Library of Congress's Blog, page 37

My Job: Michele Glymph

 

Michele Glymph. 

Concert producer Michele Glymph helps bring music to the masses.

Describe your work at the Library.

As a senior music specialist/concert producer, my responsibilities include producing the Concerts from the Library of Congress series and working closely with the Library’s Events Office to present high-profile events. The events include the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, special exhibitions, lectures and book signings.

Additionally, I serve as the Music Division’s fund manager, with responsibilities for monitoring the operations of 43 gift and trust funds while working closely with the Financial Service Directorate and the chief and assistant chief of the Music Division. I also serve as facility manager of the Coolidge Auditorium and Whittall Pavilion, which houses the Library’s renowned Stradivarius instruments.

How did you prepare for your position?

Growing up, I listened to all types of music, never realizing that music would become my career. I came to the Library as a 16-year-old work-study student on a referral from a U.S. senator.

I planned to spend only a summer at the Library but fell in love with the music collections and live performances. One summer turned into a 44-year love affair, and I am still here and still in love with my work. I have been fortunate to have great mentors who observed my talents early in my career and trusted me to get the job done.

What have been your most memorable experiences at the Library?

In my position, I have met and worked with many luminaries, including three U.S. presidents: William J. Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I interviewed Gershwin Prize for Popular Song honoree Smokey Robinson and produced memorable concerts that featured Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, Paul McCartney, Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, Shirley Caesar, Billy Joel and Gloria and Emilio Estefan.

Another treasured memory was going to Thailand for the retrieval of traditional Thai instruments, on exhibit from the Library at the King’s Palace (the instruments were given to the Library in 1960 as a gift from King Bhumibol Adulyadej). I also traveled to St. Louis to pack and ship the Katherine Dunham Dance Collection, working from her home surrounded by items she collected during her travels.

While all these memories are important to me, the most significant event that I will most cherish was witnessing the first African American woman become the Librarian of Congress. This really stands apart from everything else!

What are your favorite collections items?  

I really do not have a favorite item. There are so many amazing items in our collections, however, if I had to name a few they would be the Louis Armstrong collection of letters; “The Wiz” production materials; Gershwin self-portraits; the Federal Theatre Project, which includes the first all-black “Macbeth” cast; the Alvin Ailey Dance Collection; and Beethoven’s hair.

I’ve really enjoyed being able to work with the Stradivarius instrument collection and to hear them played by some of the most famous artists in the world on the Coolidge Auditorium stage. There is so much history throughout the Library, and I am grateful to continue to be a part of making history that will be stored within our collections.

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Poinsettia: How a U.S. Diplomat Made a Mexican Flower an International Favorite

Woman with a poinsettia, 1910. Publisher unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Maria Peña, a public relations strategist in the Library’s Office of Communications.

No Christmas holiday scene in the U.S. would be complete without the poinsettia, available in more than one hundred varieties but mostly sold in vibrant red, pink, white and marbled colors. With more than 35 million sold annually, the pre-Columbian plant is the best-selling potted bloom in the United States, contributing roughly $250 million to the economy. Most are sold in a six-week stretch leading up to the Christmas holiday.

But did you know that those red poinsettias sitting on your mantle, in your dining room or under your tree are indigenous to Mexico and parts of Central America?

The plant’s name in English name stems from Joel Roberts Poinsett, an American botany enthusiast and the first U.S. Minister (ambassador) to Mexico in the early 19th century, whose papers are kept in the Manuscript Division. He came across it in Taxco, in the state of Guerrero, in 1828, brought it back to his South Carolina home and began its worldwide popularization.

But long before that, the plant had been blooming in Mexico and Central America for centuries, called by a variety of names. In Nahuatl, both the name of the peoples and the language in Central Mexico, the name for the plant was “Cuetlaxóchitl,” meaning “a flower that withers.” According to some legends, the Aztecs in pre-Columbian Mexico harvested them and used them in different war rituals, to produce dye for textiles and cosmetics, or for medicinal purposes (the milky white sap was used to reduce fevers).

In the “General History of the Things of New Spain,” published in1577, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún describes the shrubs as having leaves that resemble those of the cherry tree but are “very red and pliable,” according to a liberal translation of the old text. They are not fragrant, he continues, yet “they’re indeed beautiful and that’s why they’re prized.”

After the Spanish conquest, during the 17th century, Franciscan friars used the colorful, showy plant not only to decorate altars and nativity scenes but also to evangelize indigenous populations. The friars renamed it “flor de Nochebuena” (“Holy Night flower”) because it blooms around Christmas. In other parts of Latin America, the flower goes by other names, including “pastora” and “flor de Pascuas.”

Joel Poinsett, diplomat, statesman and amateur botanist. Portrait: Chas. Fenderich, 1838. Prints and Photographs Division.

