Maps!

In honor of this week's National Geographic Bee, we invite you to visit the current exhibit in Special Collections -- “Mapmaking: Sources from the Geography Library, Map Library, and Special Collections.”

The exhibit honors the path-breaking accomplishments of the History of Cartography Project, which has just published volume six, Cartography in the Twentieth Century.

Tom Tews of the Geography Library and Jaime Stoltenberg of the Robinson Map Library on campus worked with us to select items for the exhibit, which also includes materials from the History of Cartography Project collections. On display are maps, books, aerial photographs, and related items from the 16th century to the 21st, with most from the 20th century, in line with the focus of the publication it honors.

Many items on display carry a distinctly political message. For example, a “dream map” of intended German conquest in World War I (from the Andrew Laurie Stangel Collection in Special Collections) sits alongside a Map of the Western Theatre of War (1918) from the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. A War Atlas for Americans (1944) prepared with the assistance of the Office of War Information (from the Geography Library) illustrates the realities of World War II as delivered to bookshelves in American homes.  A large four-panel map (from the Map Library) dates from the late 1940s in the Soviet Union and celebrates (thirty years later) the achievements of the Red Army during the Russian civil war, complete with Stalin’s words of praise. From the collections of the History of Cartography Project, a necklace charm in the shape of a map of Kurdistan creates and represents Kurdistan as a contiguous and united nation-state, though it is currently divided between the internationally recognized states of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.

The exhibit also honors the important contributions of Arthur H. Robinson, founder of the Robinson Map Library, University of Wisconsin  Cartographic Laboratory, and Wisconsin State Cartographer's Office, and David Woodward, who, with J. B. Harley, founded the History of Cartography Project. Woodward was also a valued friend of the Department of Special Collections and accomplished book artist.

Hours for the exhibit (and for our reading room) are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Celebrating Shakespeare's Birthday

On this, Shakespeare's birthday, we celebrate as well the depth of the Peter Pauper Press Collection in the Department of Special Collections, the generous gift of James and Nancy Dast. We devoted an entire exhibit to the Peter Pauper Press in 2011, but individual titles from the Collection also find their way into other exhibits and class presentations in Special Collections, including our recent collaborations with Prof. Josh Calhoun of the English Department.



The Peter Pauper Press produced many volumes drawing on the works of Shakespeare, and we have been pleased to point them out to students in Prof. Calhoun's Shakespeare classes. Handsomely designed and produced at “prices even a pauper could afford,” such titles capitalized on the enduring popularity of Shakespeare's writings. They include, as shown here, editions smaller and larger of Hamlet,

and multiple editions of Shakespeare's verse, among the many books of poetry produced by the Peter Pauper Press.

Volumes of Shakespeare soliloquies and sonnets exemplify a certain Peter Pauper graphic style;

whereas this one is filled with pithy sentiments we owe to Shakespeare, such as “There's small choice in rotten apples,” from Taming of the shrew. 

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Watch this space for more about Shakespeare and the UW-Madison Libraries, as we, with our many campus and community partners, prepare for the visit in fall of 2016 of one of the Folger Library's copies of Shakespeare's First Folio -- part of a whole year of Shakespeare in Wisconsin.

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Hearty congratulations are also in order to James (Jim) Dast on his receipt of the Rotary Club Senior Service Award. We are so grateful for such steadfast library friends, donors, and supporters as Jim and Nancy Dast.

Aldo Leopold's "Sand County Almanac"

This weekend's community reading of Aldo Leopold's Sand county almanac at the UW-Madison Arboretum prompts us to highlight the rich resources related to Leopold in Special Collections and in the University Archives at UW-Madison.

We are honored to preserve and make available in Special Collections the Robert A. McCabe collection of the writings of Aldo Leopold, presented to the Libraries by Marie S. McCabe. The intriguing story of the collection and its path to the UW-Madison Libraries is recounted in the Messenger magazine for winter 1998/1999, digitized as part of the Friends of the UW-Madison Library collection. Among the notable archival material in the McCabe/Leopold collection in Special Collections are manuscript pages of Leopold's Sand county almanac, which McCabe collected from what he called the "round file" after a secretary had typed them. McCabe, who would succeed his mentor Leopold as department head, noted later in Aldo Leopold, the professor: "I don't know if [Leopold] knew I was collecting his discarded longhand writings, but he knew I was interested in their literary quality." Below, for example, a page dated 4/1/44 and entitled "Thinking Like a Mountain" shows clearly Leopold's writing and editorial process.

Please note: The Aldo Leopold Foundation holds the rights to all of Leopold's unpublished material and works in non-extant publications. Written authorization from the Aldo Leopold Foundation is thus required prior to reproducing this or other Leopold manuscripts for publication or exhibition.

We encourage you to explore more fully

• the large Aldo Leopold Collection preserved at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives, along with many other related archival collections and oral histories there;
• an extensive digital collection produced with funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, Aldo Leopold Foundation, UW-Madison General Library System, and UW Digital Collections Center; 
• the McCabe collection of the writings of Aldo Leopold in the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison (slated for digitization).

Volta and Inflammable Airs

Today's Google doodle honoring the 270th birthday of Alessandro Volta

prompted us to explore works by Volta in two of our outstanding history of science collections, the Cole Collection of Chemistry and the Duveen Alchemy and Chemistry Collection.

Among our holdings are two 18th-century editions of Volta's letters on "inflammable airs from marshes," the first in Italian (published in Milan in 1777) and a French translation (published in Strasbourg the following year).

In these letters, Volta's first studies in pneumatics, he described his investigations of inflammable gases, primarily methane, which he had discovered late the previous year in Lago Maggiore. Volta's interest in this topic was piqued by the work of Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, Marsilio Landriani, and Felice Fontana, among others.

Our two versions (1777 and 1778) of Volta's letters on inflammable gases deployed markedly different approaches to illustrating the phenomena and experimental apparatus in question. The original version, in Italian, featured engravings both decorative and informative mixed with letterpress; the French translation took a simpler tack, ornamenting the text with only a few decorative woodcuts.

Engravings in the Italian original illustrated experimental apparatus and instruments for measuring pneumatic phenomena: 

The publisher of the French translation instead gathered substantive illustrations together on a single engraved plate, a conventional practice for scientific publications of the period and, one assumes, less expensive. Because it could be viewed at the same time as any page of the text, such a plate is now called a throwout. 

For more information on Volta and the broad range of his interests and accomplishments, see, for example, the biography Volta: Science and culture in the Age of Enlightenment by Giuliano Pancaldi. Articles in Nuova Voltiana: Studies on Volta and his times  address many aspects of Volta's scientific work; they include studies of pneumatic chemistry and respirability by such scholars as Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Marco Beretta.  

By the way, in a piece in today's Guardian, "A welcome but misleading Google doodle," Charlotte Connelly, a Ph.D. student at Cambridge, took some issue with historical liberties taken by artist Mark Holmes in his design of today's Google doodle.