Bookplates

In addition to collections of materials like books, manuscripts and images, the Historical Society has a wide range of ephemeral items, including bookplates like the ones below:

Bookplates range in size from modest indications of ownership to full-page exclamations (usually of the owner’s vanity). An example like the one above offers a visual demonstration of a portion of the book’s history as it passed from one owner to the next.

Mr. Nightingale’s warning is a much kinder version of the medieval book curse, many of which include punishments like snake-bite, palsy, bookworm-entrail-gnawing, and the flames of hell.

Here are two examples of more recent bookplates. Many of the modern bookplates in our collections came from the Providence Lithograph Company Records.

For your bookplate fix, visit the Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie blog.

The Best Pie They Ever Tasted (Martin Page, part II)

In his cypher book, Martin Page let his artistic skills shine, but when the time came to put his life into words, Page resorted to idiosyncratic text in an idiosyncratic format.

Long before Jack Kerouac taped sheets of paper together and fed them into his typewriter to create the On the Road scroll, Martin Page decided that individual pages were too limiting for what he had to say, so he glued about a dozen sheets of individual paper into two scrolls, one measuring nearly six feet in length and the other just over four*.

The text of the scrolls is written in a spidery hand, possible indicating the shakiness of advancing age. Since no description would really do the text justice, here are a few selections:

Jokes, like this one, are common—

A young man stepped into a bookstore and said he wanted to get a young man’s companion. Well, Sir, said the book seller, here is my daughter.

Or observations on issues taken from his life (spelling and punctuation left unchanged)**—

One of my acquainces died Childleless and left his Wife by will as long as she remained his widow avaluable house and all his Personal Property, that she might live independent she made agreat take soon got married, the nexday his Brothers cam in and tooke all of her property and left her poor, her husband that maried for the property found it all gone he left her, would it not be best to give the Wife whare thare is no children such a part on of his Property free and clear of any incubrance, whare tharer is children it belongs to them after Her derth, a man has right to Prevent his widow from marying after he is didd
They come to us, we must soon go there.

Or the occasional gnomic passage that completely defies description—

What bones governs the world the cutridge bon the bull Ballet Bon and Bun et Bon, Interest is the King who Rules the world.

And for anyone planning a menu based on historic recipes, Page’s codfish and potatoes recipe sounds pretty good (you might consider pairing it with Benjamin Franklin’s milk punch)—

With the Cook I went to work pounding up dunfish Codfish and new Potatoes in the moster with a Little flour Plenty of fresh Butter a little mustard Oil Clover mau and Pepper as thisck and fine as Indian Bread dow, put in the Pan and baked a little when put on the table asked what it was I told them Fish and Potatoes, a baked Pie, they made the mount of Their dinner of 8 it was Excellent the best Pie They Ever tasted

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* “Reminiscences,” in the Martin Page Papers, MSS 599, Box 1, Folder 14, Rhode Island Historical Society. Transcription folder 14a. www.rihs.org/mssinv/Mss599.htm

** Transcription by Harriet Sprague Doolittle Rosch, one of Page’s descendants.

Christ Church Records

With this post we’re beginning what will hopefully become a regular feature, our collection of the month, and our first collection to be featured is the records of Christ Church (MSS 9001-C).

Formed in the late 1830s*, the congregation of Christ Church Episcopal in Providence is notable as the first African-American congregation to be admitted to the Episcopal diocese.

Early on the congregation struggled with debt assumed in the process of constructing the church building in 1842. By the early 1850s it had ceased to operate and most of the members had transitioned to St. Stephen’s Church.

One of the most important early pastors of the church was Eli Worthington Stokes, who led the church from 1846-49. Stokes left Christ Church and Providence to be a pastor in Liberia, where he died in 1867, as the following excerpt from The African Repository** indicates:

The image above is taken from the “Record Book” of the church, which comprises our collection of their materials. The page depicted covers the period from 17-29 May 1842, which includes the climactic moment of the Dorr Rebellion,*** the attempt to capture the state arsenal in Providence. The event is noted in the first entry at the top of the page. Only a few days later, on May 24th, the record book records a fire at the church, set “by some person or persons” and causing $500 in damages.

Much of the existing second-hand knowledge of the congregation’s history derives from the diary of Bishop John Prentiss Kewley Henshaw, which is found in another of the Historical Society’s collections (MSS 1133). Entries relating to Christ Church begin in 1843 and continue through to the church’s dissolution. Henshaw’s materials arrived at the Historical Society separately from the Christ Church materials, providing an example of how items from across the Historical Society’s holdings can work in tandem to illuminate a historical moment.

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* A limited account of the church is available in George F. Bragg’s History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church (1922), available online at http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/bragg/bragg.html#bragg102 .

 

** Vol. 44, no. 7 (July, 1867).

*** A forthcoming issue of Rhode Island History will include an article on the Dorr War.