But when Poinsett brought it back to his greenhouses, his success with the star-shaped blooms quickly earned him international recognition far beyond his political accomplishments. Poinsett sent one of his specimens to Robert Buist, a famous Philadelphia botanist with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, who exhibited the plant for the first time at a flower show in 1829.

A successful floral import-export executive, Buist introduced the plant in Europe in the1830s and christened it “Euphorbia Poinsettia” in honor of his friend. Apparently, people soon forgot the difficult Latin name, but “poinsettia” stuck with American and European consumers. After the Vatican began using this most universal of all Mexican flowers for Christmas decoration in the 19th century, all Catholic churches soon followed suit.

The mass cultivation of poinsettias reached an industrial scale in the U.S. early in the 20th century when Albert Ecke, a German immigrant, settled in Encinitas, California, and began growing them in earnest. His son, Paul, inherited the thriving business in 1919. The Ecke family soon held about 500 plant patents in the U.S., nearly a fifth of them for the poinsettia modifications the family patriarch crafted.

By 2002, the plant’s success was enshrined, with Congress formally recognizing Dec. 12 as National Poinsettia Day to honor Poinsett and mark his death on that day in 1851.

Today, the plant is an important source of revenue for Mexican farmers, who export cuttings to American growers. Poinsettias account for 60 percent of cuttings exported to global markets, although the COVID-19 pandemic caused a drop in 2020, according to the Mexican Flower Council.

According to Mexican popular culture, if you receive a poinsettia plant as a gift it will bring you good luck and prosperity. Call it poinsettia, “Cuetlaxóchit,” “pastora” or “Nochebuena,” it’s a great gift to brighten your hearth this season.

A poinsettia, now popular worldwide, grows in Lachung, an Indian village close to the border of Tibet. Photo: Alice Kandell. Prints and Photographs Division.

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The (St. Louis) Story Behind “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”

The copyright submission for “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

Few holiday songs strike a melancholy note quite like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” the poignant Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane tune that summons hope in troubled times and the comfort of friends and family close by.

It wasn’t always so.

The original, unpublished version of the song (above), submitted to the Copyright Office at the Library in November 1943, made for a most bleak holiday:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

It may be your last

Next year we may all be living in the past. …

Faithful friends who were dear to us

Will be near to us no more.

The song debuted in the the 1944 hit musical “Meet Me in St. Louis,” starring Judy Garland. In the film, Garland and her siblings learn the family soon will move across the country to New York — devastating news that would upend romances and friendships. The script called for Garland to soothe her youngest sister on Christmas Even by singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

She balked: Those lines would be more cruel than comforting to a kid afraid she’d never see her friends again.

Martin resisted a rewrite but eventually altered the lyrics to those Garland sang in the film, a version submitted for copyright 11 months after the original.

The new lines, wistful but warm, offered hope — to Garland’s on-screen sister, to an audience separated from loved ones by World War II. Seven decades later, they still do:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

From now on your troubles will be out of sight.

The 1944 movie poster for “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Prints and Photographs Division.

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“A Christmas Memory,” Truman Capote’s Classic, Handwritten at the Library

The cover of “A Christmas Memory,” with young Truman Capote standing next to his beloved cousin “Sook,” Nanny Rumbley Faulk. 

“A Christmas Memory,” Truman Capote’s story about his Alabama childhood with an eccentric elderly cousin, has been one of the nation’s most beloved tales in the holiday canon for more than half a century.

First published in Mademoiselle magazine in the winter of 1956, it starts this way:

“Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town.”

His cousin, Nanny Rumbley Faulk, soon arises to exclaim, with her sherry-colored eyes, her breath smoking the windowpane, “Oh my! It’s fruitcake weather!” They were two misfits in a no-nonsense Southern household in the 1920s and ’30s. He called her “Sook.” She called him “Buddy.” They were cheerful co-conspirators at the opposite end of their lives; each delicate, sensitive and adoring of one other.

Since then, the story has been issued and reissued in books and anthologies, over and over again, adapted to television at least twice, staged as an off-Broadway musical and even as an opera. Sook has been portrayed on camera by legendary actresses Geraldine Page and Patty Duke; the musical featured Tony Award-winner Alice Ripley. It’s around every Christmas, as dependable as holly and mistletoe.

Capote was an icon to me as a young writer, also growing up in a tiny Southern town lost among the pines, so you can imagine my delight when I discovered that the Library has Capote’s original, handwritten copy of the tale as part of his early papers. It is penciled into two thin brown notebooks marked with his neat, tiny script. “A Christmas Memory 1” he wrote on the cover of one, and “A Christmas Memory 2” on the other.

The story fills just a few lines on each page. There are several word edits, but only a couple of crossed out passages. The image that features in the story’s famous ending popped into his mind midway through the second notebook. He wrote it at the very top of the page: “kites like a pair of mingled hearts hurrying toward heaven.” A few pages later, he dropped it in for the story’s heartbreaking conclusion, exactly as it appears in the published version: “As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.”

