In this week's bonus, we look at the behind-the-scenes reality of being a curator at Harvard's Houghton Library with John Overholt. We look at why 18th-century paper is surprisingly tough, how John managed the high-stakes transport of a book that belonged to George Washington, and why curators actually prefer bare hands over white gloves.
In this week's bonus, we look at the behind-the-scenes reality of being a curator at Harvard's Houghton Library with John Overholt. We look at why 18th-century paper is surprisingly tough, how John managed the high-stakes transport of a book that belonged to George Washington, and why curators actually prefer bare hands over white gloves.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings Grammarpaloozians. Thank you so much for supporting our work and I am really excited to bring you this bonus episode today with John Overholt, curator at Houghton Library at Harvard, in charge of the Samuel Johnson collection, as well as, I think, everything before 1800 as well. Is that right, John?
John Overholt: So technically, there are two subject-based departments at Houghton: one for the history of printing and one for the history of performing arts. And so they have some pre-1800 stuff as well, but kind of everything that doesn't fall into those specific categories that's pre-1800 is in my curatorial department.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, wonderful. Well, you still have a lot of stuff that you're in charge of, and I have been following you probably for eight or ten years on social media. We're both on Mastodon now, and you post the most wonderful, interesting things, and I have to know, like, where do you find them all?
John Overholt: So some of it is just the stuff that I encounter in the course of my work. One of the things I do a lot during the semester is work with classes at Harvard, but also sometimes beyond Harvard as well. I have a lot of fun figuring out what would be interesting things to pull for those classes. And I always enjoy the chance to dive into the stacks at Houghton and find cool stuff that I haven't seen before. So if I encounter something interesting in that process, I'll usually take a photo and post that. I also use RSS reader NewsBlur to subscribe to a couple dozen blogs from special collections libraries around the world. And, you know, whenever I find things there that I think other people might find interesting, I like to post about those as well.
Mignon Fogarty: It is really just a bright spot in my life, I have to say. Last week or the week before, you posted about a patron wanted to read an issue of McSweeney's that was printed on balloons and had to be blown up to be able to be read. That just, pun not intended, blew my mind. So how do you resolve this issue between sort of destroying the item to be able to read it?
John Overholt: Yeah, I should say it's not a part of my collection. This was actually at Widener Library, our colleagues at the main library next door. But I saw it come into the reference address and was really fascinated to see it because I hadn't seen this issue before. I thought it was a really interesting representation of, you know, the kind of problem of you want to save a thing to be available for the future, but also you want to make it accessible to somebody who has a need to see it. So, to cut to the chase, what they found out was that another library had blown up the balloons and taken pictures of them, and posted those online. So it was possible to read the story that was printed on one of the balloons just through those photos.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, good.
John Overholt: I think, you know, if there had been no other way to do it, I think we probably would have consulted with our conservators, who are responsible for the sort of care and well-being of the collection and of treating problems if they arise how we could safely do that. We probably would not just have a patron come in blowing into the balloon. We'd probably figure out a more structured way to do that. But I think they probably could have come up with a safe way to do it; you know, we are here to meet those kinds of needs. If that's what a patron needs access to, then we want to figure out the best way to do that.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So, Sam Levine, who’s one of our joint followers on Mastodon, actually said, "What's the weirdest request you've gotten that's directly related to your collection?"
John Overholt: I don't know if it's weird exactly, but it was definitely a very unusual experience. We have a book that belonged to George Washington that is heavily annotated by him, which is relatively unusual for books from Washington's library, because it had very special circumstances. James Monroe was his ambassador to France, and they clashed over foreign policy, and Monroe was basically forced out. After that, wrote a scathing memoir about his unhappiness serving in Washington's administration. And this is Washington's own copy of that book, in which he has written notes, you know, arguing with Monroe in the margins. The tone, I think, is evident from the first one where, you know, Monroe starts by saying, you know, "On such and such date, I was appointed to be the ambassador to France." And then Washington writes, “After all of their efforts to obtain a more eligible character had failed.” It's really funny to think about Washington writing that way; it's just not, you know, how you think about George Washington. So it's so nice to have this kind of behind-the-scenes look at him and his personality.
