Library of Congress's Blog, page 91

Mystery Photos: Who Am I?

This is a post by Cary O’Dell of the Library’s National Recording Preservation Board. It was first published on the blog of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, “ Now See Hear !”

For the past year or so, we have been inviting readers of our “Now See Hear!” blog to help us identify some super-obscure photos from the world of film, TV and music. We’ve had a success rate of over 50 percent, but we still have some enduring “unknowns.”

To try to facilitate some more solutions, we’ve gathered 30 of our remaining mysteries below, and we’re asking readers of the Library of Congress blog to help us out.

To increase the size of a photo, click on its thumbnail below. Please add your guesses or solutions to the comments section of the original post on “Now See Hear!” We’ll be updating the post as each image is identified.

(Note that the photo numbers differ slightly in the original post as a result of some photos being identified and thus not included in this post. Please refer to the original numbers when you comment.)

Thank you!

(1) This gentleman with the bow-tie looks familiar but we don’t know his name.

[image error](2) We’d like to know the name of this trio – either as a group or individually.

[image error](3) Anyone recognize this guy? Could he be Irish actor Noel Willman?

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(4) We thought this gent was Bruno Ganz, but we’ve since had that disproved. Could he be French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant?

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(5) The rest of this photo is NSFW. Can anyone recognize her face?

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(6) This is not Dana Delany, Stephanie Zimbalist or Bonnie Bedelia. Who is she?

[image error](7) Does anyone recognize this lady with the hoops? Could she be former Miss America Debbye Turner?

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(8) This photo might be U.K. in origin due to where it was found in the collection. Who is this song-and-dance lady?

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(9) There’s a two-letter code on this photo: TC. That might be the initials of the woman in the photo or the initials of the film she is appearing in – or it might be neither.

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(10) This photo is from White Studios, a busy New York vaudeville and Broadway photographer. But who is the subject?

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(11) We are still trying to ID this actress, or the exotic film she is in.

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(12) No one, so far, has recognized this duo. We thought this might be Wendy and Lisa, but they say no. The Jacobites? Christian Death?

[image error](13) And who is this well-dressed man?

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(14) Is this the local horror host? Is he from Jekyll and Hyde?

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(15) Who is the man with the glasses? British comedy writer Denis Norden?

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(16) This one has frustrated many. He looks very familiar. But we don’t know who he is.

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(17) Here’s a series of styled shots for an unknown personality. Thomas Jane?

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(18) We’d like to know the names of either of these two young men.

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(19) Someone thought this was Shel Silverstein, but it’s not. The cartoon in the background is by Herb Gardner, but it isn’t Gardner, either. Any guesses?

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(20) These creatures must be in a movie or TV production of some sort, but which?

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(21) We assume that this is a musical group, but the names of its members are so far unknown.

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(22) This has got to be a production of “Knickerbocker Holiday” based on the set, costumes and date on the stage. But it doesn’t sync up with the Hollywood version or the Broadway debut.  Suggestions?

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(23) This fetching lass is so far without a name.

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(24) At one time, we thought this was British actress Suzy Mandel – even Mandel said it looks like her – but it’s not. Who is she?

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(25) Blond ambition: This might be from a film – but which one? The woman in the foreground is wearing a graduation cap with an “86” on it.

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(26) So many people thought this was Juliet Prowse that we reached out to the late Ms. Prowse’s son, who tell us it isn’t his mom.

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(27) This shot is probably from a Brazilian film due to the stamp on the front, or from another country south of the border. But we haven’t been able to identify the film or the lady in the photo.

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“Not an Ostrich”: Library Photos on Exhibit in Los Angeles

This is a guest post by Beverly Brannan, curator of photography; Adam Silvia, associate curator of photography; and Helena Zinkham, chief of the Prints and Photographs Division. It was first published on “Picture This,” the division’s blog.

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This exotic bird is not an ostrich but a prizewinning “Floradora Goose.” Actress Isla Bevin holds it at the 41st Annual Poultry Show, held in 1930 at Madison Square Garden.

