The Center for the Book establishedits "Books & Beyond" author lecture series in January 1996 to stimulate interest in books and reading by presenting talks by authors of recently published books that draw on the Library's collections or are connected with a Library of Congress program or project. All presentations are free and open to the public.
From Jane Aikin Rosenberg's talk on Jan. 30, 1996, about her book The Nation's Greatest Library: Herbert Putnam and the Library of Congress (University of Illinois Press, 1993) through Patricia O'Toole's Dec. 8, 1998, presentation (see below) about her book Money and Morals in America: A History (St. Martin's Press, 1998), the Center for the Book has sponsored 27 "Books & Beyond" talks.
Barbara Wolanin contributed a chapter to The Library of Congress: The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building (left) and wrote Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol.
Barbara Wolanin on Constantino Brumidi
Through slides, discussion and a lively question-and-answer session, curator for the Architect of the Capitol Barbara Wolanin presented a new book about the U.S. Capitol to the public at the Library of Congress on Oct. 13. The program in the Library's Mumford Room was sponsored by the Center for the Book and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society as part of the center's "Books & Beyond" series.
Written by Ms. Wolanin and including chapters by several contributing authors, the 260-page volume Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol tells the story of the Capitol's major artist in words and illustrations. It includes more than 200 illustrations (most of them in color) that depict the work of Brumidi (1805-1880) and the conservation of his murals. "We wanted to stimulate greater understanding of Brumidi's career and his work in the Capitol," said Ms. Wolanin. "One way of doing this was to learn more about his work in Italy before he came to the United States in the 1850s. But we also wanted to create a book that could be enjoyed by different audiences — from casual visitors to the Capitol to serious readers and conservators who will use the more specialized chapters, the endnotes and the appendices. We have highlighted the discoveries made in the conservation of his work, about the high quality of his painting and his techniques."
Barbara Wolanin - John Y. Cole
Following prefaces by Architect of the Capitol Alan M. Hantman and George M. White, who, as Architect of the Capitol from 1971 to 1995, started the Capitol's mural conservation program in 1984, Ms. Wolanin presents an extensive chronological and analytical treatment of Brumidi. Her chapters follow the course of the artist's years at the Capitol, beginning with his creation of the building's first fresco. She provides details of his murals and other works that grace many of the Capitol's rooms and corridors as well as the Rotunda canopy and frieze.
Interspersed with her work are seven specialized chapters: "The Italian Years," by Pellegrino Nazzaro, chairman of the History Department, Rochester Institute of Technology; "The Capitol's Extensions and New Dome," by architectural historian William C. Allen; "Symbolism in the Rotunda," by cultural historian Francis V. O'Connor; "A Conservator's Perspective," by Bernard Rabin, who was in charge of the conservation of the major Brumidi frescoes in the Capitol's Rotunda; "Conserving the Rotunda Frescoes" by Bernard Rubin and Constance S. Silver; and "The Process of Change in the Brumidi Corridors," by conservators Christiana Cunningham-Adams and George W. Adams. Appendices are: "Brumidi's First Fresco," "Brumidi's Assistants and Fellow Painters" and a list of Brumidi's known works. The volume concludes with a chronology, bibliography and index.
During her presentation Ms. Wolanin introduced those contributors who were present. She also paid a special tribute to Wayne Firth, a senior photographer for the Architect of the Capitol, who shot approximately two-thirds of the photographs in the book. Henry Hope Reed, a consultant on the project, also was introduced.
Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol was published by the Government Printing Office as Senate Document 103-27, and is available from GPO for $26. It also is available from the U.S. Capitol Historical Society; for information, call (202) 543-8919, ext. 11.
The Oct. 13 program was the third about Washington presented jointly by the Center for the Book and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society during the past year. The first was "The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building," held at the Library on Nov. 14 1997 (See LC Information Bulletin, December 1997). The event marked the publication of The Library of Congress: The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building (Norton, 1997), edited by John Y. Cole and Henry Hope Reed, which contains a chapter on the restoration and renovation of the Jefferson Building by Ms. Wolanin. The second was a presentation on July 28, 1998, by Anthony Pitch, who described his book The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814 (Naval Institute Press, 1998) (See LC Information Bulletin, September 1998). Future joint programs are being planned.
Anne Fadiman on Her Love of Books
"The story of our lives is the story of books." "I love to write in books." "You never know what you might find stuck away in an old book." "I learn more if I can have a dialogue with a book."
