Awesome Archives

Treasure trove uncovered in a library

While preparing for a massive renovation of its 100-year-old facility, librarians at the Russian State Polytechnical Museum found more than 30,000 pre-revolutionary books and magazines.

…

As the books were packed into boxes, the empty racks were dismantled. Behind one of these racks, the librarians found a plywood wall that sounded hollow when tapped.

 “We moved the cover aside and found books behind it. When we removed the wall completely, we saw piles of books stacked up to the ceiling.” said Kukhtevich.

Stumbling onto a secret library has got to be one of the best things to happen to a person ever.

Epistolophilia

The librarian walks the streets of her beloved Paris. An old lady with a limp and an accent, she is invisible to most. Certainly no one recognizes her as the warrior and revolutionary she was, when again and again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide, and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau.

Through Epistolophilia, Julija Šukys follows the letters and journals—the “life-writing”—of this woman, Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970). A treasurer of words, Šimaitė carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her life, including thousands of letters, scores of diaries, articles, and press clippings. Journeying through these words, Šukys negotiates with the ghost of Šimaitė, beckoning back to life this quiet and worldly heroine—a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem’s honored “Righteous Among the Nations”) and yet so little known. The result is at once a mediated self-portrait and a measured perspective on a remarkable life. It reveals the meaning of life-writing, how women write their lives publicly and privately, and how their words attach them—and us—to life.

University Archives is the rare manuscript/artifacts business of one John Reznikoff, a major force in authentication, appraisal, and forgery detection. Lots of neat tidbits of history are available at his site, including this private detective report from the legendary Pinkerton Agency.

via Derangement and Description

Shortly before Kowloon Walled City was demolished, a Japanese group produced a cross section survey of it. This thing is crazy. There’s a strip club, a school, a barber shop… basically everything you need in a city, shoved into a structure that looks like a sim tower gone wrong.

I believe this image was published in a book, 大図解九龍城 (Daizukai kyūryūjō). There are some copies available on Amazon.jp for about 70 bucks, the only US copy registered in WorldCat is at Columbia University  and it seems they won’t let me in if I just stop by. I really want to know what else is in this book.

You must look at the hi-res version of this or you are missing out.

hostilities:

Why do I have a feeling someone in the Archives/History program made this up to inspire the rest of us with hope?

The Case of the Disappearing Documents

infoneer-pulse:

At age 10, Barry Landau wrote a letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower, admiring his “very beautiful” wife and offering his assessment of where the general stood in the country’s pantheon of great leaders. “I think you lived the most exciting and the most interesting life then [sic] any other President of our United States,” according to a copy of the letter released by the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

The boy got a card back from the White House, triggering a lifelong love of historical documents and a passion for accumulating them. He has since built what his lawyer calls the world’s largest private collection of American presidential memorabilia.

Now he’s under house arrest, and items from his prized collection have been seized by federal agents in a case that has rocked the tight-knit world of historical-document collectors.

Mr. Landau and an associate, Jason Savedoff, are awaiting federal trial in Baltimore, accused of conspiring to steal irreplaceable historic documents and sell them for profit. Paul Brachfeld, inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration, says that of the 10,000 pieces removed from Mr. Landau’s New York home, at least 2,500 of them—potentially worth millions of dollars—were stolen from historical societies, university libraries and other institutions along the East Coast.

» via The Wall Street Journal (Subscription may be required for some content)

lookhigh:

All this would fit in your pocket now

The photo shows the busy catalog card distribution office at the Library of Congress. There’s no date on the photographic print. Recently, we needed to determine when the photo was taken, so out came my magnifying glass. (LOC: Picture This blog)