Just like that, the entire piece seems to have emerged from his hand in a single sitting.

Brick ruins show the outlines of the “spreading old house” in Monroeville, Alabama, where Capote lived with his extended family, the setting for “A Christmas Memory.” Photo: Carol M. Highsmith

Today, the notebooks rest inside in a green folder tucked into a beige box, part of his collection in the Manuscript Division. Taken together, these early stories are a marvelous insight into his working technique and personal style.

He bought the occasional leather-bound journal for note-taking. He used a black one for his interviews with Marlon Brando on a movie location in Japan, which would become the classic 1957 New Yorker piece “The Duke in His Domain.” (More than two decades later, when I was a college journalism student, the professor taught that article as “how the masters wrote a profile” lesson. And here, lo and behold, was the actual notebook from the interview.)

His papers show he bought other fancy, hard-bound ledgers every now and again, say, from Italian bookshops during his vacations there. The first notebook he took with him to Kansas for reporting what would become “In Cold Blood” is one of these. Given his high-flying style, it’s about what one would expect.

But mostly, he worked with flimsy grade-school notebooks that cost a nickel or 10 cents. One is actually “Schooltime Compositions,” with a blank spot on the cover for one’s name, school and grade. He rarely filled out complete pages, but usually just a few paragraphs. His handwriting was precise and almost indecipherably miniscule.

And so it was with “Christmas.”

It’s written in two small “Double Q” notebooks “(Quality! Quantity),” which cost 10 cents each.

On top of the first line of the first page, he wrote his title, like a kid composing a high-school essay. Then, on the next line, he took a swing at the opener. The finished version is quoted above. Here was his first take: “Imagine a morning in late November, a last day of autumn, brown-leafed blowing morning more than twenty years ago.” The next line is crossed out, before picking up with “Consider the kitchen of a rambling old house in a country town.”

The opening page of “A Christmas Memory.” Manuscript Division

He crossed out his very first word, replacing it with “Imagine.” It appears, under the scratching, to be “This is,” as if he was starting the story in the present tense.

That’s about as much editing as you’ll see on any page. The story as it is written here is very close to the finished text. It’s tempting to think that the story came to him this cleanly, this clearly, and that we are looking at his first draft. Certainly he went through it again for a typewritten manuscript to send off for publication.

But I doubt there were many drafts. This was a  deeply felt story for Capote. He was 32 when it was published — almost certainly a year younger when he wrote it — and was known only as the author of a daring debut novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms.” He had yet to publish “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the novella that would make him a star. (“Christmas” would first be published in book form as collection of stories with “Breakfast” two years later.)

Reading these pages, looking at his pencil moving carefully across the page, you don’t get the idea he’s copying earlier notes. You get the idea that the story is flowing, his mind is focused and that a moment of youthful innocence, a long-lost period when he felt safe and happy and loved, was upon him once more.

It was so short, so sincere and so touching that audiences called upon him to give readings from it for the rest of his life. In the wake of “In Cold Blood,” his mammoth success, crowds still wanted “Christmas.” After one such posh Manhattan gathering in the winter of 1966, audience members had tears in their eyes when he finished, writes Gerald Clarke in his biography, “Capote.” “It was a very moving moment for me,” Barbara Paley, the socially powerful wife of CBS founder William S. Paley, is quoted as saying.

Later that year, when publishers announced “Christmas” was going to be reissued as a special boxed set, Capote was ecstatic about the cash flow. “It’s forty-five pages long, and it’s going to cost five dollars and be worth every cent,” he chortled. That’s about $43 in 2021 dollars for a book the width of your little finger. It sold phenomenally well.

Capote died in 1984 after long years of drug and alcohol abuse, often in the public eye. He had become a caricature of himself, his talent and drive long since dissipated. He was only 59.

But here, on these youthful pages, there is not a teaspoonful of anything artificial and there’s nothing diluted, either. The sincerity of his emotion and the surety of his vision is in every line. On his deathbed, his mind wandering, his final words? “It’s me, it’s Buddy.” As if he was reunited with Sook at last.

It was, at the end, where he always wanted to be.

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The “tick, tick … BOOM!” Research at the Library

Lin-Manuel Miranda (from left), Steven Levenson and Jennifer Tepper view musical theater holdings in the Performing Arts Reading Room in October 2017. Photo: Roswell Encina.

When Lin-Manuel Miranda visited the Library on Oct. 10, 2017, not many people knew about it. Clad in jeans and sweatshirt, the celebrated “Hamilton” creator quietly made his way to the Performing Arts Reading Room.

There, with two companions, he began sifting through the papers of theater composer Jonathan Larson. The trio was on a mission to bring one of Larson’s works to cinematic life.