The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles has created a lively exhibition called “Not an Ostrich: And Other Images from America’s Library.” In support of the show, more than 300 digitized images from the Library are newly available online for everyone to see! An estimated 200 of the pictures are free to use and reuse. The selections come from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, home to one of the largest and most diverse photography collections in the United States.

“Each photograph exposes us to just a fraction of the millions of American stories held in the Library of Congress, from the iconic to the absurd,” said Annenberg Foundation chairman of the board, president, and CEO Wallis Annenberg. “Though cameras and technology have changed over the years, this exhibition shows us that nothing captures a moment, a time or a story like a photograph.”

The title of the exhibit, “Not an Ostrich,” reminds us to ask “What are we really looking at?” It also suggests the whimsical quality of many photographs in the show. Other photographs, however, provoke serious reflection on different cultures and social and environmental conditions.

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Interior of a Chinese pharmacy in Los Angeles in 1904. Photo by Detroit Photographic Co.

Renowned photography curator Anne Wilkes Tucker worked closely with Library of Congress curators, reference librarians, catalogers and digitization specialists for several years to identify engaging, surprising and beautiful images.

The resulting selections combine such Library icons as “Migrant Mother” and the earliest known photographic portrait made in the United States with new discoveries. More than 1 million pictures were online before this project began. But with 15 million photographs in the collection typically described in groups of related images, the individual pictures can often feel uncataloged and unfindable. Browsing among the files and soliciting staff suggestions revealed many fascinating images to include in the exhibition: It’s always a good idea to Ask A Librarian!

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An integrated group poses on a porch, circa 1903–04. Photo by Richard Riley.

The exhibit includes a daguerreotype that dates all the way back to 1839, recently created digital photography and everything in between, thus telling the history of photography in the United States as well as revealing dramatic moments in personal lives.

The thematic sections highlight strengths of the collections: the arts, leisure, sports, built environment, business and science, civil action, daily life and portraits. Selections from the Detroit Publishing Company, the Carol M. Highsmith Archive and the Camilo J. Vergara Archive provide insight into changes in urban and rural America over time. A special section features photographers in action.

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A photographer, probably Emery or Ellsworth Kolb, dangles from a rope in the Grand Canyon in 1908 to take a photo while a man above him straddles a cliff opening to hold the rope. Photo by Kolb Bros.

A documentary movie made by the Annenberg Foundation will also be available. It includes interviews with several photographers, plus behind-the-scene views at the Library. Museumgoers on the West Coast can enjoy the exhibit in person from April 21 to September 9, 2018. Displaying primarily on large screens where the images change, the exhibit offers a chance to experience an eye-catching array of more than 400 pictures.

Learn More:

View photos digitized for the “Not an Ostrich” exhibit, including the many free to use and reuse photographs.
Explore featured content and events for the exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography.
Read an interview between Anne Tucker and Jim Estrin from the New York Times’ blog “Lens”: “The Power of Pictures: Viewing History Through America’s Library.”
Have a look at the Library’s press release about the exhibition.

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Advertising in Los Angeles for the “Not an Ostrich” exhibition. Photo by Roswell Encina.

Pic of the Week: French President Visits the Library

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Grant Harris, chief of the Library’s European Division (left), discusses a rare book from the Library’s collections with President Emmanuel Macron of France. His wife, Brigitte Macron, stands on his right. Photo by Shawn Miller.

President Emmanuel Macron of France and his wife, Brigitte Macron, viewed a display of Library treasures in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building on Wednesday; some of the materials they saw will be incorporated into a new bilingual website about French-American history. The Macrons’ visit coincided with an announcement by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Laurence Engel of the Bibliothèque nationale de France about a collaboration between the Library and the Bibliothèque nationale to provide digital content for the website.

It will build on an earlier online collaboration, “France in America,” launched in 2005, and will highlight historical connections between France and North America from the 16th through the 19th centuries through digital access to books, maps, prints and other documents. Other U.S. institutions, including the National Archives, will support the effort.

“The Library of Congress is thrilled to continue these mutual efforts with the National Library of France to collect, preserve and provide access to the rich cultural heritage of France and French-Americans,” Hayden said. “Together, we have a substantial collection of materials reflecting the deep historical and cultural connections between France and the United States, as well as materials documenting and celebrating French-American life.”

