Library of Congress's Blog, page 51

Copyright: Deposits of Gold

The Star Wars Christmas album, featuring the recording debut of Jon Bon Jovi.

The vast collections of creative works deposited at the Library of Congress for copyright registration over the decades chronicle the artistic genius of generations of Americans — even budding geniuses.

When Paul Simon came to the Library in 2007 to accept its Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, Music Division librarians were able to present him with the original manuscript for the first song he ever wrote, a tune he composed at age 12 or 13 called “The Girl for Me.”

Simon’s dad had written out the music and lyrics on paper and submitted it for copyright registration. The Library stored the submission away for safekeeping — years before Simon composed “The Sound of Silence” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” years before anyone could know the historical significance that piece of paper would one day hold.

Over the past 150 years, the Library has preserved millions of such works as submissions for copyright to the U.S. Copyright Office, located in the Library.

Those submissions preserve works everyone knows (Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) alongside multitudes that went unheard (an unpublished musical version of “The Great Gatsby”) or were heard and forgotten (“Do the Oz,” a song based on the “Hokey Pokey” that John Lennon wrote to raise funds for the defense of Oz magazine in an obscenity trial).

In 1870, Congress passed legislation that transferred the copyright function from federal courts to the Library — a milestone in copyright history and in the development of Library collections.

The law required authors, poets, artists, composers and mapmakers to deposit at the Library two copies of each published work registered for copyright in the U.S. Later, the law also allowed for the submission of some unpublished works.

Portions of the massive collection of copyright deposits eventually were transferred to other Library divisions for preservation — a treasure trove of history that otherwise might be lost.

We know how the march played at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral in 1865 goes because the composer’s daughter submitted the music manuscript, “To the Memory of President Lincoln,” for copyright in 1911.

Copyright deposits capture milestones, even if they aren’t recognized as such until years later.

The Copyright Office holds the unpublished deposit for a 1980 “Star Wars” Christmas album that marks the recording debut of Jon Bon Jovi, who sang lead vocals on “R2-D2 We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” (Sample lyric: “If the snow becomes too deep, just give a little beep. We’ll go there by the fire and warm your little wires.”)

They reveal new dimensions to famous folks — an unpublished composition by a 14-year-old Aaron Copland, for example, or unpublished plays written by Tennessee Williams and Zora Neale Hurston.

Mae West , posing in 1948. Photographer unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Manuscript Division holds 13 such plays by Mae West, the actress and sex symbol whose ability to impart suggestive meaning to any line onscreen is immediately apparent in her writings, too. “The things I can teach you are not in the books,” a seductress slyly tells Professor Thinktank in “Ruby Ring,” a 20-page play West submitted for copyright in 1921.

In 1997, a Library staffer discovered 10 unpublished plays written by Hurston, the African American anthropologist and author who died in obscurity in 1960. She later became celebrated for her novels and work as a folklorist, but few knew of her ambitions as a dramatist until that discovery among copyright deposits nearly four decades later.

Copyright deposits record the history of events that never even happened.

The Music Division holds songs composed for productions that were begun and then called off, including dozens for a live TV musical version of “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rainbow Road to Oz,” a film project that proposed to star the Mouseketeers as characters from the Land of Oz.

They help scholars and artists better understand the works they study and perform.

William Grant Still, the “dean of African American composers,” wrote “Grief” in 1953, and a version published a few years later introduced an error into the final line of vocals. For decades, performers unwittingly sang the piece wrong.

It wasn’t until 2009 that Still’s daughter, feeling something wasn’t quite right, examined the original version submitted for copyright and discovered the mistake — finally, some 50 years on, allowing the piece to be heard as the composer intended.

Copyright deposits are a great resource for the study of early African American music.

That material preserves songs by well-known figures: the original manuscript of Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train” and Bessie Smith’s manuscript for “Wasted Life Blues,” on which she crossed out her husband’s name as composer and wrote in her own.

Bessie Smith (above), crossed out her husband’s name as the author of “Wasted Life Blues” and wrote in her own. Copyright Division.

But they also are invaluable for preserving works by lesser-known artists, shows such as Henry Creamer and Turner Layton’s “Ebony Nights” (1921) and Louis Douglass and James P. Johnson’s “The Policy Kings” from 1938.

Movie studios tragically threw away historical music scores to save the expense of storage — even the original music for “The Wizard of Oz” didn’t survive. Copyright deposits preserve elements of films and TV shows that otherwise might not exist.

The Music Division holds original scores for “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and lead sheets to songs — “I’m in the Middle of a Muddle,” “Pretending,” “Raga-Daga-Day” — that didn’t make the cut for Disney’s classic “Cinderella.”

Copyright deposits preserve Elmer Bernstein’s score for “The Ten Commandments,” Jerry Goldsmith’s avant-garde work on “Planet of the Apes” and music Charlie Chaplin composed for his own films.

