Monthly Archives: June 2018

Through The Grapevine: writing for Alcoholics Anonymous

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By Anne Garner, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts

Alcoholics Anonymous first issued The Grapevine in June of 1944, seventy-four years ago this month.  In the journal’s inaugural issue, an uncredited author recounts the founding of the publication “in a big, smoke-filled room” where “six ink-stained wretches sipped at their Cokes … a cashier, a radio script writer: an author: a bookseller: an art director: a wife and mother of two.”  When questioned on the journal’s purpose, the mother of two explains.  It’s about “A.A.’s whole design of living.  There’s going to be a big, full-page on local group doings … and we’re planning to get all the big general stuff on alcoholism into the paper.  Best of all, we think, is the Servicemen’s Letter page…”[1]

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While managed by senior advisor and Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill W., The Grapevine was conceived and established by a handful of New York “A.A.” women. In “–the story of your magazine – – ” published in the December 1948 issue, the initial idea for the serial publication was credited to “Lois K., a New York member,” who suggested a trial run. A preliminary meeting between Lois K. and three other women in the program, Priscilla P., Grace O. and Marty M. (the latter was the founder of the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism) solved initial questions about content and funding.  They also decided that male representation was needed, and added two men to their staff, Chase H. and Abbott T. Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill W. gave the plan his blessing, and in his first editorial for the publication, called The Grapevine, “a lighted lamp.”[2]

The initial print run was 1,200 copies, and demand was steady. Members voted on October 3, 1945 to designate The Grapevine as the initial periodical of A.A.  In 1944 and 1945, the journal was produced entirely by non-paid volunteers; by 1948, The Grapevine was supported by four paid staff.  In September of 1948, a smaller, pocket format was conceived (the earliest editions bear a fruit-heavy vine on the cover with the issue information but no title, in an instance of design safeguarding anonymity.)

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The first edition of “Alcoholics Anonymous,” or “the Big Book,” (1939) included only one essay about a female in recovery.  But from the beginning, The Grapevine was more inclusive of women’s stories.  An early article by founding member Grace O. focused on female membership and the perceived challenges by men of women at meetings.  Here, she ticks out some of the complaints expressed by male members, who believed “women talk too much,” “many women form attachments that are too intense,” “women’s feelings get hurt too often,” and that they frequently “are attention demanders;” she concludes that the way forward is with patience and acknowledgement of common purpose.[3]  As Leslie Jamison writes in her 2018 book, The Recovering, “Describing the ‘traditional beliefs’ that inflect how male and female drinking have been understood differently, one clinical textbook puts it like this. ‘Intoxication in a woman was thought to signal a failure of control over her family relationships.’”[4]

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A selection of The Grapevine from 1948-1949.

4Grapevine_t_May1949_v5n2_WatermarkedPnina Levy demonstrates that in the earliest years of the organization men and women shared editorial and writing responsibilities for the serial, though the organization wasn’t always able to shake the entrenched cultural and social gender stereotypes of the early post-War period.[5] A May 1949 article, “Lady A.A.s Get Their Heads Together” acknowledged the challenges of “scurrying to fix dinner, wash dishes, prepare kids for bed, dress yourself and make the meeting across town by 8 o’clock.”[6]  In a “Vino Vignette” published in a 1946 issue, Esther E. tells of the difficulties of moving to her new town of San Antonio to kindle a regular meeting because she’s a woman. She’s successful assembling a group of three females and one male; eventually, as she says, “‘evah-thing’ caught fire.”  The December 1955 issue has no less than five articles by women, including articles about co-ed sponsorship, a narrative of a former female prisoner in recovery, and “My Son and I and AA,” written by a New York program mother.[7]

Today, The Grapevine is still in print, along with La Vina, for Spanish audiences.  Current information about subscriptions and excerpts from past issues can be found here.