“Since the epic story of the New France, our two nations share also a common history,” said Engel, president of the Bibliothèque nationale. “The future website, a joint initiative of the Library of Congress and the National Library of France, will associate prestigious American institutions such as the National Archives to bring it to life for the benefit of all.”

Inquiring Minds: Finding “Something Wonderful” in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Papers

The following is a guest post by Todd S. Purdum, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a senior writer at Politico and author of “Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution,” published this month by Henry Holt. For more about Broadway, keep an eye out for “Brilliant Broadway,” the May–June issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. The issue, to be published shortly, will be available in its entirety online.

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Todd Purdum. Photo by Jeffrey MacMillan.

For a lover of musical theater and the Great American Songbook, entering the quiet precincts of the Performing Arts Reading Room at the Library of Congress is akin to sneaking into the cave of Ali Baba or King Tut’s tomb, a magical realm full of hidden treasures and unexpected gems. The weeks I spent there over the last three years, researching my new biography of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, were a golden time.

The Music Division is home to the manuscripts of George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Marvin Hamlisch and many others, including, of course, Richard Rodgers, and it also houses the vast bulk of the letters, papers, draft lyrics and libretti of Oscar Hammerstein. (Rodgers’ literary papers are mostly archived at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.)

The Library of Congress acquired the Oscar Hammerstein II Collection piecemeal after Hammerstein’s death from stomach cancer in 1960. In 2015, when I began my research, the papers had long been open to scholars, but had yet to be fully organized or processed. So my dogged digging through them was both a rare privilege and a special challenge. Some of the papers were stored in the moving boxes in which they’d originally arrived, and a manila folder labeled “Farm Equipment” might well instead contain bowdlerized lyrics for the film version of “Carousel.”

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Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, 1959.

But the papers, which have since been more formally processed, constitute a rich survey of the American theater for the first two-thirds of the 20th century, beginning with Hammerstein’s early work with Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg and others, before he teamed up with Rodgers in 1942. A virtual Who’s Who of American political and artistic life parades through the hundreds of folders and dozens of boxes, with Hammerstein’s own wise, wry voice at the center of everything.

It was hard to peruse some discoveries without having the hair go up on the back of your neck. For instance, there was Hammerstein’s hand-drawn map of Claremore, Oklahoma, showing the locations of the characters’ homes in “Oklahoma!” Or his fragment of a draft lyric for “My Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music”:

Riding down hill on my big brother’s bike

These are a few of the things that I like

Or his personally annotated copy of James A. Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific,” in which he made red grease-penciled checkmarks in the margins, and notes about characters and plotlines.

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Scrapbooks Hammerstein compiled for his wife, Dorothy, from the Music Division’s Hammerstein Collection.

There were other less expected finds as well, like the series of red leather-bound scrapbooks, with silk moire endpapers, that Hammerstein compiled for his wife, Dorothy, for each of his shows with Rodgers, starting with “Oklahoma!” And his collection of autographs from 19th-century literary figures like Mark Twain. And his wide-ranging correspondence with world-famous figures and ordinary people alike.

The Music Division, and its deeply knowledgeable and friendly staff, is a precious national resource. Blessedly for a researcher who was also a transcontinental commuter from my home in Los Angeles, it is also open on Saturdays, making each weeklong visit to Washington just that much more productive. It’s no exaggeration to say that the division contains more than a few of my favorite things. It probably has some of yours, too.

This post first appeared on “In the Muse ,” the blog of the Library’s Music Division.

New Poetry Podcast Series Launches

This is a guest post by Anne Holmes of the Poetry and Literature Center.

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U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith speaks with Rob Casper of the Poetry and Literature Center for the inaugural recording in the center’s new podcast series, “From the Catbird Seat.” Photo by Anne Holmes.

As April winds down, our celebration of National Poetry Month at the Library of Congress is still going strong: Today we launch “From the Catbird Seat,” a new poetry podcast series from the Poetry and Literature Center. Each Thursday for the next eight weeks, we’ll explore poetry’s past, present and future.