With the advent of sound technology, Chaplin went back and wrote scores for his silent features. In his 1919 film “Sunnyside,” Chaplin milks a cow directly into his coffee and holds a chicken over a pan to get an egg for breakfast — a scene eventually accompanied by a waltz composed by Chaplin and submitted for copyright in April 1977, eight months before his death.

Pieces of history, preserved by the copyright process for posterity.

Charlie Chaplin. Bain News Service, 1915-1920. Prints and Photographs Division.

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Lynd Ward’s Eerie, Early Graphic Novel, “Gods’ Man”

The grinning skull, from “Gods’ Man,” by Lynd Ward. Photo of book page: Mark Dimunation. Rare Book & Special Collections.

Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, wrote about their copy of “Gods’ Man” in an internal memo recently. This is an expanded version of that piece. 

We arrive on the doorstep of winter with a gift from the dark, shadowy recesses of the Library: A beautiful, eerily unsettling work of great American significance that, as the artwork above suggests, may leave you with images you cannot easily dismiss.

This is “Gods’ Man,” a 1929 black-and-white wordless novel that tells a Faustian tale of ambition, love, greed and death. It’s by the illustrator and woodcut artist Lynd Ward. It is widely regarded as the first American book of the form and the urtext of the graphic novel. The story is told through 139 uncaptioned woodblock prints, rendered in a dark, foreboding style that mixes Art Deco beauty with the stern lines of German expressionism. It can leave you breathless with its craftsmanship, vision and narrative detail.

The cover of Wards’ groundbreaking wordless novel. Photo: Mark Dimunation. Rare Books and Special Collections.

But “Gods’ Man” and Ward’s five subsequent wordless novels were not regarded as a bold new stroke for literature in their day. They were just Depression-era quirks. They sold moderately well and drew good-but-not-great reviews, and Ward moved on to more profitable lines of work. It was only decades later, after comics had matured from the funny pages into sophisticated, standalone stories called graphic novels, that his influence was fully realized.

“[Ward was] the father of pure ultimate visual,” the late Will Eisner once said, a remarkable testament considering that Eisner is one of the most influential comic artists in the second half of the 20th century and the namesake for the Eisner Awards, the comics equivalent of the Academy Awards. “I’ve tried to reach that same mountaintop and have never been able to do it.”

“Way ahead of his time, a visionary in understanding the importance of the book as an object, as a container of a kind of content,” said Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Maus,” the 1986 graphic novel about the Holocaust that has itself become an iconic narrative of the form.

The Library’s first-edition copy of “Gods’ Man” is part of our collection of hundreds of pieces of Ward’s work, from original prints and woodblocks to the woodworking tools he used in his craft. The collection is housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division and the Prints and Photographs Division. Ward died at 80 at his home in Reston, Virginia, in 1985. His collection was given to the Library in 2003 by Robin Ward Savage, his daughter. (Georgetown University has the most significant holdings of his work.)

A burin, one of Ward’s many woodworking tools in the Library’s collections. Prints and Photographs Division.

Ward was born in 1905 in Chicago, survived a bout of tuberculosis and quickly developed a talent for drawing. He was raised in a progressive, forward-thinking family that soon moved to the East Coast. His father, Harry K. Ward, was a British-born minister with a strong social reform streak, and Ward would hew to socialist ideals all his life.

He earned a fine arts degree from Teachers College at Columbia University in New York and married fellow student May McNeer, who obtained her degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. The pair would work together, often collaborating on books, for the rest of their lives.

They honeymooned in Europe and stayed a year in Leipzig, Germany, where Ward studied illustration. There, his encounter with German expressionism in general, and with the Flemish artist Frans Masereel’s “The Sun” in particular, greatly influenced his thinking. “The Sun” was a wordless novel, a form then unknown in the United States.

The young couple returned to the U.S. in 1927. Ward put together “Gods’ Man” in 1929, when he was just 24 years old. (The plural “Gods” in the title was intentional, invoking a world of many gods, not just one.)

In the story, a naïve artist signs a contract with a masked stranger in exchange for a brush. The brush propels him into fame and he soon finds himself in a bloated life of wealth and excess.  Disillusioned and enraged, he strikes back, only to awaken to find himself in jail. He escapes, chased by a vengeful mob, who drive him over a cliff.  Badly injured, he is discovered by a simple woman who lives in the woods. They marry and have a child.

But as fate would have it, the stranger returns and asks him to paint a portrait. When the stranger removes his mask, the visage is so terrifying that the artist flees and falls to his death at the cliff – the stranger with the skull-like head has exacted his contracted price for the brush.

A woodcut illustration from “Gods’ Man.” Photo of book page: Mark Dimunation. Rare Book and Special Collections.

The images were striking and, over the next decade while working as an illustrator, Ward created five more wordless books, each concerned with major issues such as fascism, the slave trade, the Depression, the plight of workers and so on. There was “Mad Man’s Drum,” “Wild Pilgrimage,” “Prelude to a Million Years,” “Song Without Words” and, finally, his masterpiece of the form, “Vertigo,” in 1937.

