D is for Diaries, Drama, and Dracula

Buck and his chewing gum.

I’m lucky. As a volunteer at the RBMSCL, I’ve been creating finding aids for small manuscript collections—collections such as love letters and travel diaries from the 19th century—which can be more compelling than any historical novel. One in particular I found to be especially memorable is the John Buck Diary.

Elaborate script and comic sketches recount the eight week long vacation in England and Scotland in 1887 of John Buck, an affluent, young American who spent several days in close company with Henry Irving, the famous English actor; the equally famous actress and Irving’s rumored paramour, Ellen Terry; and the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre as well as Irving’s personal assistant, Bram Stoker. Yes, the Bram Stoker who later wrote Dracula. His visit begins with the Royal Lyceum's performance of another popular demonic tale:

I reached Edinburgh at seven o’clock and was met by Mr. Stoker. He took me to the Edinburgh Hotel (close by the station) where Mr. Irving was staying. . . . Mr. Stoker after fixing me comfortably hurried away to the theatre and I had my dinner served in Mr. Irving’s dining room. The dinner was good but I was so anxious to see some of "Faust" that I left at the end of the third course and jumping into a hansom drove to the Royal Lyceum Theatre, where I found Mr. Stoker “laying” [?] for me. He . . . took me into the only remaining private box. Mephistopheles was just transforming Faust into a young man as I entered the box, so I had not missed much of the play. . . . At the end of the act Mr. Stoker took me around [to the stage] to see Mr. Irving and Miss Terry. . . . While we were chatting and I was being questioned about “home affairs” the scene shifters were building Marguerite’s room around us, and very soon I was compelled to "skip" as the curtain was about to be rung up. . . . Mr. Irving was grand, and he will make a tremendous hit with Faust in America. (pages 67-70)

The diary is so extraordinarily descriptive and entertaining; it is as if Buck, who loved the theater, were writing the storyline for his own theatrical play. At times, I could imagine his diary recast as a BBC period drama! Equally remarkable is the extent to which Buck’s personality is so clearly revealed. He was sometimes irreverent and informal, even when visiting the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton House in Gloucestershire, highly competitive, a bit arrogant, and more interested in pretty young women, having fun, and socializing than sightseeing; he seemed so American, and so amazingly like a few modern young men that I have known.

One of Buck's sketches.
Happy Halloween!

Post contributed by Danielle Moore, RBMSCL Technical Services volunteer.

Devil's Food

Our celebration of National Dessert Month has been surprisingly chocolate-free, so we're aiming to correct that today with recipes from Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes, published around 1922. Instead of boring candy bars, we at The Devil's Tale want our plastic pumpkins filled with Devil's Food cake!

Devil's Food

2 cups sugar
3/4 cup butter
4 ounces Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate
4 eggs (3 may be used)
2 1/4 cups flour
4 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon clove
1 1/4 cups milk

Cream butter and add sugar gradually, while beating to a cream; add chocolate, melted, and beaten yolks and mix thoroughly. Sift together flour, salt, cinnamon, clove and baking powder and add to butter mixture, alternately with the milk. At the last, fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites and bake in a deep pan and ice when cold.

And, just because you can never have too many chocolate recipes (and because there were no pictures of the Devil's Food cake):

Chocolate Jelly

1 pint boiling water
Pinch salt
1 square Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate
2 tablespoons gelatine
1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Put the water, salt and chocolate in a saucepan. Cook, stirring until the chocolate melts, then let it boil for three or five minutes. Soften the gelatine in a little cold water and pour the boiling mixture over it. Stir until disolved, then add sugar and vanilla. Pour into a mould and set aside to harden, serve with cream and powdered sugar or sweetened whipped cream.

RBMSCL Travel Grants: $$$ to Visit Us!

Photo by Mark Zupan.

Good news, researchers! The RBMSCL is now accepting applications for our 2011-2012 travel grants.

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History will award up to $1,000 per recipient to fund travel and other expenses related to visiting the RBMSCL. The grants are open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, artists, and activists living outside a 100-mile radius from Durham, NC with research projects that would benefit from access to the centers’ collections.