A few years ago, Mount Vernon did a major exhibition of Washington's library and books from their own collection, but also books that they borrowed from collections around the country. And they asked to borrow this particular book. You know, when we can do that, we're always happy to support that kind of exhibition. So, I was tasked with providing an insurance value for our copy, which I thought was pretty substantial based on, you know, comparable auction records for books from Washington's library. And the insurance company said, "Okay, if this is going to go out of your library and to that library, you must carry it by hand. It must be accompanied by an armed guard from the back door of Houghton up to the gate at Logan, fly down to Virginia, and then met again at the other end." I carried it in, it was not literally handcuffed to my wrist, but it was the kind of briefcase you would handcuff to a wrist, you know, one of these metal briefcases with a foam lining inside. I got to sit in first class. The first class was really for the book more than me, but then I got to stay on site at Mount Vernon. There's a little hotel almost for members of the association that runs Mount Vernon. So I got to stay in one of these guest rooms and be there after it closed for the day, which was amazing. And then the next day I went and oversaw the installation of the book into the exhibition. And once they had locked the case back down on top of it, then I went home. And this time I sat in coach because I didn't have the book.
Mignon Fogarty: Didn't need that extra space. So I've thought about that because it must be, I don't know, I'm clumsy. I've seen you joke about how you're clumsy. It must be nerve-wracking to deal with all those really valuable things.
John Overholt: It can be a little bit. I take a lot of comfort from two things. One is that in my time period, the books are really pretty well-constructed usually. They are made out of rag fiber from cotton and linen fibers rather than wood pulp paper, like modern paper is. So, you know, if you're thinking of old books as being brittle and crumbly, those are mostly 19th-century books that are on pulp paper. That's acidic. Books in my time period are actually pretty strong and soft and, to use compared to that super brittle, crumbly paper. And the other is, as I said, I work with an amazing team of conservators, so I'm trying very hard to work carefully, mindfully, and with focus about what I'm doing when I'm handling a book. But I do know that if anything does go wrong, there’s this amazingly skillful team of folks that can repair pretty much anything that I could do to a book. You know, we hope it doesn't come to that, but things inevitably happen through use. And like I said, we're here for the collections to be used. So it's very important that we have their services to call on when necessary.
Mignon Fogarty: We talked in the main episode about a document from Samuel Johnson where he was planning his dictionary, and I posted a picture of that online and one of my followers asked why the text seemed to have almost a drop shadow under it. Is that because of the nature of the paper or the ink of the time?
John Overholt: It is the ink. So, most writing in this time period is called iron gall ink, and it's made from basically a little thing that forms on oak trees that has a very high iron content. And when you mix it with some other ingredients, makes for a very good writing ink. But that iron is corrosive over time. And so particularly in some manuscripts of the period, if the paper is of a lighter quality, or if the ink is really heavily applied, you will get both the kind of shadowing and discoloration that you're talking about. And also, you can see, if you look real closely at that letter or that document, some examples of full burn-through where the ink is actually eaten through the paper and you're seeing through to the other side. This isn't the worst example I've seen, but I've seen some where the letters are almost gone and all that's left are the holes in the shape of what the letters used to be.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh wow.
John Overholt: Thankfully, that isn't a problem that happens with so much severity in most cases, but it can.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I mean, I know it's really important to you to make your collection available to people so people can come in and physically look at things, but do you worry about damage? You know, I thought of you when they had the theft at the Louvre, like, do you worry about things like that?
John Overholt: So, if you come to Houghton to work on our collections, obviously you cannot check stuff out and take it home. We have a reading room in the library where, the collections get brought and sit down at a table. The item is presented to you in a way that you can handle it safely. If it's a bound volume, it's probably going to be in a what we call a foam cradle for support of the binding. If it's a series of loose pages of manuscript, you might get a little page turner to help you sort of separate the pages easily without having to, you know, claw at them too hard. And not to put too fine a point on it, but we will be keeping an eye on you to make sure that you are both handling things safely and making sure everything goes back where it belongs when you're done with it. And, you know, we really do want to strike a balance between that security and safety and the collections and people feeling too and judged. We don't want to be unfriendly, but we do have this obligation to make sure that something is there not just for you, but for the people who come after you.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you want to just spell the myth about white gloves?