Anne Fadiman - J. Ross Baughman
These tributes to books and reading were but a few of the epigrams that Anne Fadiman spoke during her "Books & Beyond" talk presented at the Library on Oct. 20, 1998. Now the editor of The American Scholar, until early in 1998 she wrote the popular "Common Reader" column in the Library's magazine, Civilization. Her new book, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), is a compilation of her columns from Civilization — some of which, she notes, "I've renamed or lengthened or fiddled with." She remains a Civilization contributing editor. During her talk she read an excerpt from Ex Libris and also briefly discussed her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Ms. Fadiman's wry humor, delight in language and detail — ("I am a splitter") were obvious and are also evident in Ex Libris's chapter titles, such as "Marrying Libraries" (mixing her book collection with her husband's), "Never Do That to a Book," "The His'er Problem, "Scorn Not the Sonnet" and "The Odd Shelf" ("It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an odd shelf.")
Her presentation, later seen on C-SPAN2, emphasized that the love of books "can take many forms." The "courtly" love of books, which is real but platonic, emphasizes a book's physical self and leads to reading in chairs. To "carnal" book lovers, including herself and all members of the Fadiman family, words are holy and the physical book is a "mere vessel," to be treated as "wantonly as desire and pragmatism" dictate. Hard use of books, she noted is "a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy," and she presented several graphic examples, from wonderful marginalia to squashed food (bacon) used as bookmarks.
In his introduction of Ms. Fadiman, this writer paid a tribute to her father, Clifton Fadiman, the distinguished author and promoter of books and reading. In particular, he explained how Mr. Fadiman's example as "a lightning rod for the curious, intelligent reader" has inspired the work of the LC Center for the Book.
Ms. Fadiman referred frequently to her father and entire family during her talk. Moreover, Ex Libris is dedicated to her parents, "who read tens of thousands of pages aloud to me when I was a child, transmitting with every syllable their own passion for books. … Without them I would be neither a reader nor a writer."
Patricia O'Toole on Money and Morals
Patricia O'Toole spent Dec. 8 working in the Library's Manuscript Division before presenting a talk about her new book, Money and Morals in America: A History, that evening at the Library.
She began with a brief tribute, first to the Library of Congress ("library of all libraries") and then to her public library where she grew up in Michigan. "I used the Library of Congress's Andrew Carnegie Papers for Money and Morals, and now I'm deep in your Theodore Roosevelt Papers researching a book about the last years of TR's life," she told the audience.
Patricia O'Toole - Nancy Crampton
When she first ventured into the public library in her hometown, she assumed it was some kind of commercial establishment. But then "when the librarian explained that all the books could be borrowed —for free — and asked me if I'd like a library card, I could hardly believe it. I remember watching her fill out the card, with a fountain pen, and praying that she wouldn't change her mind while we were waiting for the ink to dry. That library card — No. 1221 — was my passport to the universe. More than anything else, my library card — and the worlds it opened — are what turned Nancy Crampton
me into a writer."
Ms. O'Toole's first book, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918 (Clarkson Potter, 1990), was set in Washington's Lafayette Square in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When she finished it in January 1989, "I did not expect Washington to provide me with another idea for a book." But back in the city on a magazine assignment and struck by the contrast on Henry Adams's Lafayette Square between the homeless people and the power symbolized by the White House across the street, she decided to write about the history of the tension in America between private gain and public good. The result was Money and Morals in which, she notes, "the ‘and' is as important as the other two words," since money and morals are "inextricably connected."
Books
As a writer, she decided "to explore the tension between wealth and commonwealth in a series of mini-biographies set in different periods from the Puritans to the present. I chose each story because it seemed to me a great story — a tale with compelling characters caught in the clash between their individual desires for the things of the world and their vision of a larger social good." In addition to examining the contradictions at the core of Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy, O'Toole's examples include John Winthrop's founding of a "godly kingdom" in Massachusetts, Emerson's and Thoreau's views of the marketplace, Henry Ford's five-dollar day, Henry J. Kaiser's shipyards during World War II and Whitney Young Jr., the "man in the middle" during the civil rights movement.
Before she concluded, Ms. O'Toole told an anecdote about her research for Money and Morals. Until she discovered that the Library of Congress's American Memory site contained an entire 8,000-word account of an 1859 slave auction that she used in her chapter about slavery, she considered editing a small book that would present this narrative to the world. Now, however, she feels that it is "marvelous" that the narrative has become "immortal in cyberspace" and "part of the common wealth" instead of "adding a smidgen to my wealth by making a brief appearance in the little volume with an introduction by me."