The result became public in November, when Netflix released Miranda’s directorial debut, “tick, tick … BOOM!” The film expands on a semiautobiographical one-man show Larson wrote before his breakthrough musical, “Rent,” took Broadway by storm.

Larson conceived “tick, tick” (with a different title) in 1990 when he was about to turn 30, anxious his career was going nowhere after a decade of devotion. The film tells a similar story about a theater composer, Jonathan, wondering if he should give up his Broadway dream for a different life.

Tragically, Larson died suddenly in 1996 just before the first scheduled performance of “Rent.” Several years later, his family donated his papers to the Library.

When Miranda came to the Library in 2017, his companions were “tick, tick” scriptwriter Steven Levenson of “Dear Evan Hansen” fame and theater historian Jennifer Tepper. She had used Larson’s papers extensively and guided Miranda and Levenson to gems within them. [https://go.usa.gov/xeVAZ]

“What’s particularly exciting to us … is how much of what they discovered in the Larson collection ended up being added to the film,” Mark Horowitz, senior music specialist, said. “This is the fantasy for us archivists — that because we acquired … a collection, previously unknown, lost or forgotten work has had life breathed into it.”

There really is no definitive “tick, tick” script, Horowitz said. Larson’s papers contain various iterations and drafts. After he died, playwright David Auburn adapted “tick, tick” into a three-person off-Broadway musical. That’s when Miranda first encountered it.

Already an aspiring composer, he saw the musical in a small New York theater in 2001 when he was a college senior, he’s said. Then, in 2014, before “Hamilton” made him a household name, Miranda played Jonathan in a “tick, tick” revival. His performance, wrote the New York Times, “throbs with a sense of bone-deep identification.”

The movie version of “tick, tick” adds details about Larson that aren’t in his script and draws on his collection at the Library, including original songs that haven’t previously had a public audience.

A song from the collection, “Swimming,” became a major number in the film, Horowitz said, and a dance scene unfolds to a piece of original music by Larson. In a car scene, Larson’s music plays on the radio.

“It’s thrilling to us,” Horowitz said of the movie’s interpolation of Larson’s music. “You get collections because you hope they’ll be used and appreciated, but there are no guarantees.”

Larson’s collection is among Horowitz’s favorites. “I’ve actually never seen a collection quite like it,” he said.

Larson wrote notes and questions to himself that he would try to answer, Horowitz said. And for “Rent,” he wrote biographies of major characters more than once as the show changed.

“It’s just really rich, incredible stuff,” Horowitz said.

He acquired the collection for the Library and processed it, an experience he described as approaching otherworldly.

“It’s happened to me on a handful of collections,” he said. “You begin to feel the ghost of the creator standing over your shoulder. They become a presence … and you want to honor them.”

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“Return of the Jedi,” Mark Hamill and the 2021 National Film Registry

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The National Film Registry’s 2021 class is the most diverse in the program’s 33-year history, including blockbusters such as “Return of the Jedi,” “Selena” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” but also the ’70s midnight-movie favorite “Pink Flamingos” and a 1926 film featuring Black pilots in the daring new world of aviation, “The Flying Ace.”

The 2021 selections, announced today, include movies dating back nearly 120 years and represent the work of Hollywood studios, independent filmmakers, documentarians, women directors, filmmakers of color, students and the silent era. Most pointedly, the inductees also include a trio of documentaries that addressed murderous violence against Blacks, Asians and Latinos, respectively, in “The Murder of Fred Hampton,” Who Killed Vincent Chin?” and “Requiem-29.”

“The National Film Registry will preserve our cinematic heritage, and we are proud to add 25 more films this year,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “The Library of Congress will work with our partners in the film community to ensure these films are preserved for generations to come.”

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in a scene from “Return of the Jedi.” Photo: Lucasfilm/Walt Disney Company.

Mark Hamill, who plays Luke Skywalker in the “Star Wars” series, was one of a dozen key players in this year’s class of films to join the Library for interviews about their work. He emphasized that at the time “Star Wars” made its 1977 debut, it was largely understood to be for children.

“It had a princess, it had a pirate, it had a wizard, a farm boy, a big bad boogie-man,” he said of the original “Star Wars” trilogy, of which “Return of the Jedi” was the third installment. “It was clearly a fairy tale, but just put in the context of, you know, a Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers-type space opera, serial play.”

One of the reasons the films have gone on to make such a lasting cultural impact, he said, is because they were so optimistic during an period of national disillusionment.

“It was an era of great cynicism in film,” he said. “Post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, action films usually had revenge and anti-heroes (as) the order of the day … so for George (Lucas, the films’ creator) to make something like this, he almost had to set it in a galaxy far, far away and put it forward as a fantasy, because you couldn’t tell a contemporary story with that sense of optimism. It just seemed too corny.”