“Let’s Read” Book Week Poster, 1959. Lynd Ward. Prints and Photographs Division.

There was no real market for the books, though, and Ward continued his work as a high-profile artist, illustrator, painter and author. He contributed artwork to more than 200 books for children, juveniles and adults. He did the artwork for a book of poetry by William Faulkner and a hugely influential illustration of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” The first children’s book he both wrote and illustrated, “The Biggest Bear,” won the Caldecott Medal in 1953. He illustrated classic works for the Limited Editions Club.

Over time, artists in other fields found his work and were dazzled. Allen Ginsberg used a section of “Wild Pilgrimage” as the inspiration for a section of his poem, “Howl.”

And Guillermo del Toro, the Academy Award-winning director of such films as “The Shape of Water” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” lists Ward as one of his key influences. In a 2015 tweet, the Mexican director summed up Ward’s worldwide influence in a nutshell: “LYND WARD: American, his ‘wordless novels’ combine a modern graphic approach with Old Testament damnation. Fearsome.”

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The Original Lady Liberty

The picture of the model of the Statue of Liberty that Bartholdi submitted for copyright. Copyright Division.

This is a  guest post by Alison M. Hall, writer and editor in the Copyright Division. It also appears in the Sept.-Oct. issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

Of the tens of millions of creative works registered with the Copyright Office, the Statue of Liberty is one of the biggest and most famous.

French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi registered his “Statue of American Independence” on Aug. 31, 1876, submitting two photos of a model of the statue as the deposit copies. The first image shows just the model. The second is a rendering of how the statue would appear against the New York skyline on the pedestal. The pedestal also is registered with the office with architect Richard M. Hart listed as the author.

This second image has great significance because it shows a very early version of the statue that most people today would not recognize.

In the original design, the Statue of Liberty is shown holding a broken chain and shackle in her left hand, representing freedom newly achieved. Bartholdi later made a major change to his design by placing the chain and shackle, symbolically broken by Liberty, at her feet. He then positioned the familiar tablet, inscribed “July IV, MDCCLXXVI” (July 4, 1776), in her left hand.

In the decade before the statue was assembled in New York Harbor, newspapers and magazines popularized images of it, and memorabilia proliferated. New York publisher Root and Tinker registered a color lithograph of the statue in 1883, thought to have been commissioned to raise funds to build the pedestal. The next year, the publisher registered a reissue of the same lithograph with “Low’s Jersey Lily for the Handkerchief” imprinted on the statue’s base.

The copyright on the original Statue of Liberty sculpture has expired, which means it is now in the public domain. Creators are free to use it in any way in their works.

Copyright application of Statue of Liberty, set in New York Harbor. Copyright Division.

 

Election Day: Vote. That’s It.

Vote. Today. That’s all.

Works Progress Administration poster urging people to vote during World War II. 1943. Prints and Photographs Division.

Jason Reynolds: Grab the Mic November Newsletter

This is a guest post by Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

Last night I had a dream I went to vote, but all the names on the ballot were of kids I knew. Some really young, and some closer to grown, but all part of the fabric we refer to as youth. I was so excited, overwhelmed with joy to blacken a bubble for a young person to run our country. Finally. Now, some of you might be saying to yourselves, “Man, I couldn’t be the leader of America. At least, not yet.”

And to you, I say, of course you could! You all could. Here’s why:

IMAGINATION: You still actually believe there are true ways and, more importantly, new ways to change the world. That there are things that could be invented to shift the way we live. It doesn’t matter how strange and far-reaching it is, or even how frustrating it makes older people feel: You aren’t afraid to let your imaginations run wild. And right now, we need that.

FAIRNESS: Once I was in an interview with a young person who expressed how absurd he thought racism was. And he felt this way about all the isms. None of them made sense to him.

I asked him, “How do you think we fix it?”

He thought for a moment, then responded. “People just gotta stop being mean.”

Such a simple statement (that even I, in this moment, want to dismiss as naïve) holds such profundity. Kindness. What if we could actually be kind? It’s easier to do it. Easier on our minds and bodies. It’s healthier for us. And this young man said it with such resolve. Such certainty. It was as broad and as big as his imagination was; he couldn’t imagine a reason for prejudice and hatred. And neither can I. And I’d like to believe most of us feel this way.

COLLABORATION: In my generation, and all the generations before me, there’s been a belief that a single person should sit in the top seat. Of everything. The gold medalist. The first placer. The winner. The boss. And everyone else is pretty much … everyone else. It’s a competitive energy I honestly think is healthy for many things. It teaches persistence and helps to structure life in a (sort of) functional way.

