Red Tape

As we all know, Little Jackie Paper gave Puff strings and sealing wax. We covered sealing wax in a previous blog. Now let's look at strings.  

As we process the Bemis papers, we have found a variety of strings used to bind papers together so they would fit in pigeonholes in historic desks. 

If we look carefully at the “red tape” used to bind some of the papers, we can see how they were made. The sheen of the material suggests it is linen made from the fibers of the flax plant. The threads have been dyed various shades of color before being woven. 

To understand how the tape was woven we can turn to the portrait of Mr and Mrs Thomas Mifflin (Sarah Morris) by John Singleton Copley. 1773 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A detail of the painting shows a “tape loom” of the period. You can see the “shed” created with the shuttle that allows a “weft” or thread passed back and forth to form the tape.

The magic of digital scanning allows us to click on the photo and enlarge the image to the point where you can actually see way the fabric was woven and the "selvedge" and "Z" twist of the thread.

Here you can see the string on the other hand is an "S" twist.

Pigeonholes

Building on our recent post about “strings and sealing wax” let’s continue to review and expand our exploration of a single, seemingly simple, historical artifact, a letter in the Samuel A. Bemis collection.  

Earlier we explored the red wax seal that was broken to open and read the letter seen in the picture above. Now we are going to look at how the letter was folded so the back of letter would serve as its own envelope and to provide physical protection and privacy to the contents of the letter. Then after the letter was read, the paper was refolded in a different way so it could be "pigeonholed" (filed in an organized system). Notice we haven’t actually gotten around to reading the letter or even seeing who it was from. We will get to that later. At this point we are more interested in the context than the text.

In this 1758 painting of Bostonian Thomas Greene by John Singleton Copley at the Cincinnati Art Museum, you can see examples of a letter on the desk folded and sealed in a similar way. You can also see another letter in his hand unfolded to read.  

This method of folding and sealing provided a level of privacy and security to the letter. When folded this way it was hard to sneak a peak at the contents of the letter without breaking the seal. It also provide a functionality in which the back of the letter served as the “envelope.” If you look again at the letter, you can see the darker area of the paper that was exposed to the environment outlined in red in the image below.

Here you can see the order in which the sections of the paper were folded.

Here is how the address section of the "envelope" would have looked.

After the letter was read it was refolded in a different way so it would fit into a pigeonhole in a desk. First the letter was turned upside down.

 Then it was folded in four parts to a "pigeonhole" size.

Then it was labelled with information so it could filed away and retrieved later. (see the wording in the green box below)

 So it would have looked like this.

In this case,

Seems to read

Letter dated 8th Dec. 1836

From

Doct. L. F. Gallup

Dentist

A quick internet search finds a reference to a L.F. Gallup Dentist during the period.

Now the letter is ready to be filed in a "pigeonhole" in a desk to physically protect the papers and sort and organize the papers into categories. The desk would also provide additional layers of security for privacy and security. Inside the desk and bookcase sections of this furniture were many shelves, drawers, and compartments. The desk part seen below has six pigeonholes.

The stacks of these letters/papers were bound with paper bands, red tape or even straight pins so it would fit in the most common furniture filing system, the pigeonhole. This traditional system has led to the common social use of phrases such as:

Cut through the Red tape

Brass tacks

Pigeonhole something away

Put a pin in it

Next time we will look at these various ways of collating papers.

Of strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff

Evidence of special strings and sealing wax can be found throughout the Samuel A. Bemis papers we are processing at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.  

 

In fact, some of the evolution of various binding and sealing systems for writing, sending and organizing papers can be seen in the collection. 

MIT conservator Jana Dambrogio coined the term “letter locking” to cover the wide range of techniques used over the years to provide privacy, security and authenticity to the written word. It will take a couple of blogs to cover even a tiny bit of this vast subject and continue to examine the material context of the papers themselves including paper format, color, binding, seals, etc. 

We have already covered the grains of sand we found among the collection and at least one of the watermarks and use of string to bind a booklet in previous blogs.

There are relatively few examples of the use of wax seals in the collection. There are many more examples of the use of wafers. Let's look at the difference.

Sealing wax like that seen in red in the pictures below was made from beeswax, lac or rosin mixed with turpentine and pigments and shaped into a taper, like a small candle.

The wick was lit and the wax melted onto the paper, then a metal seal or signet ring was pressed onto it to create a design in the wax, often initials or coat of arms or other insignia.

In the Bemis papers most of the wax seals seem to have been plain.

There are many works of art that show the history of strings and sealing wax. This painting of Samuel Adams shows an example of a very large seal. 

This one from the Bemis collection has a "waffle iron" pattern.

The “waffle iron” pattern seen in this seal was later used in the wafer form.  Wafers were a cheaper and quicker alternative to the sealing wax. They were made from a starchy flour paste that became sticky when wet and were pressed or pinched together with a pair of "wafer tongs."

Both sealing wax and wafers were available throughout the life of Samuel Bemis and there is evidence to suggest that proper etiquette as well as cost and convenience may have guided which system was used when. 

 The “waffle iron” pattern can also be seen on the flap of an envelope showing three different versions of this design. 

So how did one learn all of this about letter writing? Well you could be schooled on School Street by Miss Frost!

  

As always, for any questions or suggestions, or to find the sources of images or quotations from this blog you can "comment" us or contact us at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.