This year’s selections bring the number of films in the registry to 825, representing a miniscule portion of the 1.7 million films in the Library’s collections. The list is chosen by the National Film Preservation Board and the Librarian of Congress, selecting films that were influential and important to the history of film and American society. The films must be at least 10 years old to be considered. The public can nominate films, but the final selections are not a popularity contest and they are not necessarily an endorsement of the film itself.

Baltimore’s iconic, often cheerfully outrageous director John Waters made his first appearance on the list this year with 1972’s “Pink Flamingos,” which has the subtitle, “An Exercise in Bad Taste.” Making an underground icon out of Divine, its drag queen star, the film played for years on the midnight movie circuit. Waters’ father loaned him the money to make the film but refused to see it.

“The National Film Registry preserves films that are, well, remembered, loved, hated or whatever caused people to continue to talk about them for a long time,” he said in an interview with the Library, “and I am thrilled to be on the list.”

Actress Liv Tyler stars in “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” Photo: Warner Bros.

The list this year was typically eclectic. The Pixar love story between two robots, “WALL-E,” made the cut, as did the Talking Heads, with their 1983 concert film “Stop Making Sense.” “Sounder,” a 1972 film about a Black family persevering through 1930s Louisiana poverty and racism, was admitted, thus including actress Cicely Tyson’s iconic run across a field to meet her husband returning home.

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” from 1951 was selected, joining a host of his other films on the list. The 1963 horror/thriller, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” that featured Hollywood icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, was listed, as was the ’80s campy teen horror romp, “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Robert Altman’s 1973 “The Long Goodbye” saw iconic detective Philip Marlowe in a hippie-filled Los Angeles, stumbling through a murder mystery. Elliot Gould’s mumbling portrayal of the detective was worlds apart from Humphrey Bogart’s classic turn as Marlowe in “The Big Sleep” a generation earlier, but found a spot in the registry for its unconventional, genre-bending take on the hard-boiled private eye motif.

“Selena,” the 1997 biographical film of Tejana star Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, starred Jennifer Lopez in her first major movie role. Directed by Gregory Nava, it told the story of the young singer’s rise to fame and her tragic death at 23 when she was shot to death by the head of her fan club after a dispute. Selena’s life, music and the film became touchstones in Latin American culture, and her infectious appeal crossed over to audiences of all kinds.

Edward James Olmos in “Selena.” Photo: Warner Bros.

Edward James Olmos, who played Abraham, the father and manager of the family band, said the movie stands out as a universal family story that happens to be about Mexican-Americans along the Texas-Mexico border.

“It will stand the test of time,” Olmos told the Library. “(It’s) a masterpiece because it allows people to learn about themselves by watching other peoples’ culture.”

Two more silent films from the early 20th century portray Black Americans without the degrading stereotypes common to the era. “The Flying Ace,” from 1926, is a straightforward romance. It was made by the Norman Film Manufacturing Company of Jacksonville, Florida, an important producer of “race films” — movies made specifically for Black audiences.

Although owned by Richard Norman, a white man, the studio’s films tended to portray a world in which whites, and thus racism, was absent.

‘The Flying Ace’ is a really special film because it represents Black technical expertise and bravery,” said Jacqueline Stewart, chair of the NFPB and chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. “It has been said that future Tuskegee Airmen were inspired when they saw this film in their youth.”

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will host a television special Friday, Dec. 17, starting at 8 p.m. ET to screen a selection of motion pictures named to the registry this year. Stewart will host Hayden in discussing the films. Also, some titles from the NFR are freely available online in the National Screening Room. You can Follow the conversation about the 2021 National Film Registry on Twitter and Instagram at @librarycongress and #NatFilmRegistry.

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Football: Bowl Season, the NFL and the Galloping Ghost

Red Grange turns the corner in the 1925 Illinois vs Michigan game. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Susan Reyburn is a writer-editor in the Publishing Office. She is the author of “Football Nation.”

As college football bowl games are about to get underway, with the NFL playoffs starting in a a few weeks, the specter of Red Grange — the Galloping Ghost — looms above the sport’s history, a legend of days gone by. Grange starred for the University of Illinois in the mid-1920s and brought respectability to the sketchy professional sport. He lives on in many ways, but vividly so in photographs from the Library’s collections. You can find them in our Free to Use and Reuse collections, which are copyright-free and are yours to use as you like.

During the Golden Age of Sports, baseball, boxing, horse racing and college football reigned supreme, and Grange, whose shifty moves left would-be tacklers holding nothing but air as he vanished into the end zone, was a household name with the likes of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Man o’ War. If anyone could compel college football fans to give the precarious National Football League a second look, it was the flame-haired Grange. Despite his fame, he was a relentlessly humble man from a modest background — he delivered ice to put himself through college — but whose on-field exploits made him an icon.

