Houghton Library Blog

It’s official: I adore the Illustrated London News [this is a Harvard resource I fear, and password-protected]. Once again, it has come to my rescue when I’ve needed solid visual clarification about a historical event. This time (regular readers will remember my earlier Crimean adventure) as a part of the clean-up after our Historical Sheet Music Collections survey, I was cataloging a series of sheet music imprints featuring Marie Taglioni (or so I thought), and after running through the usual complement of images from La Sylphide, I ran across this detached, closely-cropped cover.

Taglioni Mazurka cover

In late 1792, most of Europe was becoming increasingly troubled by the aggressive actions of France’s revolutionary First Republic, which had declared war on Austria and Prussia in April 1792. The War of the First Coalition (1792–1797) was the first attempt by the European monarchies to defeat the French in their political ambitions. The Austrian Netherlands, the Rhine, and Great Britain sent invading forces into France. As a member of the House of Bourbon, King Ferdinand IV of the Kingdom of Naples, naturally joined in the fray.

This set of remarkable state directives, largely unrecorded, document a massive build-up of the Neapolitan military in preparation for its mobilization. The Englishman Sir John Francis Edward Acton, Ferdinand’s prime minister and a commander of the Neapolitan land and sea forces, was ultimately responsible for the sophisticated strategies they reveal. There is no doubt that they would have been classified as highly sensitive with their precise technical specifications for dozens of types of artillery, including heavy portable weaponry. The thick paper stock that buckles and waves and frustrates attempts to scan would have helped them stand the abrasive use by foundries and military operatives in the field.

[Thanks to Karen Nipps, Head of the Rare Book Cataloging Team, for making this post.]

We have all heard it. If you think of googling it, by the way, don’t—nobody really knows who said it first. We have all said it. Ironically, even writers are fond of it. “The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book,” says Evgenii Bazarov, the revolutionary-inclined youth of Ivan Turgenev’s novel, “Fathers and Sons,” to Anna Sergeevna Odintsov, a noble woman of considerable beauty and ability to make men fall in love with her. It is perhaps worth mentioning that in his case, the words come from the mouth of a nihilist and a cynic.

But say that to a cataloger and you are unlikely to get a favorable response—more like a severe glance and pursed lips. A thousand or not, words are the stuff cataloging is made of. And being neither cynics nor nihilists, in cataloging we believe in words. The question is what made us start using pictures in our cataloging? (more…)