When this you see remember me

A recent Conway Daily Sun article reported on the contributions of the  Mountain Valley Garden Club, Home Depot Associates, and a crew of vets from the American Legion installing five memorial benches and a flower garden at the North Conway Community Center.

The article explains that “Each bench represents a different branch of the service: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard, with a plaque on each.” This project is only the most recent in a long tradition of using the landscape to share memory. Throughout the area, there are many memorial benches, flagpoles, sidewalks, roads, walls, watering troughs and even commemorative mountains, rocks, and trees honoring our heritage.

Did you know that there is a “Liberty Tree” planted in Conway, one of 500 “Liberty Trees” planted in New England as a Bicentennial Momento  in 1976.

One of our ongoing projects involve researching, mapping and documenting our landscape of memorial. Without the story behind the name on the marker, the memorial becomes meaningless. If you have any information on any of these monuments, please comment us as we work on this project, Thanks!

A Small Suitcase? Decipimur Specie!

I recently attended a wonderful program on hiking in the White Mountains given by the Appalachian Mountain Club archivist. If you have been following this blog you know that we have been doing research in the Samuel Bemis papers on his early role in developing and promoting trails in the region. You would also know that we have a new initiative to digitally share our collection and connect it with related items in other collections. Inspired by this lecture I browsed around the AMC archives website and noticed a photograph with the caption “Alpine Garden, June 29, 1919. Mount Adams in back [Clyde H. and Hilda Smith carrying a small suitcase…” I suspect it is not a suitcase, instead I think it is more likely a vasculum.

These items, now forgotten, and as we will see now mistaken for a suitcase or lunch box, were once common and easily recognized, when poet scientist scholars were treated like rockstars, botany was a verb, and botanizing was as popular an outdoor activity as pokeman go.

We had some experience with these items when we developed an artist-explorer character for a living history museum in Indiana a number of years ago. We had a reproduction made for the program.

Several nice drawings and a good explanation for this item can be found in the self-help book, Botanizing: A Guide to Field-Collecting and Herbarium Work, 1899, by William Whitman Bailey.

The idea was for the vasculum to be a rigid container used by botanists to preserve and transport field samples. The main purpose of the valsculum is to transport plants without crushing them and by maintaining a humid environment. Wet moss was often packed in with the plant samples to keep them from drying out.

The famous scientist Linnaeus called it a vasculum dilletanum, from Latin vasculum - small container and dilletanum, referring to J.J. Dillenius, Linnaeus' friend and colleague at the Oxford Botanic Garden.

Along with a plant press and several other simple tools, anyone could create their own herbarium.

The small item below belonged to the artist Benjamin Champney and was identified as a “lunch box.” While it may have indeed served that purpose, it looks like a vasculum to me too.

Champney and other White Mountain artists sketched "plein air" out among the field and forests of Conway and surrounding towns. In the photo below you can see Champney with a white umbrella slung over his shoulder. The umbrella was used to diffuse light on the sketching or painting surface.

Here is a Chamney folding stool he used in his "field work."

Edward Tuckerman's vasculum now in the Amherst College archives is similar in size, shape and color to Champney's "lunch box" vasculum. 

The eggplant (aubergine, purple) color finish was a popular style known as pontypool or japanning. There were many different recipes to create different colors and shade but they all provided a corrosion resistent coating for the sheet iron the vasculum was made from. They usually included some combination of asphaltum and linseed oil and heated to make it the finish both tough and durable.

However, it does scratch fairly easily. As you can see in the pictures here of Tuckerman’s vasculum, he used that to write notes on his botany box (click on the pictures to enlarge them).

On the front cover he has inscribed his initials (E.T. jr.) and the date 1841. It is hard for me to tell if the middle word is a place or a time. I think it reads August, but it may also be a place. As we will see he records dates and places around the surface of the vasculum. 

Also written on the cover is “Decipimur specie” a warning in Latin that comes for the Art of Poetry by Horace. Roughly translated it is a warning not to be deceived by the semblance of what looks to be right or true, but to explore more deeply and not be fooled by appearances. 

On the back he has written another indecipherable word, and perhaps Aug 1841?

Below that he has written the following:

Nimium ne 

crede colori

Heideleberg

This Latin phrase is from Virgil’s Eclogae and can be translated to something like don’t put too much faith in your appearance, beauty fades. In it can also be seen references to color fading and the bloom of a flower withering away, both quite appropriate for an object intended to preserve both color and bloom.

The most decorative work is reserved for the top end, with the hooks for the carrying straps. You can imagine it placed on the shelf this way so it would appear almost as a book. Here we can see a Christian cross alluding to his service in the ministry and the letters IHS referring to Jesus

Below that is a heraldic style shield that may take me some time to figure out.

Around the vasculum are other places and dates including Niagara Aug 1848, Mt. Holyoke 30th March 1855, Trenton Falls 25 Aug 1859, Lake Memphremagog Sept 59 (for 1859) and Newport Mtn, Mt Desert (Island) 8 Sept 1871.  

Charles Darwin’s vasculum

Edwin and Nellie Teale’s vasculum presented to them by the Baldwin Bird Club in 1959.

Dr. John Torrey’s vasculum. Courtesy Archives of the New York Botanical Garden.

Antique vasculum for sale online showing a variety of condition and shades of color.

As always, if you have thoughts or questions, please comment us or contact us at the Conway Public Library’s Henney History Room.