More details—and the grant application—may be found on our grants website. Applications must be postmarked or e-mailed no later than 5:00 PM EST on January 31, 2011. Recipients will be announced in March 2011.

We're also excited to announce that the RBMSCL will be offering three new grants this year for scholars interested in using our German Studies and Judaica collections. Additional information about applying for one of these three grants will be available on our grants website soon. These new grants will have a later deadline.

Congratulations to the 2010 Middlesworth Award Winners!

On Friday, the RBMSCL celebrated with students and parents at one of our favorite events of the year: the Middlesworth Award and Durden Prize Reception.

Given annually, the Middlesworth Awards recognize the authors of the best undergraduate and graduate student papers based on research in the collections of the RBMSCL. Funding for the awards has been generously provided by Chester P. Middlesworth (A.B., 1949) of Statesville, NC.

2010 Middlesworth Award winners Adrienne Niederriter, Bonnie Scott, and Hannah Craddock.

Undergraduate student winner Adrienne R. Niederriter plumbed the depths of the Hartman Center's Ad*Access image database for her paper, "Speak Softly and Carry a Lipstick: Government Influence on Female Sexuality through Cosmetics during World War II."

Undergraduate student winner Hannah C. Craddock received her award for her senior honors thesis, "'A New Self-Respect and a New Consciousness of Power': White Nurses, Black Soldiers, and the Danger of World War I.” Craddock's study focused upon the Ann Henshaw Gardiner Papers and the Samuel Loomis Hypes Papers.

Graduate student winner Bonnie Scott's paper began at the heart of Duke's West Campus, as she compared sermons preached in the Duke Chapel to those preached by North Carolina minister Kenneth M. Johnson during the Civil Rights Movement.

Their papers will now become part of the RBMSCL's collections.

We know that great papers are being researched and written this semester as well. If you are a Duke student, submit your paper and we might be toasting you next fall! Details about submitting your paper can be found here.

Rights! Camera! Action!: Brother Towns

Date: Monday, 1 November 2010
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Carolina Theatre
Contact Information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu, or Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu

Brother Towns / Pueblos Hermanos (59 min.) is a story of two towns linked by immigration, family, and work: Jacaltenango, Guatemala, a highland Maya town, and Jupiter, Florida, a coastal resort town where many Jacaltecos have settled. The docunmentary film chronicles how and why people migrate across borders, how people make and remake their communities when they travel thousands of miles from home, and how people maintain families despite their travel. To learn more, visit the film's website.

This screening is part of the Latin American Film Festival sponsored by the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University, the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Carolina Theater and will be followed by a panel discussion (panelists TBD).

The Rights! Camera! Action! film series, which is sponsored by the Archive for Human Rights, the Archive of Documentary Arts, the Duke Human Rights Center, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and Screen/Society at Duke's Arts of the Moving Image Program, features documentaries on human rights themes that were award winners at the annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The films are archived at the RBMSCL, where they form part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials.

Not Even Covered in Chocolate Sauce

Wonders never quite cease at the RBMSCL. If ever there were a foodstuff that we strongly believed should not be associated with dessert, it was cauliflower. And then we discovered The Dessert Book: A Complete Manual from the Best American and Foreign Authorities with General Economical Recipes (written by a Boston Lady in 1872). So, in honor of National Dessert Month, we present:

Meringues in the Form of Cauliflowers

Not dessert.

Fill a biscuit-forcer with Italian meringue-paste, and push this out upon bands of paper, in knobs, or large dots, superposed or mounted one upon the other in such form or fashion, that, when complete, it shall represent, as nearly as possible, the head, or white part, of a cauliflower (of course, on a very diminished scale, of the size of a pigeon's egg, for instance): this pat of the cauliflower, when fashioned, is to be sprinkled over with rather coarse granite sugar. The under part, or green leaves, which envelop a cauliflower, are imitated in a somewhat similar manner to the above by pushing out the paste in pointed dots upon bands of paper, in the manner and form as directed for the imitation of the heads, only somewhat flatter: these, in order the better to represent green leaves, are to be sprinkled over with green granite sugar; and when both parts have been dried in the closet, or screen, stick the head, or white part, upon the leafy or green part; thus you will form more or less truthful imitation of a cauliflower, according as in a greater or lesser degree you may have displayed your taste.

