Author: carriem

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Scripps College Architectural Drawings

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Newly published in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library is a collection of original architectural drawings of some of the buildings that comprise the beautiful campus of Scripps College, one of the seven institutions of The Claremont Colleges consortium.

Founded in 1926, Scripps College was the first undergraduate institution added to The Claremont Colleges, a system of linked educational institutions organized by Pomona College (1887) in 1925-26.

Architect Gordon Kaufmann prepared a comprehensive campus plan for Scripps College in 1926, and during the next thirteen years, designed eight buildings for the campus, including residence halls, academic buildings and a walled garden. The buildings are Mediterranean in style and are laid out among formal gardens, courtyards, and lawns designed by landscape architect Edward Huntsman Trout.

The Scripps College Architectural Drawings collection includes architectural drawings for Eleanor Joy Toll Hall (1927) and the Ella Strong Denison Library (1931).
FMI, contact Denison Library 909-607-3941 or denison@libraries.claremont.edu

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Forest of Dean Cross Section Map (1824)

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A donation to the Woodford Collection, this hand-colored map includes coal deposits in the Forest of Dean, located in Gloucestershire, bordered by the Wye and Severn rivers, the site of important British mining operations in the early 19th century.
The plate above illustrates 5 separate coal basins in SW England; the one from the Forest of Dean by David Mushet is the bottom section. This cross section map includes several overlays that depict alternate geological views of the hills.
A closer view of one section of overlays:
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“Section of the Strata of the Forest of Dean” by David Mushet, reprinted from the Transactions of the Geological Society of London (1824), accompanies the cross section map. Mushet was an influential industrialist and metallurgist who established an ironworks in the Forest of Dean.
Thank you to a scholar who contacted us recently with information regarding Mushet’s contribution to the plate [added 07.31/2014]. We’ve added the clarifying information to the paragraphs above. Many thanks!
The personal library of Alfred O. Woodford, head of the Pomona College Geology Department from 1915 until 1955, is the nucleus of the Woodford Collection. The Collection has continued to develop through departmental purchases, devotedly guided by Donald B. McIntyre, department chair from 1955 to 1984, and more recently, through personal donations from Pomona College alumnus, H. Stanton Hill.

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Edward Ellerker Williams’ Notebook

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A collection of books, articles, and manuscripts by, about, and directly relating to Edward John Trelawny (1792–1881), author of several popular and influential works and memoirs about Byron and Shelley, is now part of the Libraries of The Claremont Colleges and is housed in Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library. Accumulated over a period of fifty years by Donald B. Prell, the core of the Collection comprises nearly 140 volumes.
Of particular note in the Collection is a manuscript notebook of Edward Ellerker Williams dating from about 1819–1820. Williams, a retired military officer, was living in Switzerland with Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin when he was introduced by Medwin to Shelley. Also, about this time, Trelawny joined Medwin, Williams, and Shelley, living together during those fateful days leading up to the sailing accident in which Shelley and Williams were drowned.
In his notebooks Williams recorded his travels during his stint in the Navy then afterward on the Continent with his friends and family, and are an important source for study of Shelley’s last days. Williams’ notebook in the Prell Collection contains many sketches, botanical specimens, fragments of poems, and one particular pencil portrait that might be of Shelley, pictured above.

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Carlos Chavez photographed by Manuel Alvarez Bravo

From our collection of art photography, a portrait photograph of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez by Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, inscribed by Chavez in 1934. Print dimensions: 2 7/8 in. x 3 3/4 in.
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Carlos Chávez received formal training as a pianist, but was largely self-taught as a composer. He grew up during the period of intense nationalism in Mexico brought about by the end of the Mexican revolution. His investigation into native folk music and dance were a significant influence in his music. Chávez was also a distinguished teacher and had an active conducting career, working with nearly every major symphony orchestra in the United States, Europe and Latin America.
Álvarez Bravo studied painting and music in Mexico City; in 1922, he began to take photographs. Through his life he knew many of the artists and writers who lived or visited Mexico including Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, Paul Strand, and Cartier-Bresson, to name a few. In 1930, when Modotti left Mexico, he provided illustrations for Francis Toor’s book Mexican Folkways. In 1938 he met André Breton; Breton published some of Álvarez Bravo’s photographs in Minotaure.
Álvarez Bravo influenced younger generations of photographers in Latin America because of his subject-matter, which often focused on indigenous peoples, and because in his work he combined awareness of current trends in international photography with an appreciation of his own country’s traditions.

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Shelley’s “Adonais”. 1821 Pisa edition, annotated by John Taaffe

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On the page facing the title John Taaffe has written the following note:
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“This poem was given me by its lamented Author. The notes are my own, and were written by me one night at Florence: and I now copy them from the original which I have given to my beloved sister Fanny. J. Taaffe. Fano. May 1834.”
The margins of every page are filled with Taaffe’s notes, elaborating on the poem, explaining its allusions and sources. On the final blank, Taaffe has written an account of Shelley’s death concluding, “I can’t look upon this poem at present without a crowd of most sorrowful recollections”. The notes are written in ink and pencil; the ink has bled through, rendering reading the notes quite difficult in many places.
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Our copy of the Pisa edition of Shelley’s “Adonais” was a gift from William Clary. William Clary graduated from Pomona College in 1911; was an attorney at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles; a trustee of Pomona, Harvey Mudd, and Pitzer colleges; a founding trustee of Claremont College (now, separately, Claremont University Consortium and the Claremont Graduate University); and founding member of the Zamorano Club. His collection on the history of the University of Oxford and its colleges is one of the most distinguished of our Special Collections, along with his collections of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Milton.

