Campus Legacy

No, that's not Sam.  That's the humble author with his grandfather, William Searl Hoffman, in 1969.

A week or so ago, I was looking through a collection of books I have at home.  I call this particular section of the library the Hoffman Memorial Collection- books that belonged to my mother and her parents and are inscribed with their names.  Most of Mom's are from her college years.  There are several that belonged to my grandfather, and one- his copy of Don Quixote- has in pencil, below his name, "Carnegie Technical Inst".  I had a vague memory that he'd gone there for schooling.  Part of what now is Carnegie Mellon University, it was a trade school and was where he went after graduating from West Tech High School in Cleveland to learn to be a printer.

I did some Googling to see if I could find anything about his time at Carnegie Tech.  Nothing came up, but I *did* find his name in a document housed at CWRU's own digital repository, Digital Case.  Not once but three times does his name appear in commencement bulletins for Western Reserve University: in 1932 when he was awarded a certificate for teaching industrial arts, in 1936 when he earned a B.S. in education and again in 1942 when he earned a M.A. in Education- all of these while he was employed as a teacher in the Cleveland Public School system as an instructor of printing.  And all of them occurred after he became a family man.

Why his education at WRU wasn't celebrated family lore is beyond me.  My sister Jane has a memory of Grandpa's graduate degree, but nothing beyond the fact of it.

I'd always dated my family's connection with CWRU (and all of its past incarnations) with my mother's graduate education in Library Science in 1957-58.  Dad came to campus almost exactly a decade later and completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics in 1970.  A decade and a half after that, I arrived as an undergraduate on campus earning my B.A. in English in 1988 and M.A. in English in 1993.  But it turns out our connection goes back a further 25 years with my grandfather's education.  So not a bad set of sheepskins for one family from one university.

I just wish Grandpa had stayed with us longer:  he died at the age of 62, in 1971.

Surprises from the stacks

We've been working on an inventory project at work, identifying books that were not added to our catalog when we transitioned from cards-in-drawers to records-in-computers about 30 years ago.  We've come across some real gems, and here are just two that struck a chord with the woodworker in me.

Both are academic, but completely fascinating to anyone who has an interest in period work.  Here are two illustrations from the books- on the left are two photographs of bodgers (the term for chairmakers), one installing legs to a seat, the other bending what will become the back of a Windsor chair.  On the right is a reproduction of an image of an early gang saw mill.

From The Early Sawmills of New Jersey:

Sawmills, unlike gristmills, were not places of romantic interest.  Although the early sawmills were run by wooden machinery, the water wheel vibrated the building, there was no odor of ground meal, no millstones to rumble, no dusty miller drawing in fat bags of grist, and no miller's daughter to enhance the surroundings.  Instead of gently descending mealy showers, the air was full of sawdust, bad language of the men struggling with logs, and the noise and screeching of the saw.  Sawmills were places for work and not for idle gossip or the exchange of neighborhood happenings.

A New Blog

I just want to let you know that I'm adding another blog to the stable of outlets for me to spew verbiage. It's called Notes from the KSL Stacks, and it's a place for me to post mostly work-related information. Most of the posts will be the kind of thing I've shared via my personal facebook page for quite some time. That's fun and all, but facebook doesn't keep track of those posts for me, so if I vaguely remember sharing something about etymology at some time in the past, it's hard to find the link. When I do so through a blog, I can tag the posts as well as search through them. Geeky, no?

So I'll use the new blog in a couple of ways:

• highlight new books we've added to the library collection. I'll do this at the rate of a title or two each week. It's a way to pull out a few out of the scores of books that we purchase. Criteria are strict here: I'll highlight something that seems cool or interesting to me. Or possibly something that I think is of particular interest to my readers. (of whom I have very few right now, hence this advert.) These are likely be of general interest to non-specialists as well.
• point out interesting tidbits from around the web relating to scholarship in the humanities, publishing, literary topics, library goodies, or anything else of interest.
• who knows what else.

So feel free to pop on over to the new blog. You can subscribe via email (as many of you do to the posts here on Commonplace), and/or follow it via facebook (click on "Like" and the posts will show up in your facebook feed), or if you are a geek like me, you can follow via RSS.