Join us—Rob Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center, and yours truly, Anne Holmes—as we pull archived recordings from nearly 80 years of literary events featuring poets reading and discussing their work at the Library of Congress. Starting in 1943, these events were largely recorded on magnetic reels as part of the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature (which we’ve begun to digitize and stream online); since about 2001, events have been videotaped and archived as webcasts available to stream on the Library’s website.

With such a rich history of literary events, and with so much of that history archived and at our fingertips, why not start a podcast?

On this first season of “From the Catbird Seat,” we’ll explore eight of our signature events or series from the last five years. Each week will include highlights from a single event or series. As an added bonus, each episode will also feature a special guest who can provide some behind-the-scenes context to the event.

Since this month marks the end of Tracy K. Smith’s first term as 22nd poet laureate consultant in poetry—maybe you attended her closing event last week—we’re kicking off our “From the Catbird Seat” podcast series today with Tracy as our first guest.  Tune in as our laureate sits down with Rob Casper to reflect on her first term and look ahead to her second term; then we’ll play some highlights from her September 2017 inaugural reading—a fitting way, we think, to celebrate our inaugural episode.

In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature recordings of chats with Natasha Trethewey, Juan Felipe Herrera, Kwame Dawes and many more. Stay tuned.

To listen and subscribe to “From the Catbird Seat,” visit our podcast site or find it on iTunes.

New Online: Joseph Holt Papers

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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Joseph Holt, pictured in the February 16, 1861, issue of Harper’s Weekly.

The papers of Joseph Holt (1807–94), now available online, document his career as a lawyer, commissioner of patents, United States postmaster general, secretary of war and judge advocate general of the United States Army.

Holt is best known for his service as judge advocate general during the Civil War and for presiding over the military trial of the Abraham Lincoln assassination conspirators, which is recorded in affidavits, depositions, transcribed testimony; correspondence regarding the commission that tried the conspirators; and various versions of the charges against them, as well as Holt’s correspondence about the trial long after its conclusion.

But in addition to the correspondence, diaries and legal papers that are often used to document the life of a historic figure, the Joseph Holt Papers offer abundant ephemera in the form of bills and receipts, calling cards and invitations dating from the 1820s to the 1890s that shed light on Holt’s daily life and provide evidence of the business activity and built environment of the places where he lived and visited.

The bills and receipts, for example, suggest that the Holt household really liked ice cream. In December 1863 alone, he bought almost 20 pints of ice cream from Joseph Shaffield of Washington, D.C. In 1867, he received at least five bills for cakes and multiple pints of ice cream from Shaffield’s successor, C. White, a “dealer in all kinds of fruits, confectionary and ice cream” (see Feb. 1, March 4, July 3, Aug. 1, Sept. 30).

One could speculate that Holt did some Christmas shopping at jewelers M.W. Galt, Bro. & Co. in December 1877, purchasing a brooch, a turquoise and pearl ring, a gold watch and chain and cameo buttons. He paid with a check from Riggs & Co. bank, also in the Holt Papers.

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Canceled check from Riggs Bank for jewelry purchases, 1877.

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Bill for plants purchased from John Saul, 1883.

Bill and receipts record household costs and improvements made to his house at 236 New Jersey Avenue, S.E., in Washington, D.C., including a variety of paints purchased from L. Martin and awnings ordered from M.G. Copeland in 1876.

Holt paid his gas bill to the Washington Gas Light Company, his water rent and real estate tax to the District of Columbia.

Judging from the bills from nurseryman John Saul over the years, Holt had an abundant garden or bought plants for others. Some varieties were not unusual for a mid-Atlantic garden, but others, like yucca, indicate some horticultural adventurousness on Holt’s part. The illustrations on John Saul’s billheads suggest he sold exotic plants, enticing customers with images of Dracaena Goldieana, Lantania Borbonica, Washingtonia Robusta and Filamentosa.

Bills for now-defunct businesses record their existence in a city, and sometimes illustrate the spaces they once occupied. Plumbers and gas fitters Alexander R. Shepherd & Bros., hatter B. H. Stinemetz and the dry goods company of Perry & Brother included their Pennsylvania Avenue buildings on their billheads. In 1835, Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel in Washington, D.C., looked different from Brown’s Hotel in 1854 and from the greatly expanded Metropolitan Hotel in 1893.

