Marilyn Hatch: Special Collections Treasure

Jill Triplett Bent, Subject Specialist, Library Collections Management Group

Everyone knows that Wellesley's Special Collections houses literary riches. But does everyone know that Marilyn Hatch, Research and Instruction Specialist in Special Collections, is a treasure in her own right?

After working in publishing and raising a family, Marilyn Hatch came to Wellesley in 1975 as part-time assistant to Special Collections Librarian Eleanor Nichols. In addition to general office and library duties, Marilyn, an artist by nature, discovered a love of letterpress printing from lead type, often using a hand-operated press. The Book Arts world became Marilyn's oyster. Inspired by medieval manuscripts and modern artists' books alike, Marilyn began experimenting with calligraphy, paste paper, and bookbinding. By 1978, she was teaching the fall letterpress-printing component of the Book Arts Class.

Marilyn's influence has inspired countless students and many staff and faculty to try their hand at creating and printing books. Debra Carbarnes, Administrative Assistant to Friends of the Library, says, "She's a fabulous teacher: organized, patient, and enthusiastic. I especially admire her willingness to share what she knows.

Kindness and humor also make her wonderful!" Joan Campbell, Reference Librarian and member of the Research and Instruction Group, says, "While everyone who has taken a class with Marilyn would heartily agree she is a muse-a. A guiding spirit b. A source of inspiration c. just plain fun- It's been a closely held secret that Marilyn actually is the tenth Muse: Marilyn, the Muse of Book Arts, daughter of Mnemosyne and Zeus. How grateful we are to have her creative, immortal spirit here at Wellesley."

Practical as well as artistic, Marilyn has also been the organizing force behind Special Collections' intricate system of filing supporting materials. Need to know where the seventh love letter written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Robert Browning is? Or how and when Special Collections acquired William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience? Marilyn knows right where that information is.

Marilyn has exhibited her own work in area galleries such as Kingston's The New Art Forum, the Wellesley College Library, Harvard's Widener Library, and the Federal Reserve Bank's Lettering Arts Guild. Workshops and traveling inspire most of her current books. Her latest are accounts of trips to the American South and to the Grand Canyon. More trips will succeed these after Marilyn retires from Wellesley in June.

When not busy in Special Collections or making books, Marilyn follows other passions-gardening, walking with her dog, Shagatha, and traveling cross-country in her converted minivan. Did I mention she's hiked through the Himalayas in Kashmir? just one more reason to be inspired by the amazing Marilyn Hatch.

More than ever, the Library needs your support. The expiration date of your membership appears on the Newsletter address label. If it's time to renew, please send a check payable to Friends of the Library
or use our secure online Membership form

Life Member $1,000; Patron $500;
Donor $250; Sponsor $100;
Contributor $50; Regular $35;
Young Alum $15.

Kass on Channing: A Life Brought to Light April 30

Katherine Hall Page '69

In the 1800s, childbirth was not purely a blessed event, but one fraught with peril for both mother and child. In her new book, Midwifery and Medicine in Boston: Walter Channing, M.D. 1786-1876 (Northeastern University Press, 2002), Amalie Moses Kass '49 relates the history of nineteenth-century