On adding vocabulary

Organology.

That's my new word for today, and it came to me through an internet-typical series of clickety-clicks. Here's how.

One of the blogs that I follow originates from the Colonial Williamsburg's Hay Shop, the period cabinetmakers shop in that wonderful town. Despite being set firmly in the eighteenth century, the workers there recently began a blog, where they write about the work that they do. And they are without doubt men after my own heart. One of the cabinetmakers there specializes in building spinet harpsichords , a trade that was necessary at the time and for that shop. He is working on a piece, but due to nagging tendinitis, is unable to work with tools, so has been reading up on the history of spinets.

In his post, he mentions having read a recent dissertation from the University of Edinburgh, a two volume brute, by Peter Geoffrey Mole which discusses (among other things, no doubt) construction methods of period instruments. Following that link, I kept myself to reading just the abstract of the work, but marveled at the index terms, among them Organology.

Further curiosity and tippity-tapping lead me from the Oxford English Dictionary through the Grove Dictionary of Music (both of these behind Ivory Tower pay walls, sadly) and of course Wikipedia to explain that this is the field of study of the history of musical instruments, and reminds me quite a bit of how the field of bibliography studies the history and "construction" of books, if you will.

Aren't connections super?

On Distraction

I don't know what it is lately, but when it comes to attending to tasks- even those I relish- I seem to be like a kid in the proverbial candy store.

OH! LOOK! SHINY!

An example: reading. I'm not at all a fast reader, but have diverse interests and a complete inability to follow any one of them through. Perhaps it's just my DNA. But I thought I'd give an example. To whit, the current pile. And this is just the in-my-office pile, as opposed to the in-the-dining-room pile or the on-the-nightstand pile.

Have you noticed the title of this blog? I'm fascinated by commonplace books, and David Allan's "Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England" investigates the phenomenon in Georgian England, and the effect it had on readers and reading. Looking forward to it!

Molly Berger's "Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829-1929" is the next book to be featured on my podcast, so I'm GOING to read it. I'm going to enjoy reading it too. But this one, as must needs, will filter to the very top of the pile, very quickly, as the books for the podcast generally do.

I'm a closet (or out of the closet, more like it) clock and watch aficionado. And more specifically, mechanical clocks and watches. And I want to learn more about horology, so Eric Bruton's "Clocks and Watches: 1400-1900" is on the pile.

In keeping with the above-mentioned jones, David S. Landes' "Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World" takes a broader view of the topic, one I think I'll enjoy.

Language and linguistics savant David Crystal's "Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices" is a companion volume to an exhibition at the British Library that I am very sorry I did not see. As a language history junky, this book is like a sweet injection of the best stuff.

David Pye's "The Nature and Art of Workmanship" is a book that I return to often, and not just when looking for inspiration for my furniture building. I find what Pye says about workmanship can apply to many aspects of my life, from building cabinets to teaching library skills to baking pizza to being a father. From the second chapter:

If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship, I shall say as a first approximation that it means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgment, dexterity and care with which the maker exercises as he works. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making; and so I shall call this kind of workmanship "The workmanship of risk"... [which] we may contrast the workmanship of certainty, always to be found in quantity production, and found in its purse state in full automation.

The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book

I began this blog over a year ago to serve as a space for random thoughts, musings, and a space for sharing interesting thoughts and musings of others that I find as I read and study and listen. I chose the title Commonplace to evoke the tradition of thoughtful people in times past who might keep books in which they would copy interesting or thought provoking passages from whatever they happened to be reading, often with a few notes of their own. The resulting remixes surely represented new works of their own- mashups, pre-digital style.

So when I read this piece by Steven Berlin Johnson entitled The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book, I was delighted to see that Mr. Johnson goes one step further, saying in effect that the future of text has two potential paths in our networked world- the model of the glass box or the model of the commonplace book. It is an interesting piece- with some equally interesting observations about the current limitations of the nascent iPad and its iBook application as indicative of the "glass box". Johnson's point is that it is the ability to snip, cut, paste, connect, remix, mashup text that is the beautiful value of writing and of text, digital or not.

The image above is from a digital exhibition at the Library of Congress, and shows Walt Whitman's commonplace book.