John Overholt: I would be happy to. Yeah, that is a very common misconception that we wear white gloves to handle the collections. And, you know, it's certainly something you see in media. These days, I see it the most in auction houses because they want to create this aura of importance. But it is not best practice for handling materials because, I mean, if you think about it for a minute, you would be very clumsy trying to handle something with thick white cotton gloves on your hands. That is absolutely counter to what we're trying to encourage, which is careful dexterity in handling the collections.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
John Overholt: For most types of material, you will have, you know, a little bit of oil on your skin, but that's not harmful. We do want you to wash your hands right before you come in. And we did a renovation a couple of years ago where we installed a handwashing sink for people put their bags when they come in. So, hopefully, everybody is coming into the reading room with freshly washed hands. But for the vast majority of things, your bare hands are the best way to handle that material carefully. There are a couple of things, photographs is the biggest one, where you can actually leave like a permanent fingerprint on something if you touch it with bare hands. So for that, we have nitrile gloves, which are more tightly fitted to your hand and don't have quite the same dexterity problem as a bulky cotton glove.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, a listener named Kim Scheinberg also wanted to know, like, what else do people misunderstand or get wrong about your profession?
John Overholt: I think the one librarians hear the most commonly is, "Do you just sit around and read books all day?" That is definitely not the case. If I sit around and read anything all day, it's probably email. Sometimes I feel like I need to consciously make time for myself to spend more time with the collections. Because, you know, a lot of what I do is responding to booksellers and colleagues at other institutions. And, you know, all of those things are really important. But of course, what I really love is the books. And when I do get to spend time with them, that's when I'm at my happiest.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, a listener named Bottling wanted to know, you know, how do you snag a job like this? It sounds amazing.
John Overholt: I mean, I think it's pretty amazing. I got a master's in library science from the University of Texas at Austin and worked for a couple of years at the Ransom Center, which is the main special collections library at UT. In 2004, when the Hyde collection of Samuel Johnson came here, I was working, I was trained as a rare book cataloger initially, and I was working as a cataloger at the Ransom Center. Houghton posted a job for a project cataloger to come up here and catalog the Hyde collection. And so I got that job, which was a two-and-a-half-year appointment. And when that was up, I was very fortunate that they had recently created the department I'm part of now, and they did not as yet have an assistant curator in that department. And so they hired me to stay on as assistant curator in large part based on my recent immersion in the Hyde collection, and eventually I got promoted to curator. So, you know, it is some measure of, and hopefully ability at my job, but also a bit of being in the right place at the right time.
Mignon Fogarty: Does it? Does your job, if, would someone doing your job require a master's of librarianship?
John Overholt: Generally speaking, either an MLS or a lot of equivalent experience. And I should say that, for my particular kind of position, it's actually fairly unusual that I don't also have a second degree in a particular subject. And if I were starting out from scratch today, I might find it tough to get a job like this without that additional master's degree or even a PhD in a particular field that was related to the collections that I was going to work with. I like to say that my superpower is generalism. I oversee a department that covers 2,000 years' worth of stuff and an incredibly wide range of subject materials. And so I think I am valuable to the library inasmuch as I can talk to a very wide range of users at a very basic level, but enough to understand what their needs are and to be an expert enough in Houghton and how it works and what its collections are to help them get the materials that they need in a way that I think is really valuable. Not to downplay at all the incredible importance of my many colleagues who do have PhDs and incredible subject knowledge in a more specific realm. But, you know, I think it's really important to have that interface with as wide a range of researchers as possible.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I think I want to create something. It's a Master of Library Science, right?
John Overholt: It was a Master's in Library Science when I got my degree. Increasingly, those schools are rebranding as Information Science, somewhat to my dismay. There seems to be a trend toward artificial intelligence coming into the titles as well. But yeah, they, you know, it's still basically related kinds of training.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. And you work on other things besides the Samuel Johnson collection. I saw that you curated an exhibition called, what was it? "Marks in Books." And I was particularly excited about this because I write in all my books, and my husband is always horrified when I do it. So I love that you're elevating. This is something worth looking at. So do you want to talk a little bit about that exhibition?
