Special Collections

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & FINE ART EXHIBITIONS

Harrison Gordon Photography Exhibition June 15 – September 19, 2021

Magic Mayhem & Maturity: The Growth of Youth Fantasy Literature October 7, 2021 - February 5, 2022

Picturing History: Historic Barns of Connecticut December 15, 2021 - January 20, 2022

Presented in partnership with Preservation Connecticut

{Her}story: Women’s Roles Through History February 17 - May 9, 2022

Paint, Pen and Petal: Artists in the Garden April 1 - April 30, 2022

Presented in partnership with Fairfield Garden Club and Sasqua Garden Club

Fairfield Public Schools Art Show AP Art Show: On view May 11 – June 5, 2022 K-12 Art: On view May 21-31, 2022

The Lure of the Garden: The Enduring Desire to Work and Shape the Land June 23, 2022 - February 5, 2023

VOLUNTEER DOCENTS

Anne Boberski Mike Brennan Barbara Burian Lynn Dacey Lisa Krieger Lynne Laukhuf Lynn Van Winkle Richard “Deej” Webb In February, the Library welcomed Cecily Dyer, who joined the staff as the Special Collections Librarian. Cecily came to us from the Center for Brooklyn History, where she managed a busy special collections reading room and produced articles based on materials excavated from the archives, covering topics ranging from a delightful dog show in 1935 to the devastating Brooklyn Theatre fire in 1876. Cecily hit the ground running and has been digging into the Library’s many holdings of rare books, archives, and manuscripts. She looks forward to making the Special Collections more accessible and discoverable to scholars, historians, and laypeople, embracing our mission of making access to the Library’s treasures “free as air to all.” She feels a debt of gratitude to her colleagues, volunteers, and her immediate predecessor, Beth Beaudin, Ph.D., for the work and accomplishments in this department over the past year.

Pequot Library hosted a number of tours of the Special Collections, including those for donors and other community members. The Library hosted three elected officials: Congressman Jim Himes, representing Connecticut’s 4th District, Jennifer Leeper, CT State Representative for District 132, and Cristin McCarthy Vahey, CT State Representative for District 133. Highlights of the tours included Anno Regii Georgii III Regis, nunc Magnae Brittannie, Francie et Hiberniae, a tax bill delivered to Daniel Sherwood, Constable and Tax Collector of Fairfield in 1770, and Flowers from my Garden, dedicated by P.T. Barnum to his wife in 1894.

Three exhibitions drew upon the Special Collections this year, supported by the generosity of the Constance C. Baker Rare Book Fund. Magic, Mayhem, and Maturity: The Growth of Youth Fantasy Literature, curated by Chief Librarian Christine Catallo, opened in October 2021. Drawing on materials from the Children’s Historical collection and the modern circulating collection, the exhibition examined the emergence and evolution of youth fantasy literature and featured works including Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, and more. This exhibition was supported by a grant from Connecticut Humanities.

[Her]story: Women’s Roles Through History, curated by Special Collections consultant (through February 2022) Beth Beaudin, Ph.D., opened in February 2022. The exhibition drew upon the Special Collections to reveal the accomplishments women have made locally and throughout the country from Colonial America to present. Professor Kelly Marino, Coordinator of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Sacred Heart University, gave an engaging talk at the opening reception, and News 12 aired a piece about the exhibition for Women’s History Month.

The Lure of the Garden: The Enduring Desire to Work and Shape the Land opened in June 2022, drawing on the original collection of rare

RIGHT IMAGE: JOHN KEYS, THE PRACTICAL BEE-MASTER (LONDON: PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR, 1780); PEQUOT LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS. PHOTOGRAPHY: JENNIFER PRAT.

books acquired by Pequot Library’s founders and more recent bequests from our generous donors including George Brett, Pepperidge Farm founder Margaret Rudkin, and C.S. Bradley. Archival materials from local garden clubs and the National War Garden Commission added to the exhibition. The Lure of the Garden covers the propagation of the “three sisters” — corn, beans, and squash — by Native Americans and includes information on garden clubs, war-era Victory Gardens, and community and pollinator gardens.

With material dating back to the 1500s, the Monroes and the Wakemans, founders of Pequot Library, sought to curate a collection that would be democratic — of use to all classes of society from the financier to the farmer. Pequot Library’s Special Collections reflect the changing tastes, styles, and purposes of gardens, as well as their perennial lure.

We continue to uncover unique items in the Special Collections, including a small cache of printed and manuscript music in the archives that includes patriotic songs from the Early Republic and a hymn composed by Timothy Dwight, possibly in his hand. The interesting publication, Entire New and Complete Instructions for the Fife, was not, in fact, entirely new; the contents were copied from a pamphlet with an almost identical title that was published in London around 1780. What was new was the cover, which features rudimentary depictions of the American flag along with the seal of the United States, showing a bald eagle with outstretched wings. Even though the marches and airs within were British and Irish, this small publication was intended for an American audience. We have not located any other examples of this publication, making it a very rare item indeed.

Many visitors and researchers continued to view and utilize our Special Collections. On March 31 we hosted an event for members of the 1889 Planned Giving Society and special Library donors, where guests viewed a selection of highlights from the collections including Leonard Thurneysser’s beautifully designed Historia sive descriptio plantarum omnium, tam domesticarum quam exoticarum from 1578, the Kelmscott Press masterpiece of 1898, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and more. Scholarly researchers utilized the collections, including Jonathan Bulkley’s journals and Captain John F. Bulkley’s account of the burning of the steamship Lexington, and more.

As professional staff, we are tasked with the responsibility of serving as stewards of our Special Collections so that they may be enjoyed by future generations of students, scholars, and local residents. With this in mind, this year we continued to take important steps in terms of care and conservation. First, in August, eight items from Special Collections traveled to the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) in Andover, Mass., for conservation evaluation. From the eight, John Keys’ The practical bee-master (1780) received skilled treatment, which helped to stabilize this important text. Other books in the group now have custom boxes to protect them for years to come.

In November 2021, Bexx Caswell Olsen of the NEDCC visited Pequot Library for a day to provide a detailed, collection-level conservationneeds assessment, resulting in an 88-page report delivered in January 2022 that praises much of the policies and infrastructure that Pequot Library already has in place — including the excellent recent additions of the Dillon Storage Room and Dillon Reading Room. The report also functions as a roadmap for next steps, and since January we have made significant progress in addressing additional needs of the Collections, including rehousing in proper acid-free folders and boxes and gaining full intellectual control of both onsite and offsite collections.

PAINTING RESTORATION FUND Pequot Library launched a campaign to raise $4,350 for restoring the paintings of Pequot Library founder Virginia Marquand Monroe’s Uncle Frederick and Aunt Hetty Marquand, the couple that adopted Virginia following the death of her parents. Virginia later used her inheritance to grant her uncle’s wish of making a space of learning “free as air to all” and created Pequot Library, a space devoted to arts, culture, education, and the written word.

Portraits honoring the Marquands had hung in the Library’s grand auditorium for more than a century, and they’d started showing their age in spite of past efforts to protect them. Pequot Library contracted Yost Conservation located in Oxford, CT, which specializes in the conservation of fine oil paintings, focusing on easel works from the 18th through the mid-20th centuries.

Yost Conservation cleaned the paintings, removing old varnish, lining, and rabbit skin glue, and provided new lining and stretcher bars. To make a contribution to this project, email development@pequotlibrary.org.