Exhibits/Lectures

New Exhibit Features the Library's "Admirable Nucleus"

In 1869, Northwestern Latin professor and University librarian Daniel Bonbright was visiting Europe when he heard about an extraordinary private book collection that had just become available for sale. Assembled by Johannes Schulze, who had studied with Hegel and befriended Goethe and Schopenhauer, this personal library included books printed by the famous 16th and 17th century printing dynasties, the Manutius and Elsevirs, as well as 13 incunabula' books printed before 1501.

After an enthusiastic report from the librarian at the Royal University in Berlin concluded that this collection would "serve as an admirable nucleus around which a great library might gradually grow," Bonbright quickly and shrewdly negotiated a deal to pack up the 20,000-volume collection and ship it to Evanston. Says AUL for Collection Management Jeff Garrett, "This was a 'coup de bibliotheque' that was recalled painfully by intellectual Germany for decades thereafter. As late as 1925, Berlin library historian Karl M. Meyer would express "regret that this library could not have been kept for the Empire.""

Jeff is co-curator, with Special Collections curator Russell Maylone, of a new University Library exhibit called "An Admirable Nucleus: The Prussian Purchase at the Heart of Today's Northwestern University Library." The exhibit runs May 1 through June 28 in the Main Library's first-floor exhibit space and on the third floor of Deering. Jeff and Russell will conduct a Curators' Tour on Wednesday, May 16 at 2 p.m. (meet at the Main Library exhibit cases).

In three segments, the exhibit highlights three different facets of Bonbright's purchase: the history of the acquisition, including the place of collector Schulze at the epicenter of 19th century German scholarship; a display of some of the original volumes, many of them very rare in the library world today; and a look at how profoundly scholarly research has changed from the time of Schulze, when scholars had to travel the globe to consult the sorts of works he collected in his library, to today, when libraries deliver these texts, word-searchable and annotated, literally into the laps of their fully wired (and wireless) student populations.

Schulze was an enormously influential figure in the early 19th century Prussian educational bureaucracy, who championed Hegelian philosophy and was a progressive force in the shaping of modern European education. His story, and the story of how Bonbright mobilized Northwestern's president and trustees to buy the collection at a moment of perfect historical serendipity, is illustrated by the first part of the exhibit, as well as in an audio broadcast available to stream online or as an MP3 download.

Now known as the Greenleaf Library, after the Northwestern trustee who donated the funds for its purchase, Schulze's collection contains 13 books from the 15th century, more than 500 volumes from the 16th, and thousands from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Among its unique and priceless volumes are the first printed texts by classical Greek historian Herodotus (published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1502); the first appearance of the nine plays of Aristophanes in the original Greek (published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1498); and the first publication of the complete known works of Archimedes, again in the original Greek (published in Basel in 1544).

"This collection includes the first appearances in print of most of the major classical authors and most of the minor ones," says Russell. "There are museum catalogs from throughout Europe by the dozen, descriptions of many of the earliest wunderkammer collections in Europe, early literature, history, travels through Europe and especially Italy, and almost the entire range of Renaissance publications of newly excavated ancient treasures.

"Schulze was an omnivorous bibliophile collector who, with enormous knowledge, persistence and drive created this great library," Russell adds. "And Northwestern was incredibly fortunate to have acquired it."

Exhibit poster by John Kannenberg

May Day Exhibit Kicks off New Reference Department Series

The Reference Department launched a new ongoing series of exhibits designed to highlight its resources by mounting a May Day exhibit. Designed by Kathleen Bethel, Jason Kruse, Geoff Morse, and Jeannette Moss, the exhibit featured resources on May Day itself as well as labor, labor history, and May 1st celebrations around the world. A bibliography of 23 reference sources, including a bulletin board displaying electronic resources and a display of reference books, were included.

Reference Head Denise Shorey says, �We wanted to find an engaging way to inform people of the variety of resources available to them by linking the displays to topical themes.� The exhibits in the Reference Room will change every two weeks, with an exhibit on Memorial Day scheduled to go up today.

