News & Updates

Surprises in the Stacks

By Mark Tillson

April 22, 2015

One of the great things about working in Special Collections is that I get to be around and work with materials that are often very old, rare and perhaps even one of a kind. There have been times that we simply stumble upon things tucked inside of a book, such as an original broadside advertisement for a lecture to be given by Sojourner Truth in the 1880s. Last year, as many of you heard, we found a collection of original signed letters from some of the leaders in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, including great names such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Isabella Beecher Hooker.

Another project we have undertaken has involved searching the Burke stacks for books that were in the original 1826 library at Hamilton College. Believe it or not, we have hundreds of books with original bookplates that have been on our shelves for nearly 200 years.

At the end of March, I got a request to locate an item that was not on the shelf in the Burke Stacks in its catalogued spot. I looked in all of our shelving locations to no avail. I thought of one other place to look—the basement.

When Special Collections was formed, there was quite a large backlog of rare book material that had been acquired by previous library directors. These items were placed in boxes and on shelves in the basement. Over the past few years, we have combed through much of it and found some wonderful little gems that have become part of the collection officially, by being catalogued and placed on the shelf in the rare book room.

It was the remaining backlog that I decided to sift through that brought me to our latest discovery. One of the small pamphlets, tattered and rather brittle showed a publication date of 1798 in Philadelphia. It is entitled “Message of the President of the United States to both houses of Congress April 3d. 1798.”

I opened the front cover and much to my surprise, found a signature tipped in on the first page. Yes, it is John Adams’ signature, the second President of the United States.

I was of course skeptical, but a quick google image search for his signature on the Declaration of Independence pretty much clinched it.

I can’t claim that every day is THIS exciting in Special Collections, but moments like this certainly make my job very fulfilling. By the way, I never did find the item I set out to locate. Perhaps I will stumble upon it someday.