Summer in the Archives: Annie Armour's Musings

In this new series, Archivist Annie Armour shares interesting stories 
from Sewanee's archives:


There can be unpleasant tasks to do in the Archives from time to time, 
but it can never get boring. Maybe that’s why fourteen (count them – 
Fourteen) of my student assistants have gone on to graduate school or 
other jobs in related areas. Anyway, I just thought I’d give you a 
couple of examples of why my summer helpers haven’t ever gotten too bored.

The first summer I ever had help I gave my student assistant, Mary Jo 
Livengood C ‘89, (now Shankle), the rather mundane task of inventory 
control-of our museum items. I was new and wanted to know if we really 
had what our paper inventory said we had. Well, we have one less item 
now, because in among the Sewanee dairy bottles and the pieces of 
cornerstone and Freshmen beanies we found a live World War II Japanese 
hand grenade that the Fort Paine bomb squad had to come take away. We 
marveled for days that, as the officer had told us over the phone, “the 
chemicals in Japanese hand grenades are so unstable that they break down 
and form salts around the rim, so it could go off without provocation at 
any time.” And we had had it for FORTY years!

This summer, while not matching the adrenaline levels of that first 
summer, we did have an exciting find, thanks to my student, Sarah Beer, 
C ’06. She was moving special collections books from a room where they 
had sat virtually untouched since I was hired 21 years ago, basically 
because nobody knew why they were there. Some had been in the 
collections before.

Others were newer gifts. Some merely looked very difficult to catalog. 
All looked dusty, some moldy and buggy. The room was small and stale; 
one pretty much had to be a contortionist to get anything out of it.

Nevertheless, we were determined to empty it out this summer. With mask 
and lab coat on, Sarah managed to remove a couple of cartfuls of books 
each day. She showed me several really nice books on all subjects.

THAT day, she reached up to the top shelf and pulled down what first 
looked like a termite ridden, moldy looking book, but which turned out 
to be a beautiful 1519 Latin Vulgate Bible with 117 black and white and 
28 hand-colored woodcuts-the find of the summer! We are still 
researching the particulars of the book, but it is of interest to us 
because it is related to another Bible we have, a 1483 Nuremberg Bible. 
The printer of the Nuremberg was Anton Koberger, and this Bible was also 
printed for him. Look for these two to be displayed together at the 
Kappa Sigma House, and for the woodcuts to be available online in the 
future. We are currently in the early phases of looking at software.

<http://www2.sewanee.edu/communications/news?id=15107>

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