(Photos by Alan Chan)

Raul Nino�s Poetry Reading

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Senior Acquisitions Assistant and Bibliographic Editor Raul Nino read from his newly released chapbook, A Book of Mornings. Held in the Forum Room, the April 25 event was well attended�but in the event you had to miss it, another reading is scheduled for Wednesday, June 20 at 8:30 p.m. at the California Clipper, 1002 N. California Avenue, in Chicago.

(Photo by Mary Bradley)

Library Mini-Exhibit Highlights End of Slave Trade

"Abolition of the British Slave Trade, 1807," a mini-exhibit now in the small exhibit cases near the Lantern entrance, showcases rare materials commemorating the bicentennial of the end of England's trade of slaves from Africa.

Esmeralda Kale, Bibliographer of Africana, and Kathleen Bethel, African American Studies Librarian, created the display in homage to the historical event, to complement the "Fifty Years of African Independence" exhibit, and to recognize the success of the Art History department's recent conference, "Out of Sight: New World Slavery and the Visual Imagination." The exhibit features important publications from the Rare Books collection of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies and from the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections.

Poster by John Kannenberg

Ottenberg Art Books in New Book Alcove

A small exhibit in the New Book Alcove highlights anthropologist Simon Ottenberg�s recent gift to Africana. Ottenberg studied at Northwestern with Africana founder Melville J. Herskovits in the 1950s before joining the faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle, from which he retired in 1991. His most recent book, Farmers and Townspeople in a Changing Nigeria, was published in 2005. The founder of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, Ottenberg is also an art historian who has been deeply involved in the contemporary art scene of Nigeria since the 1960s and �70s, says Africana curator David Easterbrook. �What Esmeralda Kale and John Kannenberg selected to display in the New Book Alcove is a selection of works on art history that was a part of his gift,� David says, �but it also included a rich collection of Nigerian exhibition catalogs and 35 boxes of field work materials that are just invaluable.�

Exhibit poster by John Kannenberg

New Exhibit Honors Fifty Years of African Independence

Fifty years ago, on March 6, 1957, the British colony then known as the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first modern African nation to achieve its independence from colonial European powers. Between that date and the day in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first president of majority-ruled South Africa, no fewer than 47 African nations emerged from various forms of colonial rule.

The Library�s new exhibit Fifty Years of African Independence not only celebrates this remarkable half-century of African self-definition, but also commemorates the role that Melville J. Herskovits, founder of the University�s ground-breaking African Studies program and world-renowned Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, played in the process. The new exhibit runs from February 27 to April 26, 2007. Herskovits curator David Easterbrook will conduct a special Curator�s Tour of the exhibit on Tuesday, March 6 at 2 p.m.

Herskovits and his wife Frances attended the official independence ceremonies in Ghana in 1957, for example, and the exhibit includes programs from those ceremonies, as well as publications from some of the early independence conferences, and original copies of the constitutions and acts of independence of Botswana and Zambia.

�It was because Herskovits was recognized as one of the most knowledgeable experts in the United States on Africa that he was asked to become an advisor to the Allied war effort in the 1940s,� says David, �and this experience in part shaped his belief that independence would come to African colonies far more quickly than the colonial powers ever imagined. And one of the reasons he established the African Studies program at Northwestern in 1948 was so that there would be a pool of Americans knowledgeable enough about African cultures to conduct diplomatic relations with the new republics.�

Northwestern�s was the first African Studies program at a major U.S. research institution, and in its early days, David says, trained many of the foreign service officers who were sent to U.S. embassies in Africa in the early 1960s.