In the late fall, especially after baseball season, college football teams dominated the sports pages and drew huge crowds. But at the professional level, the nascent NFL (founded in 1920) struggled to sign college stars, fielded teams that regularly folded and was regarded by sportsmen as disorganized, if not a bit shady.

When Grange signed with the Chicago Bears in 1925 and played his first pro game just five days after his last collegiate contest, those closest to him objected.

“My [college] coach, Bob Zuppke, didn’t talk to me for four years,” Grange later said. “My father wasn’t happy about it. All of my friends looked upon me as if I was a traitor or something, as if I had done something terrible.”

Grange turned out to be exactly what the NFL needed and wanted: He filled stadiums, gave the pro game a sense of legitimacy and showed that with the right personnel in place, the league could be a profitable venture. As the first vital link between the college and pro games, Grange has a place in football history like no other.

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Collecting the Globe: The Library Abroad

Acquisitions librarian Abdus Salam (right) selects titles from a local bookshop in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Collecting at the Library of Congress literally never stops.

The massive collections of the world’s largest library are the product, in part, of a staff that acquires material around the world, around the clock.

To facilitate its acquisitions work, the Library operates six field offices abroad, stationed across 11 time zones from South America to Southeast Asia.

At any given moment somewhere on the globe — perhaps in Rio, maybe in New Delhi — an employee is acquiring an item to add to the more than 171 million others already in the Library’s collections.

They do so in the face of all manner of challenges: everyday hassles like bureaucratic red tape and unreliable transportation and extraordinary events such as violent social unrest, coups or natural disasters.

The hard-to-find material these offices acquire helps provide Congress, analysts and scholars critical information they need to do their work, today and in the decades ahead. Their mission is unique: The Library of Congress is the only library in the world that operates such a network abroad.

“We are at the forefront of preserving today’s scholarly and cultural output for future access in one shape or form for the generations to come,” said William Kopycki, who for 12 years has served as field director for the Cairo office and temporarily also oversees the Nairobi office. “There is no other institution operating on the scale that the Library does, and that is what makes it the world’s greatest library and a name familiar to all people.”

In the early 1960s, the Library established nearly two dozen field offices around the world — a recognition of the importance that developing regions would play in post-World War II affairs and of the need to better understand these places.

Six of those offices still exist today, set in cities across South America, Africa and Central and Southeast Asia: Rio, Cairo, Nairobi, Islamabad, New Delhi and Jakarta.

These offices confront significant challenges in carrying out their mission.

They cover vast geographic areas, deal with an enormous variety of languages, rely on underdeveloped infrastructure, negotiate bureaucratic processes across dozens of countries and even persevere through natural disasters — in 2015, the Kathmandu suboffice survived a magnitude 7.8 earthquake.

The employees there, at times, face conditions that make just getting to work dangerous.

Massive, violent protests in 2011 and 2013 forced the temporary closure of the Cairo office (located in the U.S. Embassy) and the evacuation of its director from Egypt. In 2012, protestors targeted the embassy and actually came over its walls; the Library’s staff was sent home just an hour beforehand. Pakistan is so risky for Americans that the director of the Islamabad office oversees its operations from neighboring India.

The Library’s offices around the globe.

Oppressive governments pose another challenge.

In some cases, Library staffers have been detained and questioned by authorities. In the past year, the Kuala Lumpur suboffice went to great lengths to get books the government had banned. In some places, suppliers may face difficulties if it’s known that they are acquiring for a “foreign entity”; suppliers sometimes risk their livelihoods, and in some cases their lives, for performing work for the Library.

But the offices persevere, no matter the circumstances — even through coups.

“Coups, whether in Myanmar or another country at a different time, do not stop our staff from seeking to find library resources that make our collections the best in the world,” said Carol Mitchell, who serves as the field director of the Jakarta office and previously held the same position at the Islamabad office. “When there is a regime change — whether Suharto or the next regime change — our staff with their incredible intellectual curiosity and contacts developed over decades will help the Library document those changes.”

Despite the challenges, the overseas offices manage to collect a huge range and volume of material — in fiscal 2020, over 179,000 newspapers, magazines, government documents, academic journals, maps, books and other items that represented about 120 languages and 77 countries and jurisdictions.

As one might imagine, such work gets complicated.

Each office is responsible for a group of countries in its region — the Nairobi office alone covers 30 countries and jurisdictions in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Jakarta office, which covers Southeast Asia, processed material in 43 languages in fiscal 2020: English, Malay, Chinese, Tamil, Tetum, Portuguese, Indonesian, Filipino, Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Vietnamese and Lao in addition to many subnational or minority languages. The two dozen staffers in Islamabad collect in three countries that speak a combined 19 different languages.

Ade Farida (left), head of acquisitions for the Jakarta Office, meets with representatives of Insist Press Book Stores.

Such an effort requires knowledgeable people at the source, wherever that may be.

Each office is led by an American field director and staffed by Library employees recruited from the local populations — 212 locals across the six offices.