Your generation is a little different. You play together, and you celebrate together for playing together. We tease you about the whole “participation trophy” thing, because our fear is that you won’t have enough grit to compete with the world. But … I wonder if there’s something to be said for the fact that because you all push back against the single winner, you can see value in all your teammates. You can more easily acknowledge the strengths of each individual and how they all have a part to play. Which means as president you’d truly understand the power of a diverse and dynamic cabinet. As a matter of fact, maybe you all would make it so that the presidential seat was a bench shared by a few people at a time. Each important for different reasons. The presidents.

TECHNOLOGY: You all understand it better than the rest of us, which means you’d be able to use it better than the rest of us. The coolest part about it is you—through social media, video games and YouTube—have developed relationships with young folks from all over the world who are going to someday lead their countries. And it’s harder to go to war with whom you used to talk to everyday through a headset. Whom you partnered with in zombie killings. Whose cultural differences you’ve learned about through YouTube and whose cultural similarities you’ve celebrated through TikTok. Not to mention, it’s harder to hate people you can call by name.

FUN: It’s still a priority. You understand why it’s important to have it, and you will do anything for it not to be taken from you. And I like that about you. So maybe you’d invent a few new holidays. Like Block Party Day, where the whole country has to throw block parties, and we all have to get to know our neighbors. That would be cool. And maybe the most patriotic thing EVER. I’m sure you all could come up with something better than that, but … yeah.

Of course there are other things you have to know as far as policy and law and blah blah blah, but all that can be learned. It’s much, much harder to learn imagination, fairness, collaboration, technology and fun. But more than anything, what you all have is courage. And it’s that courage I believe in most.

I would tell you that you’d have my vote—like in my dream—but the truth is, you’ve had it for a long time now. Whether your name is on the ballot or not, just know you already are the leaders of the free world. I’m just trying to make sure I stay close to you, waiting for the day you create the world of the free leaders.

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Hollywood, Houdini and the Halloween Seance of 1936

Houdini, performing suspended upside down outside B.F. Keith’s Theatre, 15th and G St. NW, Washington, D.C., Jan. 1922. Photo: National Photo Company. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

It was a setting befitting the showmanship of Harry Houdini:

The bright, clear, cold evening of Halloween, 1936, atop the roof of Hollywood’s high-profile Knickerbocker Hotel. There, the lights of Los Angeles glittered in the distance. Here, at 8 p.m., a dimly lit séance. Atop a table in the center of the attraction lay a pair of locked handcuffs on a silk pillow. A trumpet. A tambourine. Nearby, an invitation-only audience of 300 was crammed into a set of bleachers, waiting to see if the dead might come to life.

This was Bess Houdini’s final attempt to contact the spirit of her husband, the master illusionist who had died on Halloween 10 years earlier, and the expectations were high.

“The zero hour of the 10th anniversary of our departed friend is fast nearing the end,” began Edward Saint, the séance’s moderator, in a melodramatic flourish.

The session atop the hotel was recorded and, if you’re interested in more on the world of magic, you can also survey the Houdini and the McManus/Young Collections in the Rare Book and Special collections Division at the Library. They’ll take you deep inside the world of Houdini, one of the early 20th century’s most compelling personalities.

Bess Houdini, seated, at the last seance, and Edward Saint, right, with beard. Other men unidentified. Photo: New York World-Telegram and the Sun  Newspaper Collection. Prints and Photographs Division.

That Halloween night in L.A., Saint sat in a huge, oversized chair, the back of which extended well above his head. It was perched by the side of a small shrine to Houdini, replete with the man’s photograph beneath a dim bulb. Bess sat in an identical chair on the other side of the shrine. The set was near the edge of the hotel’s roof, so that the city’s HOLLYWOODLAND sign (as it then read) was clearly visible behind them. Across the country, more than 20 simultaneous séances were also getting underway, all reaching out for Houdini, as Saint said, “to come through.”

Among the others seated around the table were Charles Fricke, judge of the California High Court; two journalists; the past president of the California Spiritualist Organization; and several other high-end magicians and seers. As they had done each Halloween for the nine years since Houdini’s death, the group gathered in an attempt to contact Houdini’s spirit. This 10th attempt was, by an agreement Harry and Bess had made before his death, to be the last.

For the family and friends of a man who spent much of his career debunking spiritualism, sponsoring a Houdini séance seemed a serious contradiction.

He had, after all, attended séances in an attempt to contact his deceased mother and found them to be stuff and nonsense. He challenged mediums to demonstrate any ghostly communication that he could not, as a magician, replicate by a trick. The rapping on the table, the ghostly moans, things floating in the air … he showed that it was all done with special effects, hidden wires and the like.

But before Houdini’s death, he and Bess made a pact that the first to die would try to contact the survivor from the beyond.  If contact was not made within 10 years, the pact would be broken and the notion of communication with the dead refuted. Houdini promised Bess that his spirit would deliver a message in code and open a pair of locked silver handcuffs. Their secret code word was “Rosabelle,” followed by the phrase: “answer – tell – pray – answer – look – tell – answer – answer – tell” – a shorthand used between the two when they had been on stage together. In their code, it spelled “Believe.”