Because Herskovits also established Northwestern�s Africana library with the goal of collecting comprehensively, the University now preserves a vast archive of materials related to celebrations of African independence, as they occurred in both the cities and the rural villages. Besides documentation of the independence process, the exhibit features forms of communications media commonly used in Africa, including photographs, postcards, and commemorative cloths of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya�s first head of state, and Winston Churchill, who was still regarded warmly in some of the former British colonies. Comic books, a familiar form for mass-market biography, feature the lives of South African hero Nelson Mandela and Felix Houphouet-Boigny, a leading figure in Cote d�Ivoire�s independence movement, and its first president.

(Poster designed by John Kannenberg)

Special Collections Exhibit: Suriname & Haiti

The exhibit Suriname & Haiti now on view in Special Collections (on the third floor of Deering) spotlights both the glorious natural history and�more disturbingly�the dark human history of these areas in the 18th century.

One set of exhibit cases features vibrantly colored, extraordinarily detailed, hand-colored engravings by Maria Sibylla Merian, who traveled to Suriname, on South America�s northeast coast, in 1699 at the age of 52. They were published in the 1705 book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, and were, says exhibit curator Russell Maylone, �some of the earliest scientific work ever published about Suriname.�

A second set of cases features an original edition of John G. Stedman�s 1796 Narrative of Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, with its sometimes graphic depictions of the brutality of life in Suriname under Dutch colonial rule. �Stedman was a Scottish soldier of fortune who was sent by the Dutch to Guyana to help suppress the revolt there,� says Russell, �but he was often appalled by the treatment of slaves and natives by his superior officers and by plantation owners.� A lifelong diarist, he chronicled what he saw in his Narrative and persuaded his friend, the British poet and artist William Blake, to contribute about a dozen illustrations�including two in the exhibit that portray a slave being drawn and quartered and another being hung alive from a meat hook.

A third set of cases includes books, historical documents, and artwork relating to the abolition of slavery and the revolt against French rule in Haiti.

The exhibit runs through January 3, 2007.

The Bohemian Tours Again

A portrait of 19th century French composer Erik Satie bequeathed to the Library by the family of Charles Deering is being featured for the second time in a prominent national art exhibit. Ramon Casas�s 1891 painting The Bohemian, depicting Satie in Monmartre, was requested for inclusion in the exhibit Barcelona & Modernity: Picasso, Gaudi, Miro, Dali, which opened in October at the Cleveland Museum of Art and travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in March of 2007. In 2005, the portrait appeared in the exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, which opened in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and then traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago.

�Because of its grand scale,� says Art Collection Head Russ Clement, �the portrait has received considerable attention at both exhibitions. �Casas incorporates the hallmarks of self-satisfied, bourgeois, full-length portraiture, but cleverly turns them upside down, with Satie�s eccentric and scruffy appearance outside the proletarian Moulin de la Galette on a rainy day.�

The portrait�s home for the past 50 years has been the Charles Deering Library, where it normally hangs high on the east wall alongside portraits of members of the Deering family, for whom the library is named. Charles Deering acquired the painting in the early 1890s when, as an art student in Paris, he befriended a circle of avant-garde artists that included Ramon Casas and John Singer Sargent. After his death, his daughter, Mrs. Chauncey McCormick, bequeathed it to the University Library.

The curator of Barcelona & Modernity requested a loan of the portrait, calling it �extremely important� to the exhibit�s mission, which is �to examine a remarkable 71-year period (1868-1939) when Barcelona transformed itself from a city of provincial culture into one of the most dynamic centers of modernist art and architecture in Europe.� After more than a decade in Paris, Casas returned to his native Barcelona in the mid-1890s, where he became famous for his portraits of intellectuals and artists and his commercial posters.

While loaning out a valuable painting can cause logistical and nervous headaches, Russ notes that it can have benefits as well. �People who had seen the painting previously have remarked that now that it�s been cleaned, and hangs at eye-level, it�s much more engaging than before.�

And when it finally comes back home to the Art Collection in late 2007, he says, �We�ll make sure it�s secure in an optimal viewing location.�

More information on Barcelona & Modernity can be found online.

