Through January 21 of 2011, the MSE Library is hosting a student exhibit called “Reading the Peabody.” The exhibit, which displays books from the Peabody Library, is the final project for a class taught last spring semester by Gabrielle Dean, who is both the Librarian for English and the Writing Seminars and the Curator of Modern Literary Rare Books and Manuscripts.
The class, called “Reading Culture in the 19th Century Library,” met at Peabody library once a week and culminated in a final project that required students to compile a collection of twenty books illustrating a theme relevant to the time period.
“We examined the Peabody Library as an example of what people were reading in the 19th century and what that meant,” Dean said.
“So, for their final projects, students put together book collections from the Peabody. They actually went into the stacks and pulled books that . . . they understood to be representative of the Peabody’s collections.”
The exhibit is in M-level of the MSE Library, where anyone walking toward the tables can see a couple dozen books. At first glance the books all look the same-crumbling pages and deteriorated bindings exposed under glass display cases. However, it doesn’t take too long to notice the details — a cover made of ivory, a gold engraving, a famous author, or an intriguing back-story.
The exhibit showcases four student collections: “The Stewardship of a Republic: Ancient Rome and Baltimore,” by Melissa Phreaner, who graduated last spring; “Under One Roof: Religious Books in the George Peabody Library,” by sophomore Katherine Tan; “Go West, O Pioneers! America’s Obsession with the Wilderness,” by senior Cassandra Kowal; and “Once Upon a Time: Fairy Tales in the George Peabody Library,” by Allison Burton, who graduated last spring.
Each display consists of five to eight original 19th century texts from each students’ collection of twenty. This is the latest of several exhibits that have been held on M level in the past, and it is not the first to involve students. The library is also in the beginning stages of developing a digital platform, which will digitize this and other exhibits.
Each book in the exhibit tells three stories simultaneously — the story contained in the original text, the story of the people who flipped its pages in the 19th century and the story of the student who brought the book out from its dusty hiding place and into the light of the MSE Library.
Kowal, whose exhibit is currently on display, explained the challenge of putting together a coherent and meaningful collection.
“The assignment was to find a collection of books with a central theme,” Kowal said, “and then [figure out] why those kinds of books would’ve been in a library, what purpose they would’ve served and then kind of find a larger context for that too.”
In her exhibit about travel and Westward expansion in America, Kowal tried to imagine why the Peabody library housed travel guides despite the fact that it was a non-circulating library, meaning that people were not permitted to remove the books from the building.
“So I was interested in why they would’ve had travel literature in the Peabody,” Kowal said, “because if it wasn’t circulating, people weren’t taking it with them. And it was open to the public and poor people wouldn’t be able to travel either, [because] they were working.”
To solve the mystery, she had to imagine what the patrons of Peabody in the 19th century were like. She guessed that those who could not afford to travel visited the Peabody to read the published travel journals of their more wealthy contemporaries.
“There’s a lot of speculation, but it’s really cool to talk about and think about . . .” she said. “What I came up with was poor people and working class people would come and read [the travel journals] there so it was almost like they were going out.”
The overarching theme of Kowal’s collection is how westward expansion unified the people and created an American identity. In addition to travel guides, her collection also includes selections from children’s literature, a book documenting the expedition of Lewis and Clark and stories about Native Americans. Of note is a book written by Thomas Jefferson himself, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” which attempted to show the States’ natural advantage over Europe and included a table of the relative weights of wild game on both continents.
The idea for her exhibit came from another class, “Nature’s Nation,” taught in the English department.
“ . . . In that class we did a lot of like reading [about] the west,” Kowal said, “and that actually happened to be the same period as the Peabody was being formed.“
Tan, another student curator, took her own collection in an entirely different direction. Inspired by a personal interest in religious books, she found books about a variety of religions, written from a variety of perspectives.
“I was very interested in religious books and I was sure that religion was a very big part in the Peabody Library . . . Peabody has different religions under one roof, as shown in the bible, in the Koran, Buddhist texts, Hindu texts and even more rare religions such as Baha’i and others.”