That coded promise was, as it turned out, final proof of the man’s genius.

After his death, spiritualists across the country, if not the world, said Houdini had contacted them. In Chicago, his ghost supposedly walked in to a room. In Kansas City, the ghost wrote a letter. In New Zealand, it drank a cup of tea. But — thanks to Houdini’s foresight — none could claim he had spoken in the code that only his wife knew.

Therefore, this séance was the last gasp.

Saint, who conducted most of the ceremony, was Bess Houdini’s business manager and companion — and a former carnival showman. He had the dramatic patter down, delivering a 10-minute oration on Houdini’s career before intoning a solemn Christian prayer.

Then:

“Ooooohhh, thou disembodied spirits,” he begins, “those of you who have grown old in the mysterious laws of spirit land, we greet thee….. Houdini … are you here? … Are you here, Houdini?” he said, his voice rising, “Please manifest yourself in any way possible … We have waited Houdini, oh so long…now this is the night of nights…SPEAK HARRY!”

“Pomp and Circumstance” followed, the stage music Houdini had used for his show openings and closings. The group waited for contact, for a message from Houdini. It never came. On the last part of the séance played to the radio audience, Bess announced: “Houdini did not come through. My last hope is gone. I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me or to anyone. … It is now my personal and positive belief that spirit communication in any form is impossible. I do not believe that ghosts or spirits exist. The Houdini shrine has burned for ten years … I now, reverently, turn out the light. It is finished. Good night, Harry!”

It was over.

The Rare Book Division holds the documentation of this event, including the radio script. Once viewed, of course, it becomes clear that the entire séance was scripted beforehand. It is replete with speaking instructions – “Pause.  Speak slowly.” It was all show business, kids. Nobody on the stage thought Houdini was going to “come through.” Perhaps a fitting bit of artifice to end Houdini’s life-long crusade against fraudulent spiritualists.

In 1943, nearing death, Bess recalled her decade-long vigil. She wasn’t sorry she had stopped, saying, “10 years is long enough to wait for any man.” And, on that score, we can agree, she closed the book.

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That Magical, Mystical Book On Witchcraft from 1584

 

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And so it begins…the title page of Reginald Scot’s 1584 edition of “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

We first ran this piece last year at Halloween. It proved so popular year-round that we reprint it this Halloween season. It was co-researched and co-written by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins, who also had the brilliant idea for the piece.

An ancient tome delving into the dark arts of witchcraft and magic…a book of doom…yet it lives…at the Library of Congress.

You’re forgiven if you think we’re talking about H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional book of magic, “Necronomicon,” the basis for the plot device in “The Evil Dead” films, or something Harry Potter might have found in the Dark Arts class at Hogwarts.

But, as the darkness of Halloween descends, we’re not kidding. A first edition of “The Discouerie of Witchcraft,” Reginald Scot’s 1584 shocker that outraged King James I, survives at your favorite national library in the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room. (The Library has a copy of the original edition, as well as a 1651 edition.)

It is believed to be the first book published on witchcraft in English and extremely influential on the practice of stage magic. Shakespeare likely researched it for the witches scene in “Macbeth.” It was consulted and plagiarized by stage magicians for hundreds of years. Today, you can peruse its dark secrets online. How could your wicked little fingers resist? Scot promises to reveal “lewde dealings of witches and witchmongers”! The “pestilent practices of Pythonists”!  The “vertue and power of natural magike”!

Also, juggling.

It is one of the  foundational examples of grimoire, a textbook on magic, groundbreaking for its time and nearly encyclopedic in its information. Scot’s research included consulting dozens of previous thinkers on various topics such as occult, science and magic, including Agrippa von Nettesheim’s “De Occulta Philosophia,” in 1531 and John Dee’s “Monas Hieroglyphica” in 1564. The result is a most impressive compendium.

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The heavens, as used in witchcraft. “The Discoverie of Witchcraft,” P. 283. Rare Book & Special Collections.

But Scot wasn’t lurking about in a hooded cape, looking for eyes of newts and toes of frogs to bewitch mortals. A skeptic, he wrote to make it plain that “witches” were not evil, but instead were resourceful and capable women who practiced the art of folk healing as well as sleight of hand. Their apparently miraculous feats were in no way wicked. He wrote, “At this day it is indifferent to say in the English tongue, ‘she is a witch’ or ‘she is a wise woman.’ ”

Born in 1538 in Kent under the rule of Henry VIII, Scot was landed gentry. He was educated and a member of Parliament. He admired, and may have joined, the Family of Love, a small sect comprised of elites who dismissed major Christian religions in favor of arriving at spiritual enlightenment through love for all. By publishing “Witchcraft,” he meant to expose it as superstition, hoping to better England by forwarding knowledge. Since most people who were accused – and often hanged – for it were impoverished women on the margins of society, he hoped to garner social empathy for them and other scapegoats.