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Knowledge Wins–American Library Association Advocacy during World War I

For Memorial Day, a World War I poster from our collection of world war posters: “Knowledge Wins…Public Library Books are Free”. This is one of several posters commissioned by the American Library Association. This particular poster was designed by Daniel Stevens, an American illustrator originally from Philadelphia, who was best known for his depiction of Western Americana scenes.
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During WWI, ALA created the War Service Committee, which established more than 30 libraries at training facilities and other encampments for soldiers.

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1904 Trip to Yosemite in a Covered Wagon

In 1904 an intrepid young married couple, Robert and Alice Jennings, drove a covered wagon from the city of Los Angeles to Yosemite. They had taken the trip at least one time before, and on that earlier Yosemite trip, they rode by train to Fresno then traveled by stagecoach to Yosemite.
Robert and Alice Jennings both graduated from Pomona College in 1900 and were married soon after. Their grandson, Robert A. Jennings, and his family recently gave to Pomona College two accounts of their 1904 Yosemite trip: a diary and a photo album. While the photo album records views of the trek to Yosemite that no longer exist–a dirt track created by wagons through Tejon Pass; the gargantuan grapevine that gave its name to that area, the “Grapevine”; unpopulated canyons–the diary tells of the extremes of the landscape and of the weather but also of the fun that the couple had on their journey.
Alice Jennings in the covered wagon, drawn by “Samanthy” and “Jim”:
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At Wawona Point:
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Monday July 18th, diary entry for the Wawona visit:
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The Jennings’ photo album and diary of their trip to Yosemite in 1904 can be viewed in person at Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library.

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Crispin 21, A 15th Century Book of Hours from the Netherlands

Among the Libraries most frequently used collections by faculty and students is our superb collection of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, excellent sources for teaching medieval life and thought. Notable in our collection are several beautiful books of hours, compilations of prayers and texts intended for lay people, especially women, to follow and worship during the liturgical season.
Crispin 21 was copied after 1471, as Pope Sixtus IV is mentioned in an indulgence. This manuscript is composed of parchment leaves of beautifully calligraphed text, ornately decorated initials and pen work. The text includes a calendar of feasts, Hours of the Virgin, Long Hours and Short Hours of the Cross, Psalms, prayers, and the Office of the Dead. In the image below you can see that the binding is 15th century; the central image blind-stamped on both front and back is the Virgin and Child. The clasps are original as well. In the late 19th century the manuscript’s spine was rebacked in morocco by Zaehnsdorf, one of Europe’s notable fine custom binders, which you can see along the spine of the volume.
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Pictured here are leaves 10-11, the beginning of the Hours of the Virgin:
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The Crispin Collection of exquisite examples of early bookmaking and fine binding was given to Honnold Library by Dr. Egerton Crispin during the 1950s and early 1960s. Nearly fifty Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, including 12th century sermons, 13th century Bibles, 14th and 15th century books of hours, missals, psalters and antiphonals are among the contents of the Crispin Collection.
Denison Library on the Scripps College campus, and the library at the Claremont School of Theology also hold significant collections of medieval and renaissance manuscripts. These collections are cataloged definitively in Dutschke and Rouse, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Claremont Libraries (University of California Press, 1986), call number Z 6621 .H5814 1986

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Letters of Lorenzo de Medici and Angelo Poliziano

Newly digitized from the Bodman Collection, Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library are eleven autograph, signed letters written between members of the Medici family of Florence and others in their social and political circles, including Angelo Poliziano, the Sforza family, Palla Strozzi, and Francesco Guicciardini. Written between 1426 and 1522, these letters touch on a number of issues urgent to the House of Medici including military campaigns, political associations, and the trials of family life.
1478, 20 September:

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In 1483, Lorenzo de’ Medici gave his Villa Diana to the poet and then tutor of the Medici children, Angelo Poliziano. In the twentieth century, Harold C. Bodman (1886-1960) and his wife Ysabel acquired the Villa Diana, making it their home of some years. Poliziano’s villa sparked Bodman’s interest in collecting the works of Poliziano and those works produced at the time by the Medici’s “think tank” of humanist scholars, philosophers, artists, and writers. Mr. Bodman’s studies in this area led him to assemble his splendid collection, which he gave to Honnold Library from 1956 to 1960.

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The Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby Fashion Plate Collection

The Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby Fashion Plate Collection comprises 650 images of nineteenth-century fashion plates from the Macpherson Collection of the Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College. The collection was donated to the Denison Library in 1948 by Scripps Trustee Benjamin Kirby (1876-1957) and is named for his first wife, Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby (1881-1942). In addition to the Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby collection, the digital collection includes 65 fashion plates donated to the Denison Library by Elliot E. Lawrence.


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The full-color fashion plates in the Kirby collection were culled from a variety of women’s periodicals and other mass-circulating works published between 1789 and 1914. The images are primarily from France, Britain, America, and Spain, and depict scenes of nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class life with an emphasis on the leisure practices of bourgeois women, men, and children. Many of the fashion-plate images in this collection circulated in nineteenth-century women’s periodicals or in bound collections. Fashion plates from the nineteenth century bear witness to the importance of fashion in our recent past and, as widely circulating precursors to photographic images in modern-day fashion magazines, anticipate fashion’s role in today’s mass-media, image-driven culture.