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1835 bill

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1854 bill

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1893 letter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Holt’s international and domestic travels are chronicled in hotel bills, many of which display idealized views of the properties. In the 1840s and 1850s, Holt stayed in Baden, Cairo, Cologne, Geneva and Naples. Within the United States, Holt visited a number of hotels and resorts, including the Girard House in Philadelphia, Barnum’s City Hotel in Baltimore, the Mountain House in Virginia and the International House in Niagara Falls in 1862 and 1876.

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Joseph Holt calling card

Clues to Joseph Holt’s professional and social circles are found in the calling cards and invitations he received. While serving in the Buchanan administration, he met Senators Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin and Stephen A. Douglas, and was invited to events at the White House. His circle during the Civil War and beyond included the Lincolns and General William T. Sherman, among others. In the 1880s, Holt’s circle of friends also included three dogs: Frank, Haddie and Nig, for whom he bought licenses.

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Advertisement for Sun Dial Gas Cooking Stoves

Ephemera also records changes in home technology and trends in printing techniques. Bills could double as advertisements for cooking and heating stoves and refrigerators. They displayed a range of paper colors, including green, pink, gold and purple. Some billheads included embossed cameo stamps that were not only colorful and attractive, but also illustrated the nature of their trade. Thomas Geary’s carriage rental cameo further promised hacks could be “furnished for funerals at the shortest notice,” apparently a selling point in 1866.

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Invoice from Thomas Geary stables, 1866.

 

This Day in History: Happy Birthday LOC!

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The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Today, the Library of Congress celebrates its 218th birthday. On April 24, 1800, President John Adams approved an appropriation of $5,000 for the purchase of “such books as may be necessary for the use of [C]ongress.”

The first books purchased were ordered from London and arrived in 1801. The collection of 740 volumes and three maps was stored in the U.S. Capitol, the Library’s first home. At the time, it was not yet much of a building—only its north wing had been completed.

From 1802 to 1805, the small collection was located in a room previously occupied by the House of Representatives. It was later moved to various places in the Capitol until August 24, 1814, when the British burned and destroyed the Capitol, including the Library.

To replace the loss, Thomas Jefferson in 1815 sold his personal library of 6,487 volumes—which was then unrivaled in America—to Congress. Sadly, a second fire on Christmas Eve of 1851 destroyed two-thirds of those volumes. But the Jefferson books nonetheless remain the core from which the Library’s present collections grew.

A little more than a decade later, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, Librarian of Congress from 1864 to 1897, took on the mission of transforming the fledgling Library into the nationally significant institution we know today.

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An 1889 photograph by Levin C. Handy shows early stages of the Thomas Jefferson Building’s construction.

Appointed by Abraham Lincoln, Spofford obtained approval in 1865 for adding two new fireproof wings to house Library materials, which he soon filled. Then the copyright law of 1870, whose passage he had supported, helped to flood the shelves with two copies of all copyrighted items—copyright owners who registered their works had to submit copies for the Library’s use. Spofford noted in his 1875 annual report that the Library was already out of shelf space, and he pressed Congress to approve his request for a separate building.

It took more than 20 years for Spofford’s great achievement to come to fruition—the majestic Thomas Jefferson Building opened its doors in 1897—but the struggle for its completion and its ultimate success brought the Library of Congress public attention and a new public role.

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A stereograph card copyrighted in 1898 by T.W. Ingersoll shows the Thomas Jefferson Building not long after its opening.

The Jefferson Building was followed in 1938 by the John Adams Building and in 1981 by the James Madison Memorial Building. The Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation opened in Culpeper, Virginia, in 2007. The Library also stores and cares for collections in off-site storage facilities.

Today, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the world’s largest library, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collection. It retains its original role as the research arm of Congress. But it makes its resources available to everyone, providing access to a rich, diverse and enduring source of knowledge to inform and inspire users of all backgrounds and ages in their intellectual and creative endeavors.

To find out more about us and explore our collections and resources, visit our website!

