Early Materials Cataloger

I chose these two objects because students coming into the library’s collections actively use both. The indulgence roll at left, from the end of the 15th century, is illustrated with images of Christ’s passion. Co-founder Edwin J. Beinecke bought this object in 1969, and it was recently the subject of a project titled “Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript Roll” (DEMMR), a graduate student–led teaching and editing program.

The censier at right is a record of debts owned on land and property, compiled around Arles between 1366 and 1531. I use this recent acquisition in my own teaching to give a sense of how medieval books were bound and what it means for them to be objects that develop over time.

It is because of my time at Beinecke—as a Yale student (graduate and undergraduate), as a curatorial assistant, as a researcher, and now as staff—that I am able to welcome you to these manuscripts.

Early Materials Cataloger

Sir Thomas More had this 16th-century prayer book (left) with him while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London before his execution by King Henry VIII in 1535. Added to the collection in 1965 thanks to Edwin J. Beinecke, the book contains two works bound together as one: the Book of Psalms and a Book of Hours, both printed in Paris in the early 1500s. It contains notes in Sir Thomas More’s own hand.

The object at right, recently acquired, is another 16th-century printed item, a collection of epigrams by Thomas More’s good friend Erasmus. Some of the contents have been redacted. This item is particularly noteworthy because of the beautiful painting of Erasmus on the opening edge of the book, which was made by the Italian artist Cesare Vecellio, a cousin of Titian.

These books are emblematic of the strength of the library’s Early Modern collections. They each demonstrate how Early Modern scholarship increasingly pays equal attention to the marginal notes, provenance, and the material form of the book as to the book’s contents.

Curator of Prose and Drama, Yale Collection of American Literature

The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters—the JWJ Collection, as we call it—predates the Beinecke Library by a couple of decades. It was among the featured highlights of the Yale Collection of American Literature when Beinecke opened. The founder of the collection, Carl Van Vechten, was in attendance at the Beinecke dedication on October 14, 1963. Grace Nail Johnson, James Weldon Johnson’s widow, visited the library the next year.

This folder, donated in the 1940s, is my unabashed favorite in all of Beinecke’s holdings: five letters written by Gwendolyn Bennett, a budding Black poet and visual artist who traveled to Paris for a year in 1925–26, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and of transatlantic Modernism—all of which you can see converging in Bennett’s life in a delightful way as you read the letters. Some of the names Bennett drops include James Joyce, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, and Paul Robeson.

Looking to the future, African American collections continue to be in the vanguard of Beinecke’s collecting. I also selected some digital files from the records of Cave Canem, the celebrated Black poetry collective.

Curator of Poetry, Yale Collection of American Literature

First-edition copies of Herman Melville’s celebrated novel have been in the Yale Collection of American Literature for about a century. In order to secure Melville’s copyright in the United States and Great Britain, Moby Dick was published almost simultaneously in both places: in London by Richard Bentley on October 18, 1851, and in the United States by Harper and Brothers on November 14, 1851.

Although less than a month separated the two publication dates, there are roughly 600 substantive differences between the two texts; the British edition is some 2,000 words shorter than the U.S. publication. There is little hard evidence about how and why the many changes between the two editions were made.

In 2022, the Beinecke Library acquired “The Excursions of ’52,” an autograph manuscript by Augusta Melville, the novelist’s sister and copyist. The document describes trips that Herman Melville and family members—wife, Lizzie; mother, Maria; sisters, Augusta, Fanny, and Helen; and brother Tom—made around the Berkshires region of New England in May and June of 1852. The document, formerly owned by celebrated Melville collector William Reese, B.A. ’77, provides information about the novelist’s home life and family interactions during an especially productive creative period. It also opens avenues of inquiry around Augusta Melville’s role as family chronicler.