They serve as librarians, linguists, accountants, administrators, IT specialists, preservationists and shipping experts and use many of the same tools as their Capitol Hill counterparts — they perform, for example, real-time cataloging work in the Integrated Library System. In fiscal 2020, the offices created or upgraded nearly 31,000 bibliographic records.

Their knowledge and skill is the key to accomplishing work that requires negotiating so many different languages and cultures. They know what material to get and where to get it, how to navigate cultural nuances and often-tricky political terrain.

To gather material, field office staffs establish relationships with commercial vendors, who regularly acquire material on their behalf. They also work with individuals to find hard-to-get items — such as academic journals and government publications — not readily available in the marketplace.

They also make acquisition trips into the field: a literary festival in Singapore, say, or a local market six hours south of Yangon to get books in the Mon language.

For the offices, these trips are among the most rewarding and challenging work they do.

“Such acquisition trips are important so we can see for ourselves what the state of publishing in a given country is, make connections and contacts with government and other persons who can help facilitate our work, meet with our vendor or representative and otherwise get a front-line view of things,” Kopycki said. “The book publishing industry and distribution in most of our countries is still in dire need of development and modernization, and even if there is good distribution of books within one country, it does not mean that that distribution extends outside its borders.”

The offices select material in collaboration with collections divisions on Capitol Hill, choosing works for the importance of the subject matter, the quality of scholarship and the extent to which they add to the knowledge of a topic.

All that collecting requires a lot of something else: shipping, which sounds simple but often is anything but. Shipping out of country may require navigating a gantlet of bureaucracy: export permits, reviews by censors, payment of taxes.

Then there are the sheer logistics of moving large quantities of items from one far-away place to another.

Books printed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, must be moved to the Library’s representative in Riyadh, where they are combined with other material and shipped to Cairo. At the Cairo airport, they must be cleared and moved to the Library’s offices at the U.S. Embassy. From there, staffers process the materials and then, after a sufficient quantity is ready, send them off to Washington.

The work of these offices benefits more than just the patrons of the Library of Congress; employees there, in effect, serve as the eyes and ears for other libraries via the Cooperative Acquisitions Program.

Through the program, the overseas offices provide material to 80 institutions in the U.S. and 26 in other countries. Those resources allow analysts and scholars everywhere to gain new perspective on the world — and will allow future generations of scholars to do the same.

“It is not just the Library’s collections that make what we do unique,” Mitchell said. “It is the concept behind those collections that is equally important. That concept remains. It is important that we as global citizens have the capacity to learn and understand.”

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Maps: A 17th-Century Korean View of the World

Tae Choson Chido, made circa 1874. Artist unknown. Geography and Map Division.

This is a guest post by Ryan Moore, a senior cataloging specialist in the Geography and Map Division. It first ran in the Library of Congress Magazine May-June 2021 issue.

Ch’onhado is a type of Korean quasi-cosmographical depiction that means “map of the world beneath the heavens.”

Koreans developed this view in the 17th century, and it remained popular until the 19th century. Scholars debate its origins but agree that the perspective is uniquely Korean. It exists in many iterations and often was included in atlases.

Sino-centricity is an essential element of the Cho’nhado.

In the Tae Choson Chido, above, China is front and center, shown as a red circle with a yellow interior. Korea — known as Choson — is a yellowed-bordered rectangle with a red interior. To its right is Japan, pictured as a yellow rectangle.

The proximity of these lands is relatively correct. The surrounding rings of land and sea, however, represent both real and mythological peoples and places, whose source was primarily classical Chinese literature.

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Sondheim at the Library: A Friendship with “Steve”

Stephen Sondheim in New York, 1972. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist in the Music Division.

Musical theater reached its apotheosis in the work of Stephen Sondheim. His passing last week at the age of 91 leaves a void that can never be filled.

It is perhaps unfair to make the death of such an important and iconic figure into something personal, but I think that’s part of what makes Sondheim and his work so extraordinary. For many of us, his work became something deeply personal. His songs gave voice to thoughts and feelings we often didn’t have the words to express. He accomplished what one hopes for in most works of art—to connect us to our humanity, to help us realize we aren’t alone. And to many of us who knew him personally, we were blessed by generous and honest advice and thoughtful kindnesses. He was an exemplar for leading a good and meaningful life.

In my case, I owe him my entire career. I grew up as a fan of musicals but thought of them as entertainments. When Sondheim’s work began to inculcate itself into my psyche as a teenager, musicals suddenly became richer, more meaningful and important. I had found an art form to which I could dedicate my life. And I’ve endeavored to do so.

I first met Steve—as he insisted on being called—in January of 1980 when I was a senior in college. We next met in December 1989, when I was working on a production of “Merrily We Roll Along” at Arena Stage here in Washington. By 1993, I was working in the Music Division of the Library and learned that he would be visiting the area. I invited him to the Library for a show-and-tell of some of the choice items in our collections. He accepted.