Preservation Week 2018: Celebrating Veterans and Their Families

This is a guest post by Jacob Nadal, Director for Preservation at the Library of Congress.

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Jacob Nadal. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Every spring, libraries all across the U.S. celebrate Preservation Week. This annual event highlights what we can do, individually and together, to care for our personal collections and to support preservation efforts in libraries, archives, museums, historical societies and collecting institutions in communities all across the country.

Preservation Week was launched in 2010 by federal agencies and professional societies concerned with preservation issues, with the Library of Congress and Institute of Museum and Library Services working in partnership with the American Library Association, the American Institute for Conservation, the Society of American Archivists and others.

Although preservation has a long history in libraries, Preservation Week is a 21st-century program, and the 21st century has been an important period for cultural heritage preservation. One of the reasons for this is simple: the 20th century saw the development of more technologies for recording and distributing information than any earlier period in history. Photography, film, video and audio recording all came of age. Publishing of books and journals expanded exponentially and continues to grow year over year to this day. By the end of the 20th century, every genre of media was amplified by digital technologies and, at present, digital information has dwarfed all other media.

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Paper conservators Gwenanne Edwards and Mary Elizabeth Haude prepare an 18th-century map for conservation treatment. Photo by Shawn Miller.

The challenges of preservation in the 21st century are larger and more complex than ever before. In response, librarians and archivists have a responsibility to raise public awareness and develop the skills and techniques necessary to preserve a diverse and growing range of information and artifacts.

The Library of Congress has a special role in this. Our vast scope of collecting requires us to support an extensive program of preservation services and research, and Preservation Week is a welcome opportunity to share our knowledge and sense of purpose. From time to time, though, Congress gives the Library special direction to attend to preservation issues of concern for the American people. It is a particular honor to share an example of this in the form of the Veteran’s History Project (VHP).

VHP is an example of this new preservation consciousness and a model for preservation in the 21st century. A congressionally mandated effort, it was launched at the Library in 2000 to collect U.S. veterans’ oral histories, original personal documents and images and ensure that they are preserved and kept accessible for posterity. VHP collects materials from World War I through the most recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, donated by veterans or their loved ones.

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Research chemist Lynn Brostoff analyses one of the Library’s Claude Laurent glass flutes with musician Robbie Lee looking on. Photo by Shawn Miller.

As older veterans pass away, records of their lives in the military are left behind, and families find themselves faced with the dilemma of what to do with these materials. To keep the records may mean deterioration of these fragile items. To part with them means losing possession of treasured pieces of family history. By donating material to VHP, veterans and their families can ensure that their material is not only preserved according to the highest archival standards, but also made available to their family members, researchers and the public for generations to come.

For more recent service members or veterans, preserving records presents new challenges. Traditional forms of communication and documentation—letters, photographs, handwritten journals—have been replaced by emails, digital images, social media and blogs, all dependent on an ever-evolving array of hardware and software. Fortunately, the Library provides many resources to aid in the preservation of these valued mementos—from guidance about preservation practices for individuals, to a world-class repository of personal accounts, open to the participation of all Americans who have served their country in uniform.

We are celebrating Preservation Week on Monday, April 23, will a full day of programming, including behind-the-scenes tours of the Preservation Directorate; a lecture on the Library’s enduring work to collect, preserve and honor the legacies of our veterans; and a special display of VHP collection items presented by Library conservators and the project’s archivists. If you will be in Washington, D.C., consider joining us.

Although Preservation Week is a moment in time, our preservation efforts are ongoing. In addition to Preservation Week events, we offer a variety of  tours, lectures and programs throughout the year. You can also reach out with preservation-related questions through our Ask a Librarian page.

If you would like to support our work to preserve and protect collections at the Library and across the nation, you can make a donation. Your contribution will help to sustain education and outreach programs, research and training and internships that launch careers in preservation.

New Online: Benjamin Franklin Papers

This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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Half-length portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Wilson, 1761. Like Franklin, Wilson experimented with electricity; in the background of this painting, lightening strikes a village. Franklin sat for the painting while serving as a diplomat in London.