He also hoped to dispel the common belief in magic tricks performed on stage before gasping audiences. To do this, he researched and explained how magicians carried out their illusions. Beheadings? See the diagrams!

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Detail from “To cut off ones head, and to laie it in a a platter, which the jugglers call the decollation of John Baptist.” P. 282, “The Discoverie of Witchcraft,” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

How to appear to “thrust a bodkin (needle) into your head” and survive? See page 280!

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Detail on how to use a false bodkin. P. 280, “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This noble effort, as the kids say, went left.

The book was blasted by the religious faithful, according to “The Reception of Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft: Witchcraft, Magic and Radical Religion,” a study by S.F. Davies in the Journal of the History of Ideas, published in 2013. The King of Scotland, James VI, was outraged. Like many of his subjects, he was convinced that witches worked in concert with the devil. He thought a coven of witches was trying to kill him. He published “Daemonologie” in 1597, in part to refute Scot’s work. He also became King James I of England in 1603. There’s a legend that he ordered all copies of Scot’s book burned, but the historical record is silent on the subject. Still, it’s clear James I loathed the book. There was growing concern at the time that women’s use of so-called magic was counter to the aims of the state and church. Thus, James sought to instill fear in female communities and spoke out directly against witches and their perceived occultisms.

“Almost every English author who subsequently wrote on the subject of witchcraft mentioned Scot disparagingly,” Davies writes of the period. Scot died in 1599; the book was not republished during his lifetime. There was an abridged Dutch translation published in 1609, Davies notes, but was not republished in England until 1651, nearly three quarters of a century after its initial publication.

Still, the book survived, “mined as a source on witchcraft and folklore,” and his material on practical magic and sleight of hand “found a large audience,” Davies writes. For Scot’s original aims, that wasn’t good. Rather than debunking stage magic for the masses as he’d hoped, “Discoverie” became a handbook for magicians in Europe and America, well into the 17th and 18th centuries. Famous works such as “Hocus Pocus ” and the “The Juggler’s Oracle“ drew heavily on “Witchcraft,” thus spreading the very mysteries that Scot had hoped to quell. Davies: “[I]t travelled in directions Scot himself may never have imagined.”

Today, 435 years after it was published, the book sits on the shelf, silent, patient, having done the work its author did not want it to do. It’s almost as if…the thing had a hex on it.

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The First Book of Illustrated Witchcraft — 15th Century Visions

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Shape-shifting witches, flying on a pitchfork, causing a thunderstorm. Artist unknown. From “De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus,” 1489. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This is a guest post by Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Check back tomorrow when we reprint a witchy Halloween post from last year. 

Toward the end of the 15th century in central Europe, the craze for hunting witches was stoked to the level of hysteria, in part by a pair of highly influential works that formed a literary cornerstone of Europe’s fascination with and abhorrence of the occult and supernatural forces. More than 600 years later, copies of both are held in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Our story begins in 1485, when Heinrich Institoris (Heinrich Kramer), an Austrian priest and Dominican inquisitor, launched a series of witch trials of such viciousness that they were ultimately shut down. He went on to further his campaign by writing, at the request of the pope, the most influential work on witchcraft at the time, “Malleus Maleficarum” (“Hammer of the Witches”), which became the second best-selling book of the era, trailing only the Bible. His cohort in this publication was James Sprenger, a prominent German priest. It was a work in three parts, with the most sensational section describing witches’ sabbaths, or secret night-time rituals that allegedly included witches eating children, having sex with the devil and causing deadly mayhem to the wider community. The last part of the book described and authorized the torture and executions of witches. Essentially, anyone could be charged with being a witch and, once charged, was presumed guilty and subject to horrific tortures that often ended in death.

These sort of draconian charges did not go uncontested. Ulrich Molitor was a legal scholar in the region of southern Germany and northern Italy when he was approached to write a discourse on the nature and power of witchcraft as a rebuttal to Kramer. He issued an early treatise, “De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus” (“Of Witches and Fortunetellers/Diviner Women”) in 1489. Given the inflamed notions regarding witchcraft at the time, Molitor was seen as a moderate. He supported execution for the guilty, but dismissed the idea of witches’ sabbaths as demonic illusions.

Molitor worked in the court of the Archduke Sigismund of Austria, who sought to provide a calm voice in the debate. Sigismund objected to the level of torture heaped upon suspects, for fear that “punishments incites men to say what is contrary to the nature of the facts.” Molitor’s book was printed widely across the realm.

But even though Molitor spoke as a moderate, his work would come to have a dark, lasting impact on society. “De Lamiis” was the first illustrated discussion of witchcraft, with several woodcut images depicting witches. These images, widely reprinted, delivered an impact wildly different from Molitor’s intent.