References
[1] Anonymous. “Grapevine’ in Bow.” The Grapevine.  June 1944. Vol 1, No. 1.
[2] Anonymous.  “—the story of your magazine—“ The Grapevine. December 1948. Vol 5, No. 7; Bill W., “The Shape of Things to Come,” The Grapevine. June 1944. Vol. 1, No. 1.
[3] Grace O. “Women in A.A. Face Special Problems.” The Grapevine. October 1946. Vol. 3, No. 5, P. 1, pp 6 – 7, 10.
[4] Leslie Jamison. The Recovering.  New York: Little Brown, 2018.
[5] Pnina Levi. “Gender and Alcoholism: Pioneering alcoholic women’s contribution to Alcoholics Anonymous, 1937 – 60.”  Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. 2015. Vol. 29, pp. 112-35.
[6] Anonymous. “Lady A.A.’s Get Their Heads Together.” The Grapevine.  May 1949. Vol. 5, No. 12, p. 11.
[7]  See, “I’ve Changed My Tune,” “My Son and I and AA,” “Adding Up the Score,” “A Lady’s Gripe,” “I’ve Got What I Want for Christmas,” all from The Grapevine. December 1955.  Vol. 12, No. 7.Shop ad_book arts

Met by Accident: A Beaten Book

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Today’s guest post is written by Julia Miller, a book conservator who studies, writes, lectures, and instructs about historical binding structures. In collaboration with the Guild of Bookworkers New York Chapter, Ms. Miller will speak at The New York Academy of Medicine on June 27th at 6pm, “Meeting by Accident,” about types of bookbinding and delve into the what, why, and how questions concerning historical bindings. 

When I wrote my second book Meeting by Accident: Selected Historical Bindings, I drew on interesting bookbindings encountered in recent years. I wish my book had been published a bit later than it was, just so I could include the book I describe to you here.

Fig. 1

Spine, upper cover, and lower text edge of the Guthrie book. All photographs courtesy of Randel Stegmeyer.

Not long after Meeting by Accident was published, I found a book that immediately intrigued me because it carried an interesting, and to me, unusual direction to the binder: “The Binder is desired to beat the Book before he places the Maps.” It appears on page 10 following the Preface in William Guthrie’s A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar; and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World. (The Thirteenth Edition, Corrected. London, Printed for Charles Dilly, in the Poultry; and G.G.J. and J. Robinson, in Pater-noster Row. 1792.)[1]. Beating book sections to flatten them prior to sewing was a common binding practice at one time but fell out of use and out of our collective memory; the mention of this old practice in the binders’ direction reminds us. The flatness of the text leaves (and the near-absence of “bite” to the printed text) indicates the binder of this volume followed the direction to beat the book.

Fig. 4

Detail director to binder in William Guthrie’s A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar; and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World.

 

Inside upper cover and title page of Guthrie book.
Direction to binder following end of Preface, page 10.

The book measures 22 H x 13.8 W x 8 T in centimeters. It is worn, with losses to the brown sheepskin cover, and much repaired. The detached boards were oversewn to reattach them to the text block, and the spine rebacked with a strip of tawed skin. There is evidence of sewing in two- or three-on style [for a primer on three-on sewing click here] and later oversewing to secure loosened sections. The text block shows heavy use and damage: finger dirt, stains, and damaged edges.

Why is this book of reference interesting to the history of hand bookbinding? In 2013, conservator and bookbinder Jeffrey S. Peachey published his ground-breaking examination of beating books, “Beating, Rolling, and Pressing: The Compression of Signatures in Bookbinding Prior to Sewing” in Volume I of Suave Mechanicals – Essays on the History of Bookbinding.[2] His essay is an exercise in detection and is fascinating to read. Jeff discusses the history, tools, and methods of flattening book leaves, noting that it is sometimes impossible to tell if sections of a given book were beaten in the traditional way, or if sections were rolled or pressed instead. Guthrie’s book, at least the thirteenth edition, carries the type of evidence we need, in the wording of the direction to the binder, to establish that this is probably a beaten book. Peachey mentioned in a recent email that he has seen similar directions in other 17th and 18th century books.

Fig. 5

Fore edge of Guthrie book.

A comparison study of other copies from this thirteenth edition of Guthrie, and earlier/later editions, looking for the same binders’ direction and evidence of beating, plus searching out other imprints carrying similar directions to the binder, would be a valuable and interesting research project; and I hope one of you reading this post will undertake it!

References
[1] The Academy Library has the 1794 edition.
[2] Ed. Julia Miller. 317-382. Ann Arbor, MI: The Legacy Press, 2013.