�The Country Must Be Kept Clean�: Uncle Sam does social hygiene

Men, are your minds �diseased?� Women, do you know the dangers of �chance acquaintances�? Does anyone really know the risks associated with improper dance positions and the danger of the �familiarities� which can result? Do you know what representative citizens think about prostitution? Or the social cost of cavorting with sporting women? The staff of the Department of Government and Geographic Information and Data Services (Gov Info) has put together an exhibit of poignant and, at times, quite humorous, documents used by the US Public Health Services to answer these questions, circa 1920-1950. These pamphlets and books are representative of the kind of information the US government believed important for men, women, and children to have in order to be strong and productive citizens. From hookworm to venereal disease, from leprosy in Hawaii to the plague in California, from alcoholism to trafficking opium, and advocating DDT to combat malaria, there was seemingly no topic too delicate to raise in the interest of social hygiene.

Based on the amount of available information, the PHS took very seriously the specific responsibility to promote good health by launching a comprehensive sex education program to help the government stamp out venereal disease. This focus on sex education was fueled by the perception of �declining sexual standards� due to the creation of dancehalls, the shift in dating norms, the availability of motor vehicles, and the increase of women in the work force. Clearly, women with independent means and men with cars were a formula for social disaster that PHS needed to address at length in the pamphlets, books, and posters. Sex education was presented in the context of �Keeping Fit,� a program of health and well-being targeted specifically to boys and men, which reached large numbers of them over a period of at least 20 years through schools and YMCA programs. Programs targeted to women were less successful because they were �wife� and �motherhood� focused and seemed to dismiss women who lived outside the boundaries of traditional roles. Nonetheless, while the success of those original PHS programs was slight, it did establish the government�s role in guiding national public health issues, a role which persists today within the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Come visit the Government Information Reference area to see the exhibit and enjoy reading about how and why, in 1920, it was important to �control the train.� You also can see the early art work of Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) illustrating the use of DDT to fight malaria; and the Treasury Department�s Manual of Mental Examination of Aliens, instructing immigration workers about how to �inspect immigrants� entering the country. The Department of Government and Geographic Information and Data Services is open Monday-Thursday 8:30-9 p.m. and Friday-Saturday, 8:30-5:00.

Kathleen Murphy
Data Services Librarian

For more information on the exhibit and Gov Info, visit www.library.northwestern.edu/govinfo/display/current_display.html.

Digital image of "Danger in Familiarities" courtesy of Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota,Youth and Life poster #33, http://special.lib.umn.edu/swha/exhibits/hygiene/index.htm. Additional images courtesy of NUL Department of Government and Geographic Information and Data Services.

NUL book artists showcased at Chicago Public Library

Six past and present members of the Library�s Conservation Lab staff have work on display in the Chicago Public Library�s One Book, Many Interpretations exhibit at the Harold Washington Library Center. �It�s an amazing exhibit of the book arts, and it provides an extraordinary showcase of the artistic talents of past and present members of our conservation staff,� says Africana Curator David Easterbrook, who attended the exhibit�s opening�and returned to see it again with guests.

Former staffer Lesa Dowd curated the exhibit, which celebrates the fifth anniversary of the city�s One Book, One Chicago program. Bookbinders and book artists from around the world were invited to participate by reading one of the ten past One Book, One Chicago selections and then binding it in a manner that expressed their reaction to the text. Conservation Head Donia Conn chose Stuart Dybek�s story collection The Coast of Chicago. Her simple but vibrant cover was inspired by her reaction to a story from the book in which a boy and his girlfriend spend their time riding up and down the Red Line.

�It�s a wonderful exhibit for bindings,� she says. �The trend these days tends to be toward artists� books, and it was nice to see an exhibit really devoted to fine bindings. It lets you know the art form isn�t dead.�

Forty-seven books were selected for inclusion in the show, and a best binding designation was awarded for each of the ten titles.

