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Venia, Perspectives and Autographs

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Before I took this class, I didn’t know that Saint Mary’s had a Rare Book Room. I joined this class the second week of the semester, and in my first class, Professor Noonan brought up the Rare Book Room, and my attention was caught. At first the Rare Book Room was overwhelming; it seemed like there were a thousand books per shelf and so many different books to choose from. I’ve always had a passion for history and exploring historical perspectives. Each one of these books was like one part of a tapestry, and we as a class were weaving them together into this new blanket of knowledge, inspiration, and perspective. But the Rare Book Room can also seem very overwhelming, especially if you don’t know how it’s set up, in which case then it seems like a maze. The more familiar I got with the room, the more comfortable I was in it. 

As we started our project, I found an interest in books with autographs attached to them. Autographed books seem like such a novelty item, but I thought it was puzzling to see that Saint Mary’s has multiple books containing autographs. There’s a physical aspect to an autograph. It's an interesting approach to provenance information, in that the former owner either waited in line for the autograph or knew the author and it was given to them. For example, Saint Mary’s has multiple books published by Hogarth Press with Virginia Woolf’s autograph in them. These are incredibly valuable because Woolf is one of the most prominent women authors in history, and the Hogarth Press was a prolific publishing house in England. There was also a copy of Holding the Stirrup by Elizabeth Von Gutenberg that included the author’s signature along with a note to former Saint Mary’s President, Sister Madeleva about Easter and thinking she would enjoy the book. 

The two books I ended up focusing on were copies of Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf and Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I chose Kew Gardens because I liked the art in the book, and it contained two autographs, one by Virginia Woolf and one by Vanessa Bell, the artist who illustrated the book. Bell’s art was a pretty typical abstraction, stemming from geomorphic shapes, and I thought it was cool. I chose Twice-Told Tales because in this copy of the book there was a signature of Nathaniel Hawthorne on an inserted sheet from a ship’s log. This examples shows that autographs can be more than just an intended note or a collected signature but can also be a way to preserve people and their daily actions.

I hope people see all of the research that we did for this project and how fourteen different people can find different stories in a room full of books. Everyone in this project thought of a different idea and wanted to explore different themes throughout this room, and I think that’s very evident in our project. 

Clara Venia
Majors: Humanistic Studies and Global Studies, with a concentration in Anthropology
Class of 2027

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  1. Student Reflections Sarah Noonan