then sold it to the Swiss antiquarian dealer. A few months before the Library purchased the codex, the dealer flew it to the Library, where Conservation Division experts viewed it under ultraviolet light. Library curators, including Hessler, also examined it.

“The manuscript is solid in its provenance,” Hessler said. “It looks like what it’s supposed to be.

Like the San Salvador Codex, one of the Library’s other 16th-century central Mexican pictorial manuscripts — the 1531 Huexotzinco Codex, acquired in the late 1920s as part of the Edward S. Harkness Collection — also narrates a legal dispute. It features testimony against representatives of the Spanish colonial government by the Nahua people of Huexotzinco.

Although it originates beyond central Mexico, yet another colonial-era map at the Library, the Oztoticpac Lands Map, is a Nahua pictorial document drawn for a court case in the city of Texcoco around 1540.

What makes the newly acquired San Salvador Codex remarkable is its completeness, Hessler said. The Huexotzinco Codex presents only the Indigenous side of a dispute, while the Oztoticpac Lands Map is just a map and, again, contains only Indigenous testimony.

The San Salvador Codex, on the other hand, has all the information about the lawsuits involved: the Indigenous testimony in Nahautl, the canon’s defense in Spanish, signatures of the parties, drawings and even the verdict.

The court acquitted the canon on some charges and found him guilty of others. As part of his penalty, he had to pay two pesos of gold to be shared among people who provided him with six jars fig tree oil.

“It’s incredible, both in its detail and in the fact that you have the complete story,” Hessler said. “From that perspective, it is rare.”

The codex arrived at the Library from Basil on Sept. 23. In early October, several experts including Guadarrama came to the Library to view it.

“Guadarrama, who has spent his career looking at manuscripts like this, was moved to tears on seeing it in person,” Hessler said.

The Library is now scanning and cataloging the codex to make it available online.

As for Hessler, he retired from the Library on Oct. 31.

“This was a great way to go out, I have to say,” Hessler said. “In my career, it’s one of the top two or three acquisitions I ever made.”

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“Iron Man,” Marvel, Rocket Into the 2022 National Film Registry

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Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was excited, explaining why he and his filmmaking team were thrilled that their cornerstone feature, 2008’s “Iron Man,” was being inducted into cinematic Valhalla, the Library’s National Film Registry, in the class of 2022.

“All of our favorite movies are the ones that we watch over and over again, and that we grow up with,” he said in an interview with the Library. “Almost 15 years after the release of ‘Iron Man’… to have it join the film registry tells us it has stood the test of time and it is still meaningful to audiences around the world.”

The Library’s annual list of 25 designated for preservation for their cultural, historic or aesthetic value to the nation always brings a list of studio hits, independently made features, powerful documentaries and even home movies into the canon. This year’s inductees cover 124 years, from 1898 to 2011. It include hits such as “When Harry Met Sally,” “Carrie” and “House Party”;  documentaries such as “Mingus” and “Union Maids”; shot-on-a-shoestring features such as “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” and “Pariah”; and even the home movies of mid-century entertainer Cab Calloway.

“Films have become absolutely central to American culture by helping tell our national story for more than 125 years,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “We’re grateful to the entire film community for collaborating with the Library of Congress to ensure these films are preserved for the future.”

The 2022 selections include at least 15 films directed or co-directed by filmmakers of color, women or LGBTQ+ filmmakers. The selections bring the number of films in the registry to 850, many of which are among the 1.7 million films in the Library’s collections.

One of the iconic scenes in “When Harry Met Sally,” a film including in this year’s National Film Registry. Photo: Castle Rock Entertainment.

Other highlights: The original “Hairspray” from 1988, featuring Ricki Lake and directed by John Waters; “The Ballard of Gregorio Cortez,” featuring a young Edward James Olmos; and the 1950 version of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which made José Ferrer the first Hispanic actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor. The first Native American film on the registry is this year’s “Itam Hakim, Hopiit” (“We/someone, the Hopi”) from Victor Masayesva Jr., Hopi director and cinematographer.

Documentary filmmaking legend Julia Reichert, who died of cancer earlier this month, learned a few weeks earlier that “Union Maids,” a 1976 documentary she co-directed, was being inducted.