Besides Donia�s work, the exhibit includes
� Former Conservation Head Scott Kellar�s binding of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn�s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (awarded Best Binding)
� Former Conservation Head Deborah Howe�s binding of Julia Alvarez�s In the Time of the Butterflies
� Former Art Collection staffer Kerri Cushman�s binding of Walter Van Tilburg Clark�s The Ox-Bow Incident
� Former Conservation Lab intern Sara Loosen Otto�s binding of Harper Lee�s To Kill a Mockingbird (awarded Best Binding)
� And Lesa Dowd�s binding of the current One Book, One Chicago selection, Jhumpa Lahiri�s Interpreter of Maladies

�These stunning �book sculptures� demonstrate incredible creativity, innovation, and sophistication with bookbinding materials,� says Art Collection Head Russ Clement, who�s also seen the exhibit. �It�s a must-see show for anyone interested in book arts.�

The exhibit, which opened on September 30, runs through April 15, 2007. For information on hours and programs associated with the exhibit, visit www.chicagopubliclibrary.org or call 312/747-4875. The exhibit catalog �with images of all the above-mentioned works�is available online.

Exhibit shows how student rebellion helped create the modern university

The new exhibit in the Library�s main exhibit cases highlights a strange irony in the evolution of universities as we know them today: many attributes of college culture that are now deeply institutionalized developed not only without faculty and administration approval�but in direct opposition to their authority.

�Athletics is a great example,� says Library archivist Kevin Leonard, curator of Student Life and Culture: Authority, Opposition, and the Creation of New Traditions, on display from October 3-December 7, 2006. �Sports are so integral to universities� identities these days that you�ll find many more people who can tell you the name of Notre Dame�s football coach than could tell you the name of its president.�

But, as the exhibit demonstrates, athletics were brought to Northwestern by a group of students who were clearly thumbing their noses at the men who were supposed to be educating them. �[A]ll our professors�appear constantly to be physically indisposed,� they informed the Board of Trustees in an 1875 document. Noting faculty members� �long, leathery faces, sunken, sallow cheeks, loose, flabby muscle,� and their lack of �scruples about long lessons in mechanics or logic, possibly caused by imperfect digestion,� the students concluded that �Such men need a gymnasium.� When the Trustees declined to provide one, the students formed their own gymnasium commission, sold shares in the enterprise for $10 each, and built the gym themselves.

�Competitive sports like football and baseball developed totally outside the purview of the faculty and administration,� Kevin explains. �It was only because of the time and expense involved, and the questions of fairness that came up, and the number of injuries, that the administration started to get involved, and eventually took control. That was true at universities everywhere. And now the public face of most universities is an athletic one.�

As the exhibit also demonstrates, long before the rebellions of the 1960s led to curriculum reform in universities everywhere, radical and nonconformist students were critiquing�and ultimately reshaping�the studies their elders considered appropriate. Today, for example, Northwestern is world-renowned for its academic performance studies programs, but these too were only formally institutionalized and adopted into the curriculum by faculty and staff after students had been staging their own extracurricular productions for decades.

The earliest dramatic tradition at Northwestern�documented in the exhibit�seems to have evolved from a ritual called �Trig,� dating back to at least 1877, in which students expressing their hatred for trigonometry ceremonially �cremated� (i.e. burned) their trigonometry textbooks at the conclusion of the course. As the tradition became entrenched over the years, the annual mock funeral ceremony became more elaborate and theatrical�an early forerunner of today�s Waa Muu show�while the actual burning of the books went by the wayside.

A 1902 flyer from the exhibit pictures a jaunty-looking Northwestern student in a turtleneck letter sweater, smoking a pipe. Says the caption: �Here we have the young College Man/Who�s been to Trig since it began/His head�s in a whirl/For he�ll have his best girl/You had better come too, if you can.�

Steve Reich birthday celebration featured talk by D.J. Hoek

Music Library Head D.J. Hoek was the featured speaker at New Music Northwestern�s October 3 event, A Steve Reich 70th Birthday Celebration at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. D.J.�s book about the pioneer of musical minimalism, Steve Reich: A Bio-Bibliography, was published in 2002 by Greenwood Press.

