Urban Blue

In an article in Sunday's New York Times about David Rockwell's designs for this year's Oscar awards ceremony at the Kodak Theater ("The Little Gold Man In a New Blue World," February 15, 2009), Patricia Leigh Brown writes: "This year the dominant color scheme will shift from red to a rich, deep blue, a shade inspired by Joseph Urban, the prolific stage designer of opera and the Ziegfeld Follies."

The Urban blue! The most wonderful of all shades of blue, presented to the millions watching the Oscar ceremonies this Sunday! We thought it appropriate to present here one of Urban's loveliest uses of his blue, as found in one of the set models held in the outstanding Joseph Urban archive in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, namely for the musical "Flying High" that opened at the Apollo Theater on March 3, 1930.

As Arnold Aronson wrote in his Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, exhibit catalog "Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban,"
"Joseph Urban, first and foremost, was a colorist. All of his innovations - on the stage, in architecture, and in decoration - can be tied to his unprecedented use of color, which was virtually unmatched in the twentieth century...Indeed a deep, rich, shimmering blue is his trademark...Only in the work of the Russian designers...for the Ballets Russes - at roughly the same time as Urban was creating his first stage designs - could one find such a brilliant use of color." Stay tuned to this site for a future posting on the RBML's forthcoming exhibit in honor of the centennial of Les Ballets Russes.

Timecapsules

For an archivist, everyday is a potential journey to the center of the earth. Open a box—any box—and you are instantly transported to another place and time. In most cases the creator of those records did not intend for this to be the case. But every now and then you stumble across a voice from the past who intended for you to hear it.

Such was the case in 2008 when I received a call from the Office of the Treasurer. The office was in the midst of a move when an envelope was found in the vault. “Do not open until October 31, A.D. 2000.” As with ancient curses of all sorts, the staff called the University Archives. “It’s some kind of time capsule. We were kind of afraid to open it.”


The package, I learned, was a 40 page observation on Columbia and its history sealed by one Roger Howson who, in 1948, was the University Librarian. Born in Overton, North Wales, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Howson came to Columbia in 1922 as assistant librarian. In 1926 he was named University Librarian and by the time he retired in 1948, Columbia was the third largest university library in the country with well over 1,450,000 volumes. He had witnessed plenty and had more than a few words to say about Columbia’s history.

In his treatise, Howson recalls with good humor college spirit and student hi-jinx. Of sports he noted Columbia’s less-than-stellar reputation on the football field describing the school as the “graveyard of football coaches.” He wrote of the expense of the city, how New York “was generally more expensive than had been anticipated” for graduate students. Well, some things don’t change in sixty years.

Howson was critical toward discrimination against Jews, Irish Catholics, Armenians, and “coloreds.” Yet his most critical words were saved for Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia from 1902-1945. “He was an intellectually illiterate man,” wrote Howson. “For him words were things out of which one made sentences, out of sentences one made speeches, and out of one’s speeches one compiled a career and a life.” Indeed, Howson asserted that the last thirty years of Butler’s administration was “one of the tragedies of American educational history.”

Roger Howson was, as Robert McCaughey described in his book Stand, Columbia, one of the least recognized historians of Columbia University history. His desire to capture the essence of time and place was deeply held and was, indeed, issued as a polite challenge in the closing paragraph of his letter to me, the University Archivist. “If I may make a suggestion it would be that you should follow my example and leave something similar for him who will follow you after fifty more years shall have passed.”

I am taking notes, Mr. Howson. I am taking notes.

Susan Hamson
Curator of Manuscripts and University Archivist

A discussion of early dust wrappers on books on the SHARP discussion list took a side turn when wrappers on playing cards came up as a possibly parallel phenomenon. The recently-publicized Field collection of playing cards -- over 6,000 decks and a good bit of related material -- has a number of these wrappers.

In England, the wrappers were apparently required from the 18th well into the 20th centuries as carriers for duty stamps (in fact, they were supposed to be destroyed when one opened the pack, to prevent re-use). Nevertheless, Mr. Field collected dozens of English examples alone.

I was taken with the example above, both because I hadn't thought of Mudies' (famous as a major circulating library) as a stationer, though it's perfectly sensible combination in the nineteenth century, but more particularly because I find the concept of selling "Genuine Second-Hand" used playing cards at odds with my memory of my English grandparents.

Eggs and "Art"

Today, in to look at medieval manuscripts, I had a great group of 7th graders from a local school: enthusiastic kids, smart, engaging, who made the leap from the early materials they were looking at to their own education in a flash. They looked at a 13th century sale receipt for a slave and a papal bull of the same date; they read the opening words of a 15th century English primer, “Fadir owre that art in hevenes . . . “; they admired the alphabets in a 16th century calligraphy manual. In spite of the odd shape of medieval arabic numerals, they recognized a multiplication table in a copy of Boethius.They compared a bookmark image of the spheres of the heavens to the manuscript source of the image, and learned the lesson: the real thing is always the best. But what astonished me was their clear and favorite choice: an ordinary paper manuscript, Italian, 15th century, of word problems, meant for the children in the “abbaco” schools to study commercial arithmetic. Our 7th grade visitors recognized problems, read numbers, and sometimes gave answers! And the hokier the drawing, the more they exclaimed over the book. Top choice? See the picture; it’s about a father who has three sons, and to the oldest he gives 50 eggs, and to the middle son, 30 eggs, and the youngest receives 10 eggs; the sons go to market and sell most of each son’s eggs at the same price, with different pricing on some of their eggs; each son returns home with the same amount of money. What was the shared price of each egg? What was the price that each son put on his leftover eggs? And how much money did they bring home?