“Even though ‘Union Maids’ was a black & white, super low-budget film, with interviews shot on open reel videotape to save money, the film has shown remarkable staying power,” Reichert emailed, in response to questions, days before she passed away. She co-directed the film with Jim Klein and Miles Mogulescu.

Turner Classic Movies will host a television special Tuesday, Dec. 27, starting at 8 p.m. ET to screen a selection of motion pictures named to the registry this year. Hayden will join TCM host, film historian and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Director and President Jacqueline Stewart, chair of the National Film Preservation Board, to discuss the films.

“I am especially proud of the way the Registry has amplified its recognition of diverse filmmakers, experiences, and a wide range of filmmaking traditions in recent years,” Stewart said. “I am grateful to the entire National Film Preservation Board, the members of the public who nominated films, and of course to Dr. Hayden for advocating so strongly for the preservation of our many film histories.”

Actress Sissy Spacek said she was unaware she was holding her arms out from her side with palms upraised in this “Carrie” scene, giving her a witch-like appearance.:”I was in the moment of being the prom queen.” Photo: Red Bank Films

Sissy Spacek, the star of “Carrie,” makes her third appearance on the registry, joining her earlier films “Badlands” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Her role as Carrie White, the telekinetic teen misfit who is abused by her mother and taunted by her classmates, drew an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and a lasting image in pop culture as a vengeful, blood-soaked prom queen.

She credits Stephen King’s novel, the basis for the film, as striking a nerve with teenagers in each generation who are desperate to fit in with their peers for the film’s lasting resonance. The other factor, she said, was a superb cast that included Piper Laurie (also nominated for an Oscar), John Travolta and Amy Irving.

“Brian De Palma was just such a wonder to work with,” she said in a recent interview, crediting the film’s director. “He would tell us exactly what he needed and then he’d say, ‘Within those parameters, you can do anything you want. That was just so wonderful.”

Several selections were defining works in their genres. Among romantic comedies, “When Harry Met Sally” from 1989 is a classic — Vanity Fair named it this year as the best American rom-com ever made — that brought together several major talents. Screenwriter Nora Ephron, director Rob Reiner, actor Billy Crystal and actress Meg Ryan all cemented their status in pop culture fame with the film.

“I just felt so plugged into the process of making the movie,” Crystal said in an interview. “…not that anything is every easy, but it was just such a joy to see it come to life.”

“Super Fly” stars Sheila Frazier and Ron O’Neal in a famously stylish scene from “Super Fly,” a 2022 NFR inductee. Photo: Warner Bros.

“Hairspray,” the quirky story of a plus-sized Baltimore teen and her friends integrating a local television dance show in the early sixties, wasn’t a huge success at first but has gone on to have a life of its own. It was remade as a Tony Award-wining musical on Broadway, a megahit musical film in 2007 and a live TV version in 2016. But in John Waters’ 1988 original, it was an 18-year-old Ricki Lake who was first tapped to play the lead role of Tracy Turnblad.

“I didn’t even really process that I was the star of the movie,” Lake said in a recent interview from her home in Malibu, “until the movie was made and we were seeing right before it came out. I was like, ‘Oh, WOW.”

Among Latino films, “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” from 1982 is one of the key feature films from the 1980s Chicano film movement. Edward James Olmos was a working actor but not yet a star when he and several friends, meeting at what would become the Sundance Film Festival, decided to make a film about a true story of injustice from the Texas frontier days.

Shot on a tiny budget for PBS, “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” accurately tells the story of a Mexican-American farmer who in 1901 was falsely accused of stealing a horse. Cortez killed the sheriff who tried to arrest him, outran a huge posse for more than a week, barely escaped lynching and was eventually sentenced to more than a decade in prison. The incident became a famous corrido, or story-song, that is still sung in Mexico and Texas.

“This film is being seen more today than it was the day we finished it,” Olmos said in an interview. “‘The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez’ is truly the best film I’ve ever been a part of in my lifetime.”