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“Double, double toil and trouble/fire burn and cauldron bubble…” Shakespeare’s witches scene in “Macbeth” was written some 150 years after this depiction in “De Lamiis.” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

The illustrations portrayed popular notions of the behavior of witches, thus unwittingly entrenching those fantasies more firmly in the public mind. Rather than leveling the conversation with reason, they added fuel to the already heated discussion. Six images that referenced items in Molitor’s text appeared in the work, but they took on their own documentary meaning. There was a woman shooting an arrow; three shape-shifting witches flying on a pitchfork; a male witch riding a wolf; the devil seducing a woman; two witches before a cauldron; and three women feasting outdoors.

The images did not suggest mere “demonic illusion” as his text did. These witches seemed real and corporeal, the physical manifestations of the devil. Their impact was profound and threatening.

It was a common notion, for example, that although witches could take the form of animals, they would never fully cast aside their true identity as a human. Therefore, the book shows that even as those pitchfork-riding witches have transformed into beings with the heads of animals, they still have female bodies.

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The devil, in partially human form, seduces a woman in ” De Lamiis.” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

Conversely, this was true of the devil. Regardless of his transformations into human forms, he always kept some remnant of his beastly self. In the image of the woman being seduced by the devil, for example, he betrays himself with clawed feet and a tail.

“De Lamiis” went through 43 editions between 1489 and 1669, many more than that of the fiercely influential “Malleus Maleficarum.” The imagery of witchcraft thus became entrenched over these centuries, with witchcraft trials and executions lasting until about 1750.

Today, scholars see these 15th-century depictions as windows into understanding the notions of gender and sexuality in the era, as well as the social and cultural impact of religious practice.

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Houdini and the Spirit Realm? Transcribe Hockley’s World of “The Beyond”

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Poster of Houdini performance

Stephanie Stillo and Amanda Zimmerman, both in the the Rare Book & Special Collections Division, contributed to this story.

You can have a lot of Halloween fun without COVID-19 worries, and one of the most original is to help out with the Library’s brand new crowdsourcing transcription campaign, “Seers, Spiritualists, and the Spirit World: The Experiments of Frederick Hockley.” Weird, strange and maybe a little bit creepy? Why, sure! Check out his sketch of the spiritual realm:

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Kind of a drag that Hades is next door to Earth, but, really, are you that surprised?

Hockley was a 19th-century British Spiritualist, Freemason and member of the Rosicrucian Society, a secret worldwide brotherhood whose members believed they had access to ancient, mystical knowledge. He spent over 60 years researching Spiritualism and experimenting with ways of communicating with “the beyond.” Through a medium — someone thought to have a special ability to reach across death’s locked door — Hockley attempted to connect with those inhabiting this other realm. The 11 bound volumes of his notebooks, each about 400 pages, are mostly in question/answer format, with Hockley posing questions to the spirit(s) and writing the answers that come through the crystal or mirror. There is also some automatic writing and astrological readings and charts.

Houdini, who researched magic and Spiritualism relentlessly, added the notebooks to his extensive collection on the subjects. They were included in his donations to the Library.

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A title page from “The Crystal,” Hockley’s notes from this conversations with the dead. Rare Books and Special Collections Division. 

The Hockley campaign is one of many crowdsourcing efforts the Library and an army of volunteers have taken up recently, ranging from the papers of poet Walt Whitman to those of baseball icon Branch Rickey. Trying your hand is free, of course, and you can sign up on the above link.

To help kick things off with this mystical campaign, Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book & Special Collections Division, will present “Harry Houdini: Life, Library, and Legacy,” on Oct. 29 (Thursday) at 3 p.m. EST.  Dimunation will tell the story of Houdini’s remarkable life and his premature end on October 31, 1926. Dimunation also will discuss Houdini’s massive book collection and papers at the Library. It’s nearly four thousand volumes on psychic phenomena, Spiritualism, magic, witchcraft, demonology and evil spirits.

That’s not all, though! A couple of weeks later, join the always charming Amanda Zimmerman, Reference Librarian in the same division, for “Through a Glass Darkly: Frederick Hockley, Harry Houdini, and the Quest for Knowledge.” This talk explores the life of Hockley who, though a firm believer in Spiritualism (Houdini was the ultimate skeptic), shared Houdini’s unrelenting desire to pursue knowledge that would lead to the truth about Spiritualism. Details on both presentations are listed below.

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That’s a “spirit Indian” floating just below a monument at the spiritualist Camp Chesterfield, Indiana. 1944. Photo: Robert Chaney. Prints and Photographs Division.

Despite Houdini’s best efforts, the idea of a ghostly spirit world in the shadows of our own continued long after his death. His wife, Bess, tried to contact his spirit via seances for a decade after he died, to no avail. In another example, Spiritualists in Chesterfield, Indiana, set up a camp in 1890. In 1944, during the midst of World War II, it was still going strong and mystical things seemed to happen all the time. Ghosts didn’t mind showing up for photographs. “Psychic photographer” Robert Chaney took a picture of a stone carving of a Native American that year. When he developed the film — (creepy organ music here) — the print revealed a “spirit Indian,” in full feathered regalia, lurking in the shadows. Amazing.

