All That Remains

This past spring I became narrowly and temporarily famous for something I'm supposed to do on the job every day—paying attention. The particular thing I was paying attention to at the moment my fame was sealed was a small collection within the larger special collections held in Brown University's John Hay Library. In the preceding year my bench-mate Erica and I, as book-conservation technicians, had been charged with assessing the condition of thousands of books, pamphlets, and other materials slated to be transferred from the Hay to our off-campus storage annex in preparation for a major renovation. We were to determine which items could travel as they were and which, due to their condition, would need stabilization before enduring the rigors of being tightly packed onto a book truck (cart), hoisted into the back of our delivery truck, and driven the five Rhode Island miles to the annex where they would live in climate-controlled exile.

The best way to assess these materials is to look at each piece individually. Most weeks we are presented with several full trucks, each holding anywhere from 100 to 350 or so items; and we look through nearly all those items. After spending large parts of our workdays this past year paying attention to crumbling leather covers, brittle pages, loose plates, moldy cases, and other unhappy conditions, we have found that the decisions we make have become nearly autonomic. Our collections are full of wonders, and we've had the opportunity to see quite a few of these as we've made our way through the project. Over time, however, seeing the wonders has given way to seeing the conditions, making decisions, and moving on. We're paying attention, but we're moving at a pace that doesn't allow us to linger too long on any one gorgeous illustration or disturbingly outdated opinion.

In March a truck of books from a collection donated to the library in the 1940s made me focus once again on the wonders. The truck contained 177 books from the personal library of Solomon Drowne, a Brown graduate (class of 1773), doctor, avid amateur agronomist and botanist, minor Revolutionary War figure, and professor in Brown's early medical school. Unlike many donated collections, this one had been Drowne's own working library, passed down through family generations mostly intact. The books were filled with his pen-and-ink handwriting. This writing was principally his ownership marks and transcribed passages from other sources, but there were also notes about where he had bought the books and under what circumstances: two were purchased during a 1772 trip Drowne made to New York City in order to receive an experimental inoculation for smallpox. On the back pages of a book titled The English Garden, were Drowne's detailed description and a hand-drawn garden plan made after his visit to the garden of a wealthy Boston merchant. Another book was inscribed to Drowne from a man whose young daughter Dr. Drowne had cared for before she died. There were bits, too, of the lives of later Drownes: gift inscriptions from fathers to sons; an 1898 trading card from an Arm & Hammer Soda box depicting the nearly extinct buffalo; a yellow paper cutout of two roosters in the pages of a spelling dictionary. As I contemplated these pieces of family marginalia and ephemera, I realized that I needed to slow down, to see everything I was handling and pay attention to these intimate remains.

In this state of mind I came to a medical book titled Thomas's Practice. Slipped into the back of the book was a loose plate that had nothing to do with medicine. It was a printed engraving depicting the baptism of Christ. The perspective of the composition was somewhat primitive, the array of graphic elements odd. At the bottom, the engraving was signed "P. Revere sculp." By the end of the day, after showing the print to our conservator and rare-materials cataloguer, I learned that I had found the fifth known copy of Buried with Him in Baptism, one of the rarest...