“House Party” joins the registry as a 1990 comedy landmark, as it put Black teenagers, hip-hop music and New Jack swing culture directly into the American cultural mainstream. It spawned the pop-culture careers of stars Kid ‘n Play, sequels and imitations — and the career of Reginald Hudlin, its writer and director. Hudlin is now a major player in Hollywood — but “House Party” was his first film.

“The day we shot the big dance number in ‘House Party’ is easily one of the best days of my life,” he said in a recent interview, still gushing about how much fun it all was. “We had all the enthusiasm in the world, all the commitment in the world.”

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Jurij Dobczansky: Working with Libraries in Ukraine During War

Photo courtesy of Jurij Dobczansky.

Jurij Dobczansky is a senior cataloging specialist in the East Central Europe Section of the Germanic and Slavic Division.  

Tell us about your background.

Growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, I spoke Ukrainian at home until I went to kindergarten. My parents were World War II refugees from Ukraine. After regular school hours, I attended a community-run Ukrainian school for 10 years. There, I learned about my cultural heritage by reading and writing in the Ukrainian language.

In 1975, I earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative European literature from the College of the Holy Cross. Soon after graduation, I came to Washington, D.C., to work as a volunteer for a committee in defense of human rights.

What brought you to the Library, and what do you do?

In December of that year, I accepted a temporary appointment to the Theodore Roosevelt film project in the Prints and Photographs Division. My supervisor encouraged me to pursue library studies while working full time. A permanent position compiling the annual “American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies” offered me a chance to develop new skills while I attended evening classes.

I earned a master’s degree in library science from the Catholic University of America in 1981. In 1983, I began my cataloging career as a Slavic subject cataloger in the Social Sciences Section. Continuing to work with the languages and cultures I was familiar with, I joined the Central and East European Languages team. It has been an ongoing educational journey. I presently work with Ukrainian and Polish resources in a wide variety of subjects.

How has the war in Ukraine affected Library collecting?

The war effectively cut off our contacts with several of the Library’s exchange partners. Our commercial vendor suspended shipping in April but was able to resume in June. Remarkably, the Ukrainian postal service continued to function. In fiscal 2022, our section received over 1,700 items from Ukraine.

The senseless and unprovoked war against Ukraine began in 2014 with the occupation of Crimea and the invasion of its Donbas region. Then, as everyone knows, Russia launched a full-scale invasion on February 24 of this year.

The war has affected me personally and professionally. Over the years, I have worked methodically to develop accurate subject and descriptive access to Ukrainian resources. It pains me to see the wholesale destruction of Ukraine’s cultural institutions and heritage; places for which I established name authority records are disappearing.

Besides military targets, Russia has destroyed libraries, archives, museums, hospitals, schools and civilian housing. Yet amid the bombing, annual book festivals continued in Kyiv and Lviv. A large contingent of Ukrainian publishers participated in the Frankfurt Book Fair.

As the ongoing documentation of Russian atrocities and war crimes proceeds, we at the Library must likewise continue to collect and preserve manifestations of Ukraine’s cultural heritage. After the war, I hope the Library will assist in rebuilding and restoring Ukrainian libraries.

What projects are you most proud of?

Especially gratifying to me are special assignments, details to other divisions and translation projects. From 1994 to 1996, I felt privileged to participate in the Congressional Research Service’s parliamentary assistance program in Ukraine, which included three trips to Ukraine.

As a docent, I have enjoyed leading tours of the Jefferson Building for members of the Embassy of Ukraine and delegations from Ukraine, including those of Ukrainian first ladies Lyudmyla Kuchma and Maryna Poroshenko.

Occasionally, I have come across items in the collection, which turn out to be rare. Especially rewarding was processing collections of Ukrainian ephemera related to the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan Protests of 2013 and 2014.

What do you enjoy doing outside work?

My favorite activities at home are gardening and landscaping. For over three decades, I have taught the art of pysanky — Ukrainian Easter eggs — at an annual workshop. For many years, I also enjoyed singing as a member of the Library of Congress Chorale. My wife and I sing in our church choir and in a local Ukrainian a cappella group.

What is something your co-workers may not know about you?