Should you want to make these for your next dinner party—imagine the aghast looks on your guests' faces!—you'll find the recipe for Italian Meringues after the jump.

In Conversation: Michael Cuscuna

Date: Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Regulator Bookshop
Contact Information: Jeremy Smith, 919-660-5839 or jeremy.smith(at)duke.edu

Grammy Award winning record producer Michael Cuscuna (Blue Note Records, Mosaic Records) will discuss his work producing the recordings of jazz pianist Horace Silver.

Silver was one of the leading composers and pianists of the hard bop era of jazz, and his music will be the focus of a concert by the SFJAZZ Collective the following evening at Page Auditorium.

SFJAZZ Collective

This event is co-sponsored by Duke Performances and the Jazz Archive.

Pictures at an Exhibition

Click to enlarge.

On Friday, library staff members and UNC SILS students gathered for an impromptu gallery talk for our new exhibit, "Book + Art: Artists' books from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture," led by curators Christine Wells and Kelly Wooten and exhibits coordinator Meg Brown. For more pictures from the gallery talk, visit the Bingham Center's Flickr photostream.

And remember: book artist and photographer Bea Nettles will be speaking tomorrow at 5:30 PM in the Rare Book Room as part of this fall's Book + Art series of events!

Stories of SNCC

Date: Sunday, 24 October 2010 
Time: 3:00 PM
Location: Durham County Library Auditorium, 300 N. Roxboro Street
Contact Information: Will Hansen, 919-660-5958 or william.hansen(at)duke.edu

To celebrate the publication of the essay collection, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, editor Faith S. Holsaert (whose papers are held by RBMSCL) and contributor Margaret Herring will speak along with Nia Wilson, Executive Director, and Mya Hunter, member of SpiritHouse, a local grassroots organization that supports the empowerment, transformation, and self-determination of marginalized communities of color.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women—northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina—share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. Along with these stories, participants in the panel will discuss the legacy and continuing work of women for civil rights and equality.

This event is co-sponsored by the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the North Carolina Collection at Durham County Library, and The Regulator Bookshop.

Voting = Cake

In honor of National Dessert Month (which everyone celebrates, right?), we'll be posting recipes from the RBMSCL's collection every Friday this month. Last Friday—The Devil's Tale's first birthday—we started the celebration with a recipe for a pretty pink birthday cake.

Today's recipe comes from an advertising brochure with a marvelous title: How to Make Bread (But Not in This Disagreeable Old-Fashioned Way). Really, we're not making that up:

You see, this brochure advises the smart homemaker to purchase The Universal Three Minute Bread Maker from Landers, Frary & Clark (of New Britain, Connecticut). The transformation is nothing short of astonishing:

And, of course, no advertisement for an absolutely revolutionary bit of kitchen gadgetry would be complete without a few recipes to make with said gadgetry. So, in honor of a certain approaching first Tuesday in November, we offer this fine recipe:

Loaf, or Election Cake

Put into the Bread Maker one and one-half cups milk, one cup potato yeast, one cup sugar, five cups flour, turn crank three minutes, put on cover and raise till light. When light, add one cup shortening, (half butter and lard), one cup sugar, whites of two eggs, nutmeg to season, turn crank five minutes, cover and raise again till light. Fill pans with batter and fruit (raisins or citron, or both), well floured alternately, until pans are two-thirds full, add also fruit on top.

The cake should stand in the pans about one-half hour and then be baked in a moderate oven.

Now we're off to eBay to find a 100-year-old Universal Three Minute Bread Maker.

"To Keep the Future Worthy of the Past"

Date: 14 October-3 January 2011
Location and Time: Rare Book Room cases during library hours
Contact Information: Tim Pyatt, 919-684-8929 or tim.pyatt(at)duke.edu

William Preston Few, undated

"'To Keep the Future Worthy of the Past': The Legacy of William Preston Few" celebrates the centennial of Few’s inauguration as President of Trinity College on November 9, 1910.