Some of the items, as I recall, were directly related to him, such as lyric manuscripts by his mentor, ; original music manuscripts by Richard Rodgers for “Do I Hear a Waltz?” for which he had written the lyrics; and the letter he wrote to Leonard Bernstein on the opening night of their show, “West Side Story.”

1958 poster for “West Side Story.” Prints and Photographs Division.

Rounding out the display were music manuscripts by several of his favorite classical composers, such as Brahms, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Bartok and Stravinsky. But the moment that’s seared into my memory is when I showed him Gershwin’s manuscript for “Porgy and Bess” and he began to cry.

Afterward, we discussed the possibility of his papers ultimately coming to the Library. We arranged for me to visit his home and look through his papers, so I could guide him in exactly what we would be interested in. Not long after that visit, tragedy struck: His home caught fire.

It started in the second-floor office of his brownstone. Steve kept his manuscripts in a closet off that office—paper manuscripts in cardboard boxes on wooden shelves. After the fire, he moved to temporary digs for over a year while his house was  repaired and remodeled. I returned to the house in 1997. In the meantime, a cinderblock vault had been built in the basement to house his manuscripts. They were still in the same cardboard boxes. When I took boxes that had been on the bottom shelf of the old closet and lifted the manuscripts out of them there were dark singe marks outlining where the music lay in the boxes – probably seconds from going up in flames. It is the one time in my life I believe I have witnessed a true miracle.

That 1997 visit was to conduct three days of videotaped interviews to serve as a complementary crib to his manuscripts. My goal was to clarify markings and try to anticipate the questions of scholars and researchers who would come to examine his manuscripts at the Library. As it happened, the interviews became far more wide-ranging than I expected, and he agreed that they could be published. “Sondheim on Music” is now in its third edition.

In 2000, the Library produced a concert in honor of Steve’s 70th birthday. He and I discussed several possibilities about what the concert’s structure and content might be. He quickly settled on two notions—the evening would begin with a concert version of his obscure musical version of Aristophanes’ “The Frogs” (which had had its premiere in and around a swimming pool at Yale in 1974; both Sigourney Weaver and Meryl Streep were students in the cast). “The Frogs” would be newly orchestrated – by Jonathan Tunick.

This would be followed by a section he titled: “Songs I Wish I’d Written (At Least in Part).” This excited him in particular. He loved the notion of being able to share his enthusiasms and introduce people to a raft of songs they may not know or would be surprised to learn he held in such high esteem. The “(At Least in Part)” was important, because he wanted to make clear that, one, these songs were not a complete list; and two, it might be just one aspect of a song that made it a favorite.

Steve began sending me faxes as songs occurred to him; the final compilation totaled 55 songs. There were five each by Harold Arlen and Cy Coleman; four by Hugh Martin; and three each by Irving Berlin, Jerry Bock, Cole Porter, and Arthur Schwartz. The most contemporary song was Adam Guettel’s “The Riddle Song” from “Floyd Collins” (1994); there was an art song by Aaron Copland, “The Golden Willow Tree”; and a Brazilian folk song, “Bambalelê.”

But I think the most surprising numbers were “Hard Hearted Hannah (The Vamp of Savannah)” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” Sondheim selected 15 songs to be performed in the concert and, as I recall, the order in which they would be performed. The cast included Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald, Marin Mazzie, and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

I got what I thought was a great idea: I would contact all 15 living songwriters on Sondheim’s list and ask them to write something about Steve for the program. All agreed.  Tunick and music director Paul Gemignani asked to contribute as well. The day of the concert, I presented Steve with the program and with, I’m afraid, a bit of a Cheshire Cat grin, mentioned that he might want to look at the things written by the living songwriters. His eyes lit up, and then he began reading them and they dimmed. He had hoped they would write about their own songs and was disappointed that they were accolades to him. This tells you a lot about Stephen Sondheim.

Steve’s relationship with the Library was enduring. He helped us acquire at least two collections from his collaborators—producer/director Hal Prince, and librettist/director Arthur Laurents. He also recommended the Library to others.

One of my last emails with Steve was just last month. He blurbed a book I’d compiled and edited of Oscar Hammerstein correspondence, due out next year. It reads:

What a generous man Oscar was. To write so many letters that actually went into detail about the art and the craft (and life itself) was a time-consuming job. Reading them makes me feel proud and privileged to have known him. And sad that he isn’t around. – Stephen Sondheim

I echo that sentiment now: What a generous man Steve was, in many more ways that I have space to recount here. I feel proud and privileged to have known him. And sad that he isn’t around. And I’d like to think that he and Oscar are now reunited.

Sondheim’s letter to Leonard Bernstein, upon the opening of their “West Side Story.”

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