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> A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org. For the terms of participation, please refer to http://www.archivists.org/listservs/arch_listserv_terms.asp. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>