�Reich is one of the most prominent and influential composers in the world today,� D.J. says, �and one of the handful of composers within the realm of �art� music whose influence actually extends beyond to other styles and traditions. He started as a drummer, a percussionist with a background in jazz, world music, African drumming, and Indonesian gamelan, along with a strong interest in music technology. And just as his music grew out of all these influences, his music has in turn come to influence a wide array of different music.�

This influence extends from John Adams, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who was at the Library earlier this year for an interview about his opera Nixon in China, to David Bowie and Brian Eno, to the current techno crowd. �Unlike some artists, who might sue if they find out someone sampled their music, Reich loves it when he hears that some deejay has sampled his music and is using it at a club in L.A.,� D.J. says.

For more information on Steve Reich, see the composer�s Web site at http://www.stevereich.com/ . Performances of selected works can also be accessed in the Naxos Music Library database to which the Library subscribes, through the following links:

Clapping Music (1972) -- performed by The Sixteen
http://northwestern.naxosmusiclibrary.com/stream.asp?s=38099%2fnorthwestern02%2fc16031%5f08

New York Counterpoint, Movement I(1985) -- originally for clarinets, here arranged for saxophones and performed by Rascher Saxophone Orchestra
http://northwestern.naxosmusiclibrary.com/stream.asp?s=38099%2fnorthwestern02%2fbi5023%5f01

Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973) -- performed by Amadinda Percussion Group
http://northwestern.naxosmusiclibrary.com/stream.asp?s=38099%2fnorthwestern02%2fu31358%5f01

Mozart scores!

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birth, the Northwestern University Music Library is currently presenting an exhibit of selected Mozart facsimiles from the Library's collection. These reproductions of the original manuscripts offer an intimate glimpse of a composer at work�from his notes scribbled in the margins, to his ink blots, to his decisions to add or delete segments.

�There�s a popular idea that Mozart just dashed these works off and never made any corrections,� says Music Library Head D.J. Hoek. �And compared to Beethoven�s manuscripts, which tend to be a mess, these are pretty clean. But you do see him occasionally rethinking something.�

The point of collecting facsimile scores, he explains, is for the insight they provide into the composer�s creative process. �Often being able to see what a composer decided not to do is as revealing as seeing what he ultimately chose to do.�

Featured facsimiles include the Jupiter and Haffner symphonies as well as concertos, string quartets, sonatas, and other works. Located in the Music Library lobby on the second level of Deering Library, this exhibit will be in place through December 2006.

D.J. thanks Ruth Young for her help with the exhibit.

New exhibit spotlights Nixon�s historic China trip

The poll results are featured in the new "Nixon in China" exhibit in the Library's first-floor exhibit space, which opened April 4 and runs through June 1. Presented in cooperation with the Chicago Opera Theater [COT], the exhibit is one of a series of events around the Chicago metropolitan area helping to establish the historical context for the Chicago premiere of John Adams�s opera Nixon in China in May. Beth Clausen, the exhibit�s curator and head of the Government and Geographic Information Department, says she wanted the exhibit to highlight how much times and attitudes have changed. �We take it for granted today that you can just get on a plane and visit China,� she says. �But before this historic trip, that was unheard-of, since U.S. relations had been closed with China since about 1950.�

The COT helped Beth obtain many of the exhibit�s striking photographs from the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California. They show, among other scenes, Nixon�s historic handshake with Premier Zhou Enlai upon his arrival, the president with First Lady Pat Nixon at the Great Wall, and Mrs. Nixon grinning at a panda at the Beijing Zoo.