The papers of Benjamin Franklin at the Library of Congress have had almost as adventurous a life as Franklin had himself. They have been abandoned and recovered, cut up by a dressmaker to make patterns and used as collateral for debt. After surviving all of that, they narrowly escaped fiery destruction on a New York pier (more on this later).

Now, in a technological development that would have fascinated Franklin, the Manuscript Division is pleased to announce that the papers have been digitized and made available on the Library of Congress website.

The approximately 8,000 items that constitute Benjamin Franklin’s papers at the Library are organized in four groups, or series.

The first two, constituting the bulk of the collection, once belonged to Franklin’s grandson, William Temple Franklin, who used them as the basis of his “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin,” published in 1817–18. The U.S. government purchased these two series from American book dealer Henry Stevens in 1882, housing them at the State Department until they were transferred to the Library of Congress in 1903 and 1922.

The third series consists of other Franklin papers the Library acquired by gift or purchase from various sources. The fourth series, which is not included on the Library’s website, contains copies of Franklin papers in other libraries and private hands.

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A May 23, 1785, letter from Franklin to George Whatley. Franklin is credited with inventing bifocal glasses, which he sketched here for Whatley, a London merchant and pamphleteer.

Now, for the first time, researchers can view the first three series online. They have long been available on microfilm, but the website provides enhancements and additional information not available on the film.

The front page of the Benjamin Franklin Papers site describes the contents of each series and the scope of the collection. A related resources link features a bibliography. Information for teachers and researchers is available in multiple links under the headings Teaching Resources and Expert Resources, while an articles and essays link provides a timeline of Franklin’s life and the story of the papers’ provenance. The papers are also searchable. For instructions, see “Learn More” below.

To return to the adventures of the Library’s Franklin Papers, we must go back to William Temple Franklin. He was partly responsible for the creation and preservation of these papers, but also for the dangers they were exposed to—dangers he was no stranger to himself.

Temple, as he was known, was born in London in 1760 or 1762, the son of William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s son. Taken from his mother, abandoned by his father, enduring early years in foster care, Temple was eventually rescued by his grandfather, Benjamin Franklin.

Between 1776 and 1785, when Benjamin Franklin was a diplomat in France, Temple served as his secretary, helping to negotiate the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War, among other tasks.

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A portrait of William Temple Franklin by John Trumbull, 1790. Yale University Art Gallery.

When the Franklins returned to the United States, despite his grandfather’s backing, Temple failed to find a job, possibly because of his reputation for flightiness. Benjamin Franklin, trying to help Temple, left him his papers, thinking he could profit by publishing them.

The portion of the papers Temple chose to publish, now series one and two, show the marks of his rough handling—his editorial scribblings, the damp of sea voyages, and the raggedness that resulted when he abandoned them after he was done with the “Memoirs.”

As a result of events that remain murky, the abandoned papers were discovered years later tied in bundles in the shop of a London tailor who had been Temple’s landlord. By this time, the tailor had cut up an unknown number of Franklin’s letters and writings to make patterns.

Henry Stevens, the book dealer, purchased the papers but ended up losing them to creditors. He eventually repurchased them with aid from Junius Spencer Morgan (father of banker and book collector J. Pierpont Morgan). Then, in 1882, Stevens sold them to the U.S. government.

Remarkably, the papers once again narrowly escaped destruction after traveling safely from England to New York—the pier they landed on burned just after a courier picked the papers up to deliver them to Washington.

For more about the colorful history of the Benjamin Franklin Papers and the life of William Temple Franklin, read the provenance essay on the Franklin papers website, and see works by Whitfield Bell, Claude-Anne Lopez, Francis Philbrick, Stacy Schiff and Henry Stevens in the bibliography included in related resources.

Learn More: Using the Franklin Papers Online

Because 18th-century handwriting can be hard to read, use the online collection in conjunction with Yale University’s published edition of Franklin’s papers, available at franklinpapers.org and Founders Online.

The published edition of Franklin’s papers is full-text searchable, but the images on the Library’s website are not, a by-product of the papers’ origins as microfilm. Be warned, finding what you want will require some patience. Your reward will be a glimpse of the impressions Franklin’s hand made on the page.