Few accepted the presidency of Trinity College promising ". . . to keep the future worthy of the past." This would be no hollow promise as, over the next three decades, he would transform the strong and growing liberal arts college into a major research university and help shape James B. Duke’s transformative gift.

Memorabilia from the inauguration, as well as documents and images pertaining to the growth of Trinity College into Duke University, will be on display in this exhibit.

The Duke University Archives will also commemorate the anniversary of President Few's inauguration with a special event on Tuesday, 9 November 2010 at 4:00 PM in the Rare Book Room. Watch The Devil's Tale in the coming weeks for further details about this event.

Post contributed by Tim Pyatt, Duke University Archivist.

Book + Art

Date: 13 October 2010-9 January 2011
Location and Time: Perkins Library Gallery during library hours
Contact Information: Kelly Wooten, 919-660-5967 or kelly.wooten(at)duke.edu

During your next visit to Perkins-Bostock Library, be sure to stop by the Perkins Library Gallery to see the eclectic selection of artists’ books on display in "Book + Art: Artists' Books from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture." Or if you can’t visit in person, you can enjoy the online exhibit!

R & J: the txt msg edition. Elizabeth Pendergrass. J. Hastings, 2006.

So what exactly is an artists’ book? In the most general terms, it is an original work of art that that incorporates or innovates upon the book form in some—often dramatic—way. These books combine traditional arts, such as graphic design, printmaking, and bookbinding, with the full spectrum of contemporary art practice and theory, expanding and redefining the form. In this exhibit, you’ll see books in the form of a cell phone, a grandmother clock, women’s underwear, and even the traditional paperback book structure. The themes highlighted in this exhibit and in the Bingham Center’s artists’ book collection as a whole reflect the strengths of our broader collection of print and manuscript materials documenting women’s lives: motherhood and family, the domestic sphere, women’s bodies, sexuality, and women’s health.

This exhibit is part of this fall's Book + Art series, part of a semester-long celebration of book arts in collaboration with UNC Libraries. In the coming weeks, the Bingham Center will be sponsoring several events about the book arts:

Aging Gracefully. Bea Nettles, 2002.

Bea Nettles, Book Artist and Photographer
Date: Thursday, 21 October 2010
Time: 5:30 PM
Location: Rare Book Room

Bea Nettles is a book artist and photographer whose work addresses issues of family relationships, the body, and the ways in which personal identities reflect political and social realities. She will give a lecture with book signing and light reception to follow. For more about Bea Nettles, visit her website.

Careers in Book Arts
Date: Wednesday, 10 November 2010
Time: 9:30 AM
Location: Room 217, Perkins Library

Panel discussion about making a career out of a love of book arts, featuring Laurie Corral, founder of Asheville Bookworks, Dave Wofford of Horse and Buggy Press, and Meg Brown, Duke conservation librarian and exhibits coordinator. Moderated by Beth Doyle, Duke conservation librarian.

Post contributed by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian for the Sallie Bingham Center of Women's History and Culture.

Filmmaker James Longley: Portraits from the Middle East

Date: Friday, 29 October 2010
Time: 6:30 PM
Location: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Contact Information: Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu

Join the Archive of Documentary Arts for an evening with documentary filmmaker James Longley. Known for his intimate and poetic portraits of individuals and families caught in the political turmoil of Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and Pakistan, Longley was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2009. His Oscar-nominated film, Iraq in Fragments, won the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Grand Jury Prize in 2006. Arts advocate, author, and accomplished television interviewer Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel will facilitate the discussion.

This event inaugurates the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Filmmaker Series, established by Duke University with generous funding from the Diamonstein-Spielvogel endowment fund. The series will feature artists whose work addresses significant contemporary topics of social, political, economic, and cultural urgency. Filmmakers chosen to participate will have a recognized body of work and show promise of future contributions to documentary filmmaking. Visiting filmmakers will be invited to Duke for a two-day residency.