Beth combined such photographs with materials from the University Library that would �highlight the resources we have for the study of this trip and its historic implications.� Contemporary magazines and newspaper items from the Library�s Periodicals Collection illustrate the media�s coverage of the trip, including a U.S. News & World Report cover wondering what a new relationship with �Red China� could mean for the United States. A declassified memo from Henry Kissinger to the president (from Government Documents), dated the day they returned, suggests �Talking Points� for the president�s pending discussions with Congressional leaders. (Kissinger urges Nixon to stress that �There were no secret deals or agreements� made, and to avoid �any indication that the Soviet Union was discussed in anything but the most general terms.�

Tao Xie, a Northwestern Ph.D. candidate in political science who was born in China, praised the Library�s exhibit. If not for that historic visit, he said, he would not be in the United States studying today. �This trip opened the door for all of us,� he said, gesturing to the display cases. �It�s important to remember the good part of Nixon�s legacy. All the rest is so overshadowed by Watergate.�

What�s in a book? The Chicago Hand Bookbinders 2006 exhibit comes to Deering.

This year�s Chicago Hand Bookbinders [CHB] Exhibition, �Books About Books,� which opened April 4 on the third-floor mezzanine of Deering Library, raises the question �What is a book?� says Karen Jutzi, a Library Conservation Technician who is also the CHB�s Program Chair. A recent tour of the exhibit, guided by Karen and Kitz Rickert, also a Library Conservation Technician and CHB member, highlighted how many different ways that question can be answered.

For those who judge books by their covers, the exhibition includes some extraordinary examples of fine hand-crafted binding. Cynthia H. Fields-Belanger�s gorgeous leather binding of Margaret Lock�s Bookbinding Materials and Techniques 1700-1920 features gold tooling, applied gold leaf, and silk endbands. Constance K. Wozny�s binding of Peace of Soul, by Fulton J. Sheen, includes a black leather box-casing lined with striking marbled paper that matches the endpapers of the book.

Fine bookbinding is an art that goes back hundreds of years, and some early examples (in the McCormick Library�s permanent collection) face their modern contemporaries from a display case across the room, including a 1557 calf-bound volume of Cicero from the library of Henri II of France, and a 1663 edition of Horace�s works, bound in full red morocco, that bears the arms of Charles of Spain.

But many of the CHB books actually challenge traditional ideas about what a book�s binding, or contents, or structure ought to be. Kathleen Marie Garness�s Fahrenheit 451�a commentary on censorship�opens up like a book of matches, to reveal a sheaf of slender, match-like pages labeled �Intolerance,� �Dogma,� �Conformity,� and so on. Benjamin Chandler�s Jonah Game and Peep Show is partly in the form of a �tunnel book,� with a pop-up center that is meant to be viewed from above�revealing Jonah, who lies swallowed in the book�s gullet. When Karen and Kitz turn the handmade, abaca-paper pages in Maria C. H. Burke�s Make Me a Book, the satisfyingly crackly sound they make seems to dramatize the book�s ability to be �heard� as well as seen. Kitz notes that this quality, called the paper�s �rattle,� is very highly prized in Japanese paper-making.

�The book arts are very hard to convey on display,� Kitz notes. �Many of these books are meant to be held and interacted with, and that�s really what the artist is looking for.�

The CHB exhibit is augmented at Deering by an additional display of works by members of the Library�s Preservation staff. Kitz�s pieces include the playful Portrait of a Tortoise, in which an account of a tortoise�s daily activities pops out in accordion folds from a well in the center of the book, like a turtle coming out of its hole.

Karen�s witty Personal Ads 1900, also in the staff case, juxtaposes text she retrieved from real, contemporary personal ads on the Internet with sepia photos of turn-of-the-century men and women, on what seems to be a large deck of playing cards. The primness of the portraits both underscores and counterpoints the confessionalism, and occasional raciness, of what the faces appear to be saying.

But is it a book?

�A scroll is a book,� Karen says, �so single sheets could also be a book, if they�re read in sequence.�

�Or,� she adds after a moment, �out of sequence.�

"Books About Books� will be on display in Deering through May 25, and then moves to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a run from June 2-20. The Preservation staff�s supplementary display also includes works by Donia Conn and Malina Belcheva.