John Overholt: Yeah, sure. I can't take all the credit for it because this was an exhibition that was originally done by a man named Roger Stoddard, who was the curator of rare books at Houghton for decades and decades. He's one of the most important figures in the history of this library. We noticed that it was coming up on the 40th anniversary of when he had originally done the exhibition and wanted to sort of pay tribute to it because I think it's been an enormously influential exhibition in documenting how you can find all these telltale signs of how a book was produced and how it was used over time, by these little pieces of evidence that we find in books. And Roger did an amazing job of documenting this wide variety of things you can find if you know what you're looking for.
And so we remounted maybe about two-thirds of the exhibition that he did originally, added some additional things, and things that have come into the collection since the original exhibition. It was a real pleasure to get to do. Roger passed away last year at the age of 88, and I'm really grateful that he got to come in and see, "Marks in Books" remounted, before he passed away and got to hear us, you know, glowing words about, much we thought that exhibition meant and how much he meant to the library.
Mignon Fogarty: What are some examples of particularly significant marks in books?
John Overholt: Well, we showed some examples of various stages in the sort of composition and proofreading and printing and publishing process that give you these behind-the-scenes glimpses into how these books came to be that weren't necessarily ever intended for someone to see, but give us all kinds of evidence that we wouldn't otherwise have about that process. So, books in which they've done a run and the authors made really dramatic revisions to the text; books in which something has gone awry in the printing process, like you can see a blank space where a little piece of type has fallen out and then lain crossways across the page, so it can't print there. So there's just a little blank space on the page.
But we have very little surviving actual pieces of type from the earliest history of printing, so it's kind of fun to get to see this little ghost of what one of those pieces of type looked like. In addition to that, there's lots of evidence about readers of books, you know, plates and inscriptions. Brands in Spain and Mexico would do what's called a Marco de Fuego, where they'd take a hot iron and stamp the ownership stamp in the edge of the book. You know, just kind of any example of, you know, how is this particular copy of a book unique and different from a generic copy?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Speaking of the production of books, Mark Sulfite wanted to know how carefully you've checked your 16th and 17th-century bindings for fragments.
John Overholt: Yeah. It's an interesting phenomenon. You know, early manuscripts are mostly written on parchment, which is an extremely durable and valuable material. While today we would think that, you know, any book that's a thousand years old is inherently interesting and valuable, they didn't necessarily think that 500 years ago. They might decide that this book was no longer useful or it was too worn out, and that parchment was too good to just throw away, so they would find other uses for it. And if you know the term palimpsest, that's when you take a piece of parchment and scrape the ink off it to create a new blank writing surface that you can reuse. With technology today, we can now use imaging to tease out the previously erased text to actually see what's going on underneath. Another common use was to repurpose that or recycle it into bookbindings for newer books. You can often find either right on the cover or sort of lurking underneath the cover manuscripts that were put into these bindings.
Houghton's collection is very large, and we don't have the resources really to make a systematic review of everything in the collection. Plus, we don't want to, you know, we're never going to go in looking for things if that means doing violence to the book as it exists now. But, you know, wear inevitably occurs, and sometimes that exposes things, and we're certainly very interested when evidence of that kind of thing turns up. It's not something where we've been able to really make a systemic survey of everything on the shelves.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, how about your book recommendations, John? We'd love to get those.
John Overholt: Sure. I picked a couple of things that I think are very on brand for me. One of them, is, speaking of the Grolier Club as we were, is the catalog of an exhibition that was recently held at the Grolier Club. It's called “Hardly Harmless Drudgery,” and it is “A 500-year Pictorial History of Lexicographic Geniuses, Sciolists.... I should have looked at this more carefully ahead of time. A long subtitle, but I think you get the gist that it's an exhibition spanning the history of dictionaries and their makers, that was put together by Brian Garner, who I'm sure you're familiar with, the expert on usage, and who has an astonishing collection of lexicographical history, and Jack Lynch, who is a,a professor of English at Rutgers. Sadly, I did not get to go down to the Grolier to see the exhibition in person, but the catalog is an incredibly thorough documentation of it, and the things they were able to put together for the exhibition are really fantastic. So, I really enjoyed reading it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I bought that book actually. It's literally sitting on my coffee table, and I'm working my way through it very slowly. It's a big book.
