Modern Books and Manuscripts

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library. Thanks to Rachel Parker, Archival Assistant, for contributing this post.

In May I began describing, photographing, and re-housing a discrete collection of posters within the Ludlow-Santo Domingo (LSD) Library collection. Tackling the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library poster collection has been exciting, in part because of the descriptive challenges in title creation. Having recently finished describing about 780 unique posters, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about posters as information carriers and the equal importance of text and image. As Susan Tschabrun, archivist, wrote in her 2003 article “Off the Wall and into a Drawer”[1] for the American Archivist, posters, like most ephemeral objects, were never meant to be primary source material and can be difficult to interpret and describe in a standard way because of their ‘temporariness.’ A poster’s text-image relationship often places it directly in a specific moment, movement, or cultural ethos. The posters in this collection tell inside jokes, represent events absent from history books, and speak a visual language that may mean the most to a very few.

Head out to oz, design by James McMullen : lithograph poster, undated. MS Am 3135.

The LSD Library posters are a perfect example of the complexity of this medium because the bulk were created during a movement breaking away from the known and the normalized. The counterculture movement, like many art, music, and cultural movements, was an underground movement for a decade before it was launched into the mainstream. Many early psychedelic images that sought to challenge the norm—with impossible-to-read fonts and colors and patterns created to mimic the effects of hallucinogens—are now mass-produced and ubiquitous in college dorm rooms. The LSD Library poster collection captures the transformation from underground to popular art, as well as almost a century’s- worth of iconographic metamorphosis in poster art.

So how does this complicated relationship between ephemerality, text-image symbolism, and the gradual adoption of underground art into the mainstream make archival description for a finding aid challenging? First we have to answer a different question: what is the title of a poster? Should every word on the poster be in the title? The most bold words? Is the title read like a sentence? Can you put visually separated word groups together in a sentence to create a title?

Let’s take for example the two posters below:

“Free the prisoners of weed!” has a lot of textual information. In this case, the boldest words coincidentally (or perhaps deliberately) can be pieced together to form a coherent title. These keywords place the poster in a political moment, give it a time and place, and hint at a larger cultural movement.

Conversely, for “Invisible Circus” almost all the language on the poster is preserved. Although at first glance it may not seem like a complex text-image relationship, in fact, these two elements of the poster are telling different stories. The performance or circus act being promoted with an image of a tiger and font in the shape of a gypsy wagon tells one story and the words tell another. The secondary purpose of this performance is a “72 hr environmental community happening.” Transcribing a long title in the catalog record or finding aid, though unwieldy, gives access to the researcher looking for circus acts and the research concerned with environmentalism and the peace movement.

The answer to our earlier questions is therefore not a matter of format but context. The words on the poster, how bold they are, how much wordage there is, matters less than conveying the context through the title. That means including artists, sponsors, distributors, and venues as well as the boldest title text, and sometimes text with less visual importance.

In my next blog post I will address my original concern: how does the relationship of text and image and the particular countercultural context of the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library poster collection make titling posters a challenge for catalogers?

[1] Page 305 http://americanarchivist.org/doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.66.2.x482536031441177?code=same-site

Image 2: Free the prisoners of weed! 4th annual Washington D.C. smoke-in & impeach Nixon march, Youth International Party : poster, 1973. MS Am 3135. http://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/c/hou02925c01611/catalog

Image 3: Invisible circus, a 72 hr environmental community happening, sponsored by the Diggers Artist Liberation Front, Glide Foundation, Glide Church, designed by Dave Hodges : poster, 1967. MS Am 3135. http://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/c/hou02925c01503/catalog