To find a letter or other document in the papers, follow these steps:

Look in the index (under Expert Resources) to see if what you want is at the Library.
If it isn’t at the Library, check Founders Online. An editorial note at the bottom of each letter gives its location.
If it is at the Library, the index will give its location in the collection. For example: The location of a letter from Franklin to his wife, Deborah Read Franklin, from January 6, 1773, is listed in the index as s1v11p39, or series 1, volume 11, page 39. Franklin’s copy of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, is listed in the index under Great Britain & U.S.—Treaty of Peace, September 3, 1783, and its location is s1v08p236, or series 1, volume 8, page 236.
Once you know where in the collection the thing you want is, the next step is to find it. Use the finding aid (expert resources). Click arrangement, which will take you to a box list of the collection.
Alternatively, from the front page of the collection, scroll down to description of series and click on the series it is in. From the list that results, find the relevant box, volume or folder. Within each series, everything is in chronological order.
Experiment with the images you find to see how you can view them singly or grouped in a grid, gallery, list or slideshow. In single image view, you can enlarge, rotate and download images as JPEGs, TIFFs and GIFs.

New Online: Unique Collection of Censored Japanese Books

This is a guest post by Benny Seda-Galarza of the Library’s Communications Office.

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“Kanikōsen” (“The Crab Cannery Ship”) by Takiji Kobayashi (1903–33) is one of the most famous works of Japanese proletarian literature. On the cover of this copy, the censor’s comments indicate the page numbers of passages that were selected for deletion and note concerns about protecting “public peace and order.”

The Library’s Asian Division has digitized an archive comprising more than 1,000 marked-up copies of monographs and galley proofs censored by the Japanese government in the 1920s and 1930s. The Japanese Censorship Collection reveals traces of an otherwise-hidden censorship process through marginal notes, stamps, penciled lines and commentary inscribed by the censors’ own hands.

Each of these books is “uniquely different from all other existing copies and editions of similar titles in Japan and elsewhere, making this collection a rich archive here at the Library of Congress for the historical study of censorship,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

In prewar World War II Japan, the Home Ministry was among the most powerful of government entities. Not only was it tasked with censoring publications, it also held jurisdiction over police, infrastructure, elections, public health and religious affairs. Following Japan’s defeat, the ministry’s censorship library was seized by the Allied forces and sent to the Washington Document Center in the United States.

It was later transferred to the Library of Congress, along with massive volumes of books and other materials requisitioned from other official institutions, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Japanese Imperial Army and the South Manchurian Railway Company. The Library digitized the Japanese Censorship Collection in collaboration with Japan’s National Diet Library.

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Ihara Saikaku’s “Eiri kōshoku ichidaionna” (“The Life of an Amorous Woman) is a classic of late-17th-century vernacular fiction. The censor has penciled a light red circle around the lovers in the middle of the page, indicating an offending item.

“Prior to World War II, censorship prevailed in Japan with the official aim of protecting peace and order in society from subversive ideologies and guarding traditional customs from obscenity. Toward these ends, censors suppressed, deleted or revised publications that they deemed a threat to social and political stability,” said Eiichi Ito, a Japanese reference specialist in the Asian Division.

The majority of the collection dates from between 1923, when the Home Ministry’s building in Tokyo burned down in the Great Kanto Earthquake, and 1945, when the imperial Japanese government’s surrender marked the end of World War II.

Common targets of censors included works that espoused socialist ideologies or contained sexual themes, but many ultranationalist groups, especially those promoting antigovernment activities, drew the attention of the censors’ red pens as well. Their decisions are reflected by handwritten comments and Home Ministry seals stamped on copies of the books.

At present, 247 of the censored titles are available on the Library’s website for off-site viewing, but this number will continue to grow as more titles enter the public domain. All 1,327 items in the collection can be viewed on site at the Library.

For an in-depth discussion of the collection’s highlights, read this blog post by the Asian Division’s Eiichi Ito.

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In this excerpt from “Kanikōsen,” workers on a factory ship have come to realize the nature of their exploitation at the hands of the ship’s ruthless manager. The text underlined in red by the censor reads in part: “‘This canned crab is made out of our real blood and sweat.”