Camp Chesterfield is still there, by the way, a peaceful 44-acre realm that is on the National Register of Historic Places and operates, per its website, as a “religion, philosophy and science.” Hockley would, no doubt, be proud of this legacy.

Event Details:

“Harry Houdini: Life, Library, and Legacy”

Thursday October 29, 2020 @ 3:00pm

Meeting number (access code): 199 302 8752

Meeting password: Houdini@LC-123

Join by phone @ +1-510-210-8882

WebEx Virtual Room will open 15 minutes prior to start time

Event Details:

“Through a Glass Darkly: Frederick Hockley, Harry Houdini, and the Quest for Knowledge”

Thursday November 12, 2020 @3:00pm

Meeting number (access code): 199 974 0579

Meeting password: Houdini@LC-123

Join by phone @ +1-510-210-8882

WebEx Virtual Room will open 15 minutes prior to start time

Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ada@loc.gov.

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Free to Use and Reuse: Autumn and Halloween Photographs and Prints

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“The Haunted Lane,” an 1889 stereograph, purporting to show a ghost scaring a man and a boy. Photo: Melander. Prints and Photographs Division. 

October, sweet October, drifts down upon us. A breath of fall, a morning chill, an early orange twilight. The farewell to summer, the beckoning of autumn.

And, just around the bend, the descent of winter.

It can be a magical season, so we offer you dozens of Free to Use and Reuse sets of autumn and Halloween copyright-free images from the Library’s vast collections of prints and photographs for you to use in any way, as cheerful or chilling as you wish. They’re part of the Library’s storehouse of images and we group some of them in sets, such as classic movie theaters,  travel posters, weddings,  genealogy, discovery and exploration and so on.

For this month, let’s get started with the ghostly image above, a 19th-century stereograph that shows a female specter of a certain age scaring the daylights out of a man and a teenage boy. The plausible explanation is that this apparition is a mom who, even in the afterlife, just cannot believe Junior and Dad still can’t keep this place together. That picnic basket isn’t going to pick itself up, for heaven’s sake!

Then again, it might also just demonstrate that even in the early days of photography, the idea of creating ginned-up images of ghosts and haints and spirits and duppys was a popular idea, giving us evidence that our forebears were just as scared of the dark as horror movies suggest we might be today. Also, that cheesy photographic stunts were as popular then as cheesy TikToks are now.

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Farmhouse and old barns, Monroe County, West Virginia, 2015. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

Then again, autumn is also the harvest season, the gorgeous changing of the leaves when the relentless green of summer gives way to a burst of reds, yellows, golds, oranges and ambers.  Autumn, imagined: A long walk in the hills, the crackle of fallen leaves underfoot, a thin strip of road curving away into the stands of maples, oaks and aspens that tower above, casting early shadows.

This isn’t just the stuff of postcards from Vermont. Photographer Carol Highsmith worked her way through Monroe County, W.V., a few years ago, capturing the quiet beauty of a rural country homestead, as seen above.

We could talk about the composition and colors — the rectangular modern house, the aged barns with the triangular roofs; the bright yellow, the sun-faded red, the way the trees seem to be a palette of them all — but let’s just look at that wooden fence. It sags. The steel gate sags. There’s no latch, no loop of chain or stretch of wire to hold the pen closed. While the grass outside the fence is neatly mowed, the  barnyard is hopelessly overgrown. It combines to show, through the ways of man and nature, that life in the house continues apace, while the barn and its workings fade into rust, memory and rot. Is there still livestock on the place? If grandpa is still alive in that bright yellow house, one thinks, he’s long past being able to tend anything kept outside. You’re pretty sure that the family dogs, kept in the yard a generation ago, are now house pets.

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Halloween-season attraction in Fort Worth, Texas, 2014. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

You’ve been here, surely.

The state fair, the traveling carnival, the roving circus. They show up in fairgrounds or parking lots on the outskirts of town this time of year, the lights flickering on at dusk. It’s a couple of acres of rides, sideshows, games that feature huge stuffed animals as prizes and, if you’re old enough to remember, ridiculous freak-show attractions that you knew better than to pay to see but did so anyhow.

Above, Highsmith happened across this impressive half-skull with fangs — or maybe just sharp canines — as the entrance way to something at a “Halloween-season attraction” in Fort Worth, Texas, the photographer’s notes say. It’s a gaping skull ready to eat patrons, sure, but the main barrier is a cheap black tarp imprinted with cats’ eyes that suggest you wouldn’t want to pay more than a couple of bucks for the thrills inside. That looming parking-lot light pole in the background emphasizes that you’re not in sophisticated territory.

Still, you’re not gonna come all this way and not go inside, are you? What, you scared?

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