On Sept. 18–20, 2015, I organized the fifth meeting of the Ukrainian Heritage Consortium of North America, an informal network of Ukrainian American museums, libraries and archives. The meeting included an all-day program at the Library. I am ever grateful to several Library staff members for their valuable assistance and presentations. Since 2012, I have also chaired the Archives and Library Committee of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, a scholarly organization of Ukrainian specialists based in New York City.

Jurij Dobczansky is a senior cataloging specialist in the East Central Europe Section of the Germanic and Slavic Division.

My Job: Jeffrey Lofton

Jeffrey Lofton. Photo: Alyona Volgelmann.

Jeffrey Lofton is senior adviser to the Library’s chief human capital officer.

Tell us about your background.

I hail from Warm Springs, Georgia, best known as the home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Little White House and ubiquitous red claylike soil.

I attended LaGrange College and studied the more-useful-than-I-imagined triad: speech, communications and theater. Later, I earned a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Nebraska (the beginnings of scratching a public-sector itch) and a master’s in library and information science from Valdosta State University.

What brought me to Washington, D.C.? It was my first career as a professional actor. I spent many a night trodding the boards of D.C.’s theaters and performing arts centers, including the Kennedy Center, Signature Theatre, Woolly Mammoth and Studio Theatre. I even scored a few television appearances, including a Super Bowl halftime commercial that my accountant wisecracked was “the finest work” of my career. My luck to find a CPA who longed to moonlight at comedy clubs.

What brought you to the Library, and what do you do?

After I left acting — much to the delight of my parents whose echo-chamber plea was always, “When will you get a real job?” — I spent the next few years as an account manager with public relations firms, many of my clients being nonprofits of various descriptions. My aforementioned parents were never quite sure what being a PR account manager entailed, but it met their chief criterion: I wasn’t cavorting about on stage or screen.

I realized over time that my heart truly was in public service, so when I saw a public affairs position with the Library’s Veterans History Project advertised, I applied with both alacrity and soberingly low expectations. Amazingly (to me), I got the job. They must have liked my bow tie, I reasoned.

I worked as a congressional liaison, program manager and section head those early years. Next, I was chief of the Employee Resources Management and Planning Division. All of that led me to my current role as senior adviser to the chief human capital officer. I just marked my 18th year at the Library, which remains my dream work home.

What are some of your standout projects?

I created the FutureBridge mentoring program and managed it for about 10 years. We envisioned it as the premiere professional development program for what was then called Library Services. It continues as a resource for employees Librarywide.

I also worked on the team that shaped the VIBRANT initiative, which is a blueprint and strategic path to enable our workforce to thrive and flourish in a future increasingly defined by disruptive forces. VIBRANT stands for virtual, interdependent, balanced, resilient, ardent, nimble and talented — all of which, together, comprise a dynamic and results-driven workforce. I am very proud of both FutureBridge and VIBRANT.

What do you enjoy doing outside work?

Writing (and, of course, rewriting), which is a lifelong avocation. Having grown up in the Deep South, I came to appreciate a good story very early. And now I like to tell them myself. I also enjoy playing and snuggling with our toy poodle, Petunia. I strive in life to be as good a person as she thinks I am.

What is something your co-workers may not know about you? Hmmmm. Well, I’m delighted to report that my debut novel “Red Clay Suzie,” inspired by true events, will be released this winte as a hardcover, digital and audio book.

What’s “Red Clay Suzie” about, you may ask? In one sentence: Fueled by tomato sandwiches and green milkshakes and obsessed with cars, my protagonist, Philbet, struggles with life and love as a gay, physically misshapen boy in the Deep South. Christopher Castellani, author of “Leading Men” calls the novel “an arresting debut … a vivid depiction of a unique childhood that feels universal in its longing.”I used the Library’s collections in my research for “Red Clay Suzie,” and it’s amazing how much one can glean from our online resources. In particular, I learned a great deal about the topography of the central Georgia region that is the setting for most of the book. I also drew inspiration from dialogue I read in some of Zora Neale Hurston’s play scripts, fully accessible on the Library’s site.  I was even able to listen to VHP interviews, including several that my mother conducted with veterans who hailed from my hometown, where “Red Clay Suzie” takes place.  Exciting times ahead!