 

Facendo Il Libro: The Making of the Book (and a digital collection and exhibit)

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By Anne Garner, Curator, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Robin Naughton, Head of Digital

The Academy Library is thrilled to announce “Facendo Il Libro: The Making of Fasciculus Medicinae, an Early Printed Anatomy.”  This online exhibit, focused on an astonishing and influential medical book first published in Italy in 1491, was made possible through the generous support of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

Originally collected in manuscript form, the Fasciculus Medicinae (the “little bundle of medicine”) is a richly illustrated collection of medical treatises on uroscopy, phlebotomy, anatomy, surgery, and gynecology.  The Fasciculus Medicinae was first published in 1491, but demand for it made it a favorite text for printers. By 1522, it had been issued more than twenty times.  Variations in the text and the illustrations through time show the early modern tension between medieval medical ideas and advances in medical understanding forged at the beginning of the 16th century.  The exhibit allows visitors to browse full-text scans of all five editions (1495–1522) in The New York Academy of Medicine’s collections; to investigate each edition’s exquisitely illustrated woodcuts and to explore their cultural and medical meanings; and to compare the books’ illustrations in different editions over time.  The site includes contributed essays from Dr. Taylor McCall, art historian of material culture and medieval medicine at the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, and from Dr. Natalie Lussey Seale of the University of Edinburgh, whose work focuses on early modern Venetian print culture.  Dr. McCall’s essay looks at the creation of the text and its accompanying illustrations, while Dr. Seale’s essay offers a window into Venetian printing processes in the 16th century and describes the making of a book in early modern Italy.

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Frontispiece, 1495.

The illustrations of the Fasciculus Medicinae offer an intriguing glimpse of medical practice in the 16th century.  The book’s woodcuts include narrative scenes depicting the earliest Western depiction of dissection in print, an early illustration of a diagnostic consultation showing a professor analyzing a urine flask, and a physician, holding an aromatic sponge to his nose to avoid infection, attending a sick plague patient confined to his bed.  Other woodcuts help us to understand early modern conceptions of health and illness.  The Fasciculus Medicinae’s female anatomical figure captures late medieval ideas about women’s bodies, reproduction, and pregnancy.  A “Wound Figure” graphically depicts the various threats to the body, from blows to the head down to the prick of a thorn on the feet.  Perhaps most surprising of all, the Fasciculus Medicinae’s “Zodiac Figure,” who balances all twelve zodiac signs on his body, conveys the powerful role the stars and planets played in health in the medieval imagination.  This figure, who dates to earlier manuscripts from the medieval period, survives well into the twentieth century, appearing alongside horoscopes in a modified form in print in American almanacs produced by pharmaceutical companies.

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Delmas Homepage imageThe Facendo Il Libro website has a simple design, but a complex structure.  It is both a standalone digital collection and an online exhibit built using Islandora, an open-source digital repository framework.  Representing the first full-text internal digitization project for the Academy Library, the five editions of the Fasciculus Medicinae were digitized in the Library’s Digital Lab. The online exhibit was built using an Islandora multi-site to leverage the digital collection repository (Fedora), Drupal Book module, and the current Library branding theme.

The ability to draw from the common repository made it possible to store content once and use it in multiple ways.  Thus, the five digitized editions are available in two different places using a single source.  The built-in navigational structure for the exhibit makes it easy for users to explore the collection in a linear fashion or by sections.

First images of the 1500 edition

Replicating the physical experience of touching the text is still a challenge for digital projects.  Thus, it was important to create a digital experience that provides the user with some sense of the materiality of the object. For example, the 1500 edition was bound with another text (Savonarola’s Practica medicinae), which is evident from the first digital image of the book. The image shows the thickness of the text and the fact that the 1500 edition begins in middle of the physical object. It shows the user exactly what will be encountered when using the physical item.  It also highlights a significant piece of information that could have been lost due to cropping.

Another important aspect of the online exhibit is the illustrations page, where users can see all the illustrations from all editions in one place.  When a user clicks on an illustration, the user is immediately taken to a page with descriptions of each illustration as it appears in each edition.  To explore the images, users can click on an image and zoom in to see the intricate details.

“Facendo Il Libro: The Making of Fasciculus Medicinae, an Early Printed Anatomy” offers a great opportunity for users to learn and explore the Library’s five editions of Fasciculus Medicinae in context.

Explore Facendo Il Libro Online Exhibit.

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