Cool@Hoole

Join us Tuesday, March 11, 2008 at the Hoole Special Collections Library, 2nd Floor Mary Harmon Bryant Hall at 4:30 pm for a lecture by Dr. Edward Tang, Associate Professor of American Studies, The University of Alabama. [flier for event here]

His talk, Turning Japanese: How Winnifred Eaton became Onoto Watanna in Victorian America explores the complicated life of Winnifred Eaton (1879-1954), one of the first known writers of Asian descent to be published in America. She wrote several popular novels set in Japan, yet she tried to hide her own ethnic identity – she was born in Canada to an English father and Chinese mother who had been adopted by missionaries. Eaton published under the Japanese pen name — Onoto Watanna.

Many of Eaton’s novels revolve around romances between American men and Japanese women. In Me, A Book of Remembrance, which was published anonymously, she wrote a thinly veiled autobiography in which she discussed her work as a writer but avoided mentioning her half-Chinese background.

“Eaton’s identity as a writer relied on cultural borrowings and blurrings,” Tang said. “By assuming the identity of a Japanese woman, she bowed to market demands for things Japanese but also challenged distinct racial or ethnic categories that many people at the turn of the century assumed to be fixed and stable.”

The lecture is in conjunction with an exhibit of books by Eaton/Watanna from the Hoole Special Collections Library and the 2008 Sakura Festival at UA and in Tuscaloosa. The books on exhibit are from the Richard Minsky Collection at the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library, and from a gift from Dr. John Crowley. Some of Eaton/Watanna’s works are featured in the UA Libraries collaborative digital project, Publishers’ Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books.

It was in Chicago that Eaton/Watanna published her first novel, Mrs. Nume of Japan (1899), which told the story of a romance involving two couples, one American and one Japanese, who switch partners during a series of romantic and tragic encounters. It was an immediate success. From then on she published almost a novel a year. Moving to New York she wrote her next novel, A Japanese Nightingale in 1901. It was translated into many languages and was even made into a Broadway play and film (1919). She lived in New York until 1917. During that time, she married and divorced Bertrand Babcock with whom she had four children. She had much financial and writing success. In 1910, she wrote the bestseller Tama, which is shown here.

This lecture is part of the Sakura Festival in Tuscaloosa and The University of Alabama. A reception will follow. This event, is of course free and open to the public.

It is a distinct pleasure and honor to announce that the Richard Minsky Collection of 19th and early 20th century publishers’ bindings have been added to Publishers’ Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books. This incredible group of books was acquired by The UA Libraries in 2007 and is part of the Hoole Library’s collections.

One way to access the corpus of Minsky books in PBO, simply go to http://bindings.lib.ua.edu/sitesearch.html

and keyword search “minsky”.

This will give you a glimpse at all 560 books included in the project — browse through the pages, click on what you like, and change the view to experience larger images. From there, you can click on any of the hyperlinked terms and explore, for example, in the book above (pba02679), there is a hyperlinked subject heading that will bring you to all of the examples of togas in PBO — clothing/Accessories–Togas Or hearts — there are eighty-six examples of hearts used as decorative elements in PBO! And give yourself some time — it’s a great site to explore and experience incredible imagery and design.

This addition, along with 200 new books included from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will bring the total number of books to 5286 in the PBO project, and well over 10,000 images.

About Publishers’ Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books:

In September 2003, The University of Alabama, University Libraries, in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, received an IMLS National Leadership grant to create the digital resource, Publishers’ Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books (PBO).

All academic libraries have within their holdings books bound in 19th century decorative bindings. These materials are significant in their place within the fabric of American history and culture, but efforts to present these bindings in a collection that is representative of the era as a whole and to make them available virtually, via the World Wide Web have been limited.

Over the past five years, PBO has developed into a significant searchable digital collection of decorative book bindings, along with an enormous body of value-added resources including a comprehensive glossary, galleries, bibliography and webliography, lesson plans and teaching tools, and so much more. It has strengthened the growing interest in and created a broader awareness of this “common” object called the book. And it has done it in so many ways!

Publishers’ bindings cover many of the books that people have in their homes today, but their owners are often unaware of their cultural and historical significance. These bindings reflect not only social and cultural history, but bibliographic history as well. PBO informs users about the importance of publishers’ bindings as reflections of historical events, artistic styles and movements, 19th and early 20th century literature and writing, and the evolution of commercial binderies, and the 19th century book trade and other areas of research and scholarship. It also expands awareness of the book as artifact and of the role decorative bindings play in providing a window into historical, cultural, and industrial period of 1815-1930.

The project allows students, teachers, book artists, binders, and scholars in many different areas the opportunity to study these decorative bindings from two (and soon to be three – LSU is contributing one hundred Louisiana-centric titles to the project and will be added this spring) different physical collections in a single, virtual location. We are also looking at building beyond this scope and into the future. Those interested in PBO are encouraged to contact Jessica Lacher-Feldman, PBO project manager.

The project serves a model for collaborative digital projects, and offers education and inspiration to repositories and individuals. PBO greatly broadens a relatively unexplored scholarly field, and provides a venue for scholars of this field to further their interest and contribution. This resource will encourage interested parties to look at their own collections, and to gain an understanding of design movements and trends both within the United States as well as abroad, comparable to Jugendstil in Germany, Art Nouveau in France, Arts and Crafts in England, and Glasgow School in Scotland.

The additional resources and scholarship in PBO project serves a myriad of users and continues to grow. The Minsky Collection’s inclusion in PBO is a perfect example of collaboration and scholarship working together in new ways to serve a broad audience.

A toast to PBO and the Minsky Collection! The books themselves are an incredible asset to the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library, and they are doing amazing double duty as part of the innovative and incredibly cool, Publishers’ Bindings Online project! They are also the subject and object of Richard Minsky’s incredibly beautiful book, American Decorated Publishers’ Bindings 1872-1929.

Richard Minsky and Jessica Lacher-Feldman will also be part of a symposium on the history, technology and conservation of nineteenth-century publishers’ bindings, sponsored by the Guild of Book Workers, New York Chapter at the Grolier Club in New York on February 22, 2008. It will be held in conjunction with the Grolier Club exhibition, The Proper Decoration of Book Covers: The Life and Work of Alice C. Morse From the collection of Mindell Dubansky.

This is all very, very cool — @ hoole and on the web too!