Curator of Modern European Books and Manuscripts

Heavily worked over, corrected, overlaid with scribbles on scraps of paper cut and pasted onto its ragged pages, the original working draft of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America looked like “rubbish” when it first arrived at Yale in May 1954—in fact, parts of it came wrapped in butcher paper that was even labeled as such. It certainly did not look like what history professor George Wilson Pierson and University Librarian Jim Babb were expecting to find: a fair copy of the finished manuscript, which Pierson had seen decades earlier at the family chateau in Tocqueville. 

By the time the manuscript was transferred to the newly built Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library 10 years later, however, librarians and scholars recognized it as something infinitely more valuable: a sustained glimpse into Tocqueville’s mind in the act of composing one of the most brilliant analyses of American political culture ever produced by a foreign observer. A cornerstone of Beinecke’s Modern European collections, it has kept scholars and editors busy collating, comparing, and working to untangle the author’s creative process ever since.

Acquired through the Edwin J. Beinecke Book Fund 77 years later, in May 2021, the original working draft of Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized resembles Toqueville’s “rubbish” in some respects. Both are written in French, both bear astute commentary on the complex political culture of a colonial (or postcolonial) society overseas, and both reveal a messy compositional process that seemed not to have changed much in a century or more. Yet they also show how much has changed—not only in the time between the writing of these texts, but also between the moments of their acquisition.

One manuscript was written by a French aristocrat looking for lessons in a successful democracy crafted by the ruling elites of a former British colony; the other was written by an “Arab Jew” (as Memmi like to call himself) with an insider’s view of life on the ground under French colonial rule in a country still struggling to win its independence.

Curator of American History and Diplomacy

Diplomatic collections first arrived at Yale 100 years ago when U.S. advisors and negotiators at the Paris Peace Conference gifted their papers to the university. The diplomacy collections have since grown to include the papers of five former U.S. Secretaries of State, numerous ambassadors, diplomats, political advisors, intellectuals, and intelligence officers, all documenting the increasing involvement of the United States in global affairs throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. 

In the papers of William Yale, a U.S. diplomat and spy who worked in the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I, are some of his dispatches and maps from the period just after the war, in which he provides information on the postwar situation in the Middle East. 

Fast forward 100 years: Yale Manuscripts and Archives, now the Beinecke Library, acquired the papers of U.S. Ambassador Paul Bremer. In May 2003, President Bush appointed Bremer to serve as U.S. presidential envoy to Iraq following the U.S. invasion. Bremer's papers include daily emails to his wife that discuss his work, meetings, conversations, and views about issues during the early part of the U.S. occupation.

Processing Archivist, Yale Collection of Western Americana

These two maps from the Yale Collection of Western Americana document the American Southwest. The 1778 map at left was created by cartographer Bernardo Miera y Pacheco of the Domínguez-Escalante Expedition (1776–77) for exploration of the interior of western North America, including parts of present-day New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. 

The 1945 map at right—annotated by members of the Manhattan Project Medical Group following the Trinity Test in the Jornada del Muerto Basin in New Mexico—shows the direction of the radioactive mushroom cloud in the aftermath of the detonation of the world’s first nuclear weapon. 

Both maps build upon co-founder Frederick W. Beinecke’s great interest in the American Southwest. Prior to the donation of his personal collection in 1956, this subject was largely absent from Yale’s collections.

Director of Community Engagement

These two documents are key archival sources for the recovery of the full history of local and campus history. The first brings together the receipts of all the people who built Connecticut Hall, the first brick building in Connecticut and the oldest surviving building at Yale and in New Haven. The record shows that two free and five enslaved Black men together worked a total of 27 percent of all the construction hours — at a time when the local Black population was only 3 percent of the region’s total. These receipts provide evidence of the ubiquity of institutional ties to the system of racial chattel slavery in Yale’s first century. 

The second pamphlet tells the 1831 story of the visionary, and thwarted plan, to build a Black college in New Haven—what would been the nation’s first historically Black college. It offers evidence and insight into the role of free Black leaders and their white allies in support of the effort and the efforts of white leaders, many associated with Yale, to kill the dream of education for liberation.