A exhibition of five items recently acquired by the Library and eight publications researched at the Library will be on display until April 30, 1998 in the James Madison Memorial Hall, James Madison Building. Many new items in the Library's collections are purchased with funds made possible by the Madison Council Acquisitions Committee. The committee was established in 1995 to aid in identifying and encouraging collectors to become donors and to help locate the financial resources that allow the timely purchase of outstanding items. Objects featured in this display include:

Dante's Inferno

Robert Rauschenberg
Mark, Postscript to "34 Drawings for Dante's Inferno"
Lithograph, 1964
Prints and Photographs Division
Gift of the Artist

This is one in a suite of seven lithographs, issued individually as "postscripts" to the 1965 book Rauschenberg: 34 Drawings for Dante's Inferno. The book's title invokes Dante's The Divine Comedy, a fourteenth century work in which the Italian poet Dante is guided through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory, and Paradise by the poet Virgil.

Rauschenberg was in the vanguard of artists during the 1960s who incorporated everyday objects and mass-media imagery into traditional art. In Mark, journalistic photographs and found objects are filtered through a maelstrom of dark, restless brushstrokes. Rauschenberg's work presents a kind of twentieth-century reliquary for assorted mass media gods: sports, technology, politics, and the media itself.

The Fox Trot

"The Fox Trot"
Sheet music, Moscow, 1927
The David J. Grunes Collection of Imperial Russian and Soviet Sheet Music
Music Division
Gift of Fairleigh Dickinson University

The David J. Grunes Collection comprises approximately 2,500 pieces of Russian and Soviet sheet Music, dating from the 1890s until approximately 1945. The collection is rich in ethnographic as well as iconographic materials. Russian and Soviet sheet music was not widely distributed in the West. Moreover, a fire at the Leningrad Library a few years ago is thought to have destroyed much of its sheet music collection.

Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell
Gone with the Wind
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936, 1st edition
Rare Books and Special Collections

Alfred Whital Stern (1881-1960) of Chicago presented his outstanding collection of Lincolniana to the Library in 1953. Begun by Mr. Stern in the 1920s, the collection documents the life of Abraham Lincoln through writings by and about Lincoln, contemporary newspapers, sheet music, coins, letters, and a large body of publications concerned with slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and related topics. Since Mr. Stern's death, the collection has continued to grow through the provisions of an endowment by his family.

The autographed copy of Gone with the Wind is part of the Stern collection. The unprecedented volume of requests for a autographed copies of Gone with the Windforced Margaret Mitchell to discontinue the practice after December, 1936.

Kyoto, Japan

Kyoto, Japan
Panoramic view at night
n.d.
Geography and Map Division

This panoramic view of Kyoto, Japan is part of a collection of fourteen eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps purchased over several years from the collection of the Reverend Thomas Garner, an Episcopalian minister who spent time in Japan.

Brazilian Chapbooks

O Homem Em Conflito Consigo Mesmo (A Man in Conflict with Himself)
Elias A. Carvalho, Cover: Ciro 1981

Thomas Jefferson and The Library of Congress in Brazil
Rio de Janiero: Raimundo Santa Helena, 1997

Lampiões
Alexandre José Felipe Cavalcanti d'Albuquerque Sabaó Saboia
Sao Jose: So Cordel São José, n.d.

Literature de Cordel Collection, American Folklife Center

The Library's "Literature de Cordel" collection of Brazilian chapbooks from the northeastern section of that country is believed to be the largest in the world, with approximately 5,000 unique titles. "Literature de cordel" translates to "literature of the clothesline" and refers to the method of displaying the booklets by pinning them to clotheslines in the markets where they are sold. Many scholars use this type of publication to study the history and folklore of an area. Topics range from supernatural beings, to historical events, herbalism, and romance stories. Typically, written in verse, a chapbook is a small, inexpensively made publication that is considered ephemera. The Library's collection goes back approximately twenty years.

Brahms and his Music Editor

The Brahms-Keller Correspondence
George S. Bozarth, editor
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996

This volume contains fifty letters and documents relating to the twenty-year exchange between German composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) to his music editor, Robert Keller. Previously unpublished, many of these letters discuss in detail Brahms's concerns regarding publication of his music. In this volume the eminent Brahms scholar George Bozarth provides translations of the correspondence as well as extensive commentary.

Spycamera

Morris Moses
Spycamera--The Minox Story
Hove, Sussex, England: Hove Foto Books, 1990

This is the story of Walter Zapp and his vision of a high quality, small camera that the welldressed lady or gentleman could carry. The Minox was produced before the war in Latvia and then in West Germany. This book combines descriptions and technical information about this unique camera with tales of its use in covert activities.

Europe in the 1840s

Jerome Blum
In the Beginning: The Advent of the Modern Age--Europe in the 1840s
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994

"The most amazing epoch the world has yet seen," so Jerome Blum characterizes the 1840s, the decade when the modern era began. In 1840, Dickens was twenty-eight, Marx twenty-two, Engles twenty, Dostoyevsky nineteen, and Darwin thirty-one. Filled with youthful self-confidence, this generation sought change in every sphere of life. "Revolution" occurred throughout society--in communications and transportation, in social relations with the dawning of the social consciousness, in science, and in the arts.

Blum focuses on five dominant European powers, Great Britain, France, Austria, Germany, and Russia. Each in its own way underwent immense political change as autocratic absolutism began to give way and early steps were taken toward the modern social welfare state.

Cartography in Asia

J. B. Harley and David Woodward, editors
The History of Cartography: Volume Two Book Two.
Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994

Maps tell us much more than merely how to get from here to there. As one of the oldest forms of human communication, they ultimately express the many ways we attempt to understand the world. The first comprehensive history of maps and mapping worldwide from prehistory to the present, The History of Cartography is both an essential reference work and a philosophical statement of maps' value to society.

Songs and Ballads

Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miners
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Rounder Records, 1997

This album of anthracite mining ballads represents a selection from recordings made in the hard-coal region of Pennsylvania as the Library of Congress first post-war field expedition, January 25 and February 1, 1946. The distinctive Celtic flavor of some of the songs is derived from a spontaneous association of the Irish and Welsh who, together with the English and Scots, formed the bulk of the mining population during the period. Most of the miners lived in remote company villages in bleak and primitive environments. Without the commercial amusements available to city workers, they drew upon their own resources to create a folk culture which has become distinctive to the anthracite mining region.

Blues and Hollers

Negro Blues and Hollers
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Rounder Records, 1997

This album includes a sampling of recordings from the landmark Library of Congress--Fisk University field expedition in 1941-42 to record the musical traditions of an African American community in the Mississippi Delta.