She chose books that were written from a variety of perspectives for many reasons. For example, her collection included scholarly works on religion as well as practical prayer books ranging from those with relatively neutral viewpoints to those with strong ethno-centric biases.
Balancing scholarly research with an eye for public appeal was not easy, however. Putting together an exhibit is fundamentally different than writing a scholarly paper, because the curator must find objects that are eye-catching and easy to explain in a fifty word label, but still relevant to the theme.
“ . . . As you gain expertise in something, you start to understand all kinds of nuances and find things that are really cool to you because you have a specialist’s knowledge,” Dean explained, “but you always have to keep in mind that, unlike a research paper or something, for an exhibit you have to look for items that are going to be acceptable for people who don’t have that specialist knowledge.”
“You have to look for things that something about them has to be accessible — like maybe they’re illustrated, or they have a cool title page or a cool binding . . . ”
The project required students to take on the roles of scholar and curator at once, encouraing them to be involved in capacities greater than just pulling books out of the shelves at Peabody Library and moving them to MSE Libary for awhile.
For one, the students had to navigate through a very limited catalogue system. The catalogue at Peabody is online, but since it originally came from a card catalogue, it works under the Dewey decimal system. Furthermore, the information online is often minimal — the title, the author and the publisher are often the only details available. In handling the books themselves, the students had to be careful.
“We used the catalogue, but some of the books were not in the catalogue,” Tan said, “so we had to go to the stacks, and pull the books out, and they were really old and musty.”
Unlike Kowal, whose work on this exhibit tied in with her minor in Museums and Society, Tan is pursuing biology. However, she appreciated the opportunity to take a class outside of the sciences.
“I thought it was a very good opportunity for me, because I’m a science major. And I rarely have opportunities like that to do something humanities related and something where I actually can work with historical stuff.”
Kowal, too, found the project rewarding.
“We basically got free rein to wander all around the Peabody library,” Kowal said. “It was just like ‘ready, set go’ and we just walked up and down the stairs and took books off the shelves. It was really really cool.”
Dean was pleased with her students’ work, especially with the variety of interests the exhibits represented.
"I didn’t expect the students to come up with topics that were so distinct yet in their own way really shed light on this thing that they have in common, which is the library and its really cool history.”
For most Hopkins students, however, it seemed that it would take something more unusual to break up their beeline to the tables of the library. Some students were simply unaware of the exhibit’s existence.
Paige Robson, a junior, expressed the apathy that seemed representative of the student body in regards to the exhibit.
“I mean, it’s better than what [the MSE Library] had before, which was, what, like showing how they built the library?” she remarked, “I don’t really care about that.”
The original idea behind displaying the books at the MSE Library rather than at the Peabody Library was to expose more people to the collection. The latter is known for its aesthetic architecture, but fewer people go there to look at the books themselves. Even scholars at Hopkins do not always utilize the Peabody’s collection when the books are available online or as reprints.
“People go to the Peabody and they’re like ‘wow, this is so beautiful,’ but actually getting into its collection is sometimes — you know people don’t do that so much,” Dean said. “So there’s certain barriers to actually using the Peabody [Library], so we wanted to have the exhibit on campus to sort of bring a little piece of the Peabody [Library] to the rest of the community.”
However, even bringing the books to the MSE Library, arguably the academic hub of the Homewood campus, did not guarantee that they were seen.
“It’s Hopkins,” senior Godfrey Chery said. “People will not take the time [to take a look], unless you have visitors–like parents, who might come here and be like ‘wow, this is really nice.’ Us students? We don’t care much about it.”
Students suggested that to attract more attention, the exhibit would have to be interactive. When asked what he thought of the exhibit, senior Rudy Joly responded that he wished he could page through the books.
“I mean just one page is exposed up,” he said, “it does not tell much about the book really.”
Freshman Paul Tershakovec expressed the same thought with some humour. “Well, I want to touch the books,” he said. “I mean, these are cool books, but they’re not touchable. Give us books we can touch.”
However, to the extent that the exhibit’s purpose was to serve as an engaging final project for the students in the “Reading the Peabody Class,” to shed light on 19th century reading culture, and to show some interesting books to those who do pause to look, it was definitely successful.