John Overholt: It's, yeah, but it's a testament to, I think, to how, what a thorough a job they did and what a valuable resource that catalog will be.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
John Overholt: Another book I wanted to recommend is called “Collecting the World: Hans Sloan and the Origins of the British Museum.” That is by James Del Burgo, and it is about Hans Sloan, who was an 18th-century physician and naturalist, who amassed a remarkable collection of plants and specimens and other kinds of ethnographic materials from mostly the British colonial empire that eventually would become one of the founding collections of the British Museum after his death. So obviously, as somebody who works in a field where my job is acquiring things for the collection of an institution like that, it's really interesting to me to hear the story of his life and work. But what I thought was really important about this book is how directly it deals with the fact that all of Sloan's collecting was inextricably linked to colonization and enslavement and, you know, that it would not have been possible without these incredibly oppressive forces. And I think it's good for anybody who has the job that I have to think about the systems that I'm a part of. Am I collecting the materials and stewarding them in an in ethical fashion? Obviously, I'm doing my best at that, but, you know, Hans Sloan probably thought he was too. So, I think that's really a valuable thing for folks in this field to think about.
The final thing I was going to recommend is quite a bit older, but I kind of think of it as my origin story, and that is a book called “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” by E.L. Konigsburg. It's a children's book that came out in 1968, so it's just a little bit older than I am, and it won the Newbery Award for that year. It is the story of two siblings, a brother and a sister. I think the sister is 11 and the brother is eight, and they run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for several weeks, hiding out in the bathroom after closing and then roaming the galleries at night and sleeping in the historical beds and bathing in the fountain. It is probably the only children's book I've ever read that includes a bunch of work on provenance research, which they end up doing at one point. Those are the mixed-up files in question. And there was something, as a child reading that, that really spoke to me about the idea of access to the museum at night and being in there and having free run of the place. As I mentioned, we're a non-circulating library and our stacks aren't open to the public. So it's a real privilege of my job that I can go down there whenever I want and just poke around. Everybody else has to access things through the catalog, but I get to be hands-on. And that is something I never get tired of.
And I will tell you that I am on the emergency response team. So, you know, if we were to have a flood or something, I would come and help with that. And there was one time when I was worried about a big rainstorm that was coming, and so I stayed here after closing well into the night to monitor the situation and make sure everything is okay, which thankfully it was. But I got that this is basically Frank Wheeler thrill being in here, the library was closed and everybody had gone home and it was dark. So yeah, that book still resonates with me all these many years later.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. Your childhood dream came true.
John Overholt: It really did.
Mignon Fogarty: Did you sleep? Did you spend the whole night?
John Overholt: I did not spend the whole night. That would not have been very comfortable. But, you know, once we determined that things seemed to be holding steady, then I went home. We do still have a guard that walks through the place overnight to make sure that everything's okay. But we figured it was safe for me to go.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, this is just fascinating. I love your posts on social media. Why are you are on the glammr.us server at Mastodon?
John Overholt: Well, so that stands for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. And it's a server that's designed for folks in those kinds of fields. And, you know, I left Twitter years ago for reasons that are probably obvious to you, and was excited to find that there was a place on Mastodon that was, you know, designed for my interests and also run by somebody who I knew from Twitter, a librarian at Penn State. So it felt like a really comfortable home. And indeed, I'm really delighted to be there. And, you know, my following is smaller on Mastodon than it was on Twitter, but my mental health is much improved.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I like it there too much better. I also left Twitter, and on Mastodon, people sometimes get confused, but you can follow someone. You don't have to be on someone's server to follow them. So as long as you know someone's address, you can follow them. So why don't you tell people your address on Mastodon?
John Overholt: Yeah. I am at Overholt, my last name, at glammr.us, G-L-A-M-M-R dot U-S.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. And then, what can people find out more about the Houghton Library and your collection? What's the best place to go to learn about that, or if they want to make a visit?
John Overholt: So, yeah, please do take a look at our website. I think if you Google Houghton Library at Harvard, that should get you there pretty easily. On our website, we've got information about our exhibitions, about the tour that we do every Friday at two o'clock, and some more in-depth pages about highlights of the collection, including the Samuel Johnson collection. And if you do want to come in and do research in our reading room, there's information about how to put in a request, and you can come and visit us.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. John Overholt, thank you so much for being here today.
John Overholt: That's a real pleasure. Thank you.
Mignon Fogarty: You bet. And thank to the Grammapaloozians, thank you for supporting our work. We get to have bonus episodes like this because of you, and we really appreciate it. Thanks.