Category Archives: Cotsen Curatorial

Happy 250th! : Samuel Holbrook’s Copy Book from 1776

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34370frontwrapper

Front wrapper with an engraving illustrating a fable. Golden Precepts. Hartford, 1776. (Cotsen 34370)

Over the long holiday weekend, let’s take a second look at the post Ian Dooley, the curatorial assistant, wrote some years ago about a manuscript made by a child that is contemporaneous to the Declaration of Independence, with some additional comments by me.

The above image is the front wrapper of Samuel Holbrook’s copy book. Composed between June and September 1776 in Hartford, Connecticut and Boston, Massachusetts, this copy book is a rare artifact that has survived from the time of the founding of this country.  Back when students learned to write using quill pens and ink, they practiced penmanship exercises of different kinds in blank copy books. They wrote out alphabets of Roman and italic letters in the upper and lower cases, proverbs alphabetically organized, passages from literature or arithmetic problems from an engraved instruction manual.

page [8]

page [8]

Sam Holbrook’s copy book happens to have an entry that is a day earlier than a very auspicious date for this country.    The maxims he copied out that day may not speak to  the pursuit of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, but they offer general guidelines for behavior appropriate for any good and upright citizen:

34370page[1]

page [1]. Notice that Sam is using red ink for the headings and black for the precepts.

As you might have guessed, helping students store up ideas and thoughts that would be useful to them throughout their lives was as important as practicing penmanship. These kinds of proverbs in couplets and other aphorisms fill a significant number of pages in copy books (think of the sayings from Benjamin Franklin’s wildly popular Poor Richard’s Almanac).  Frequent topics are the cultivation of traits that smooth the way to wealth:

page [11]

page [11]. Notice that Sam used red, blue, and black ink on this page.

 Either Samuel Holbrook hadn’t heard the recent news about independence or had belonged to a Loyalist family. In the image below, Sam has copied out an extensive praise of British merchants and the far-reaching benefits of commercial activity across the country and around the globe–ideas now under question:

page [13]

page [13]. Sam was probably using a British copy book, which might also explain all the pro-English sentiments.

He also copied out excerpts from poems about the death of a child, the death of a friend, a great storm at sea from Virgil, and a warning to girls about using makeup.  If you want to get a more detailed idea of all the things children were supposed to learn by copying out texts, including page layouts,  Samuel’s copybook has been digitized.  If you want to see how this copy book has been featured in our public programs, check out this blog post by Dana Sheridan on the Cotsen Outreach blog Pop Goes the Page.

Happy 250th, everyone from sea to shining sea…

Christopher Orr’s Funny Animal Alphabet on an Unmentionable Subject

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This June a Research Grant recipient is in residence looking at alphabets in the reading room.  Not just a handful, but as many as possible—and Cotsen has literally hundreds, even thousands.  All the paging promises the fun of discovering something new in the collection.  It took a little time to chase down this print, an alphabet that also refers to Noah’s Ark, making it squarely in scope for Cotsen.  The wry contents note mentioning “excrement” written by the donor’s private librarian signaled that the print was  something out of the ordinary.

Christopher Orr's print "A-Z" (1987).

“A-Z” by Christopher Orr.

The  panel in the  lower right hand corner announces that this is the third printing of “A-Z” below a whimsically scratchy illustration of a whale swimming parallel to Noah’s ark, the animals heads hanging over the gunwhales.   Floating to the left of Noah holding his nose is the caption “Imagine what the smell there must have been,” a thought which has probably occurred to most people between the ages of four and eighty-four if they bother to think very hard about the logistics of keeping two of every species in crowded quarters for over a month.

Now look at the subjects for “A,” “B,” and “C, which are “Ant poo, Bear smells, Cat’s nasty’s.”  The merriment continues with “hedgehog pellets,” “llama lumps,” “owl do-dads, “rabbit currants” all the way to “zebra manure.”

When the print maker Chris Orr (1943-) printed the sheet in 1987, he had not been elected Royal Academician or appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire.  His Wikipedia biography (Christopher there) soberly describes him as an “English artist and print maker who has exhibited worldwide and published over 400 limited edition prints in lithography, etching, and silkscreen” in the collections of the British Museum, the Tate and the Victoria and Albert, to name just a few.  And he has collaborated with Michael Palin on several publications. These achievements are humorously undercut with the comment:

During my thirty nine years as an artist I have been put in various pigeon-holes, such as ‘quintessential English’ or a ‘latter-day Hogarth‘. But are these epithets reasonable? My pictures are composed of well-mixed metaphors, references, allusions, jokes and descriptions. Does ‘Chris Orr-like’ refer to a typically English muddle? The tradition of graphic eccentricity (Heath Robinson, Donald McGill, Steve Bell et al.) is fair enough…

A pretty fair description of his middle-aged jeux de pee…