The Diamonstein-Spielvogel series is unique in its exclusive attention to documentary filmmakers with a global perspective. By giving Duke faculty and their students an opportunity to explore the films of socially-engaged filmmakers and discuss the work with them, this new series hopes to inspire and encourage the next generation of young documentarians.

The series is co-sponsored by the RBMSCL, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, and the Center for Documentary Studies.

Screen / Society will screen several of Mr. Longley's films in the weeks leading up to his visit. Check the Screen/Society Fall 2010 schedule for additional details and contact information:

Iraq in Fragments **TONIGHT!**
Date: Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center, Duke University

Sari’s Mother and Gaza Strip
Date: Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center, Duke University

Having Our (Birthday) Cake....

The Devil's Tale's birthday (today!) happens to coincide with National Dessert Month. In honor of these two very important occasions, we're going to be publishing dessert recipes from our collections every Friday this month. We'll begin today, of course, with a birthday cake recipe from Gold Medal Flour's 1931 New Party Cakes for All Occasions, part of the fine Nicole Di Bona Peterson Collection of Advertising Cookbooks.

It might be slightly more . . . normal than some of the recipes we've previously posted (frozen cheese, anyone?), but it sure is pretty.

Birthday Cake

3/4 cup shortening
2 cups sugar
3/4 tsp. salt
3 1/2 cups cake flour
5 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 cups milk
1 1/2 tsp. flavoring
5 egg whites

Cream the shortening and add the sugar gradually. Sift the flour once before measuring. Mix and sift the flour, salt, and baking powder, and add alternately with the milk. Add the flavoring—vanilla and almond together are good. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Pour into well greased and floured pans and bake. Cool and frost with pink and white icing.

NOTE: Part of icing may be colored pink with vegetable coloring matter and used on sides of cake with white icing on top and between layers. Pink candles to match sides can be placed on top of cake for birthday party.

Happy birthday, Devil's Tale!

Special thanks to Lynn Eaton, Hartman Center Reference Archivist, for helping us find this recipe.

The Devil's Tale Turns One!

Virginia Dare Advertising Card. From the Advertising Ephemera Collection.

Today The Devil’s Tale turns one year old, and it seems only fitting to pause for a moment and celebrate. (It’s also National Dessert Month, so we will be celebrating with a cake here in the RBMSCL.)

Where else would you hear about extracting sunbeams from cucumbers or hear the real back story of the Duke-Alabama football rivalry? Blog followers were the first to hear that Duke had acquired the papers of South Carolina author Dorothy Allison, Nobel-laureate economist Paul Samuelson, and jazz master Frank Foster. Together we marked holidays large and small with selections from our collections, from Thanksgiving to Free Comic Book Day, proving that there’s something in our collections for every occasion (and almost every research interest).

Thank you to everyone who has posted a comment or passed on a post to a friend. We invite you to become a Devil’s Tale follower so we can keep you up-to-date on upcoming events and exhibits and all the latest news. Happy birthday, Devil’s Tale! (And three cheers for our intrepid blog editor Amy McDonald!)

Post contributed by Naomi Nelson, Director of the RBMSCL.

(Intrepid editor's note: And thanks to everyone at the RBMSCL for their daily help with the care and feeding of The Devil's Tale!)

Special Screening of The Ants

Date: Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Time: 8:00 PM
Location: White Lecture Hall, East Campus (map and directions)
Contact Information: Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu

Cine-East: East Asian Cinema and Screen/Society present The Ants (Ari no Heitai), winner of the Humanitarian Award (Documentary) at the 2006 Hong Kong International Film Awards. Kaoru Ikeya’s documentary tells the story of Waichi Okumura, one of over one thousand Japanese soldiers (the "ants" of the title) to remain in China after the conclusion of World War II, ostensibly to "incubate new military cells" but really to be used by the Chinese Nationalists in the battle against Mao’s forces.

This special presentation is made possible by the Full Frame Archive, part of the RBMSCL's Archive of Documentary Arts, and will be introduced by Tanya Lee, Full Frame Archive intern.

The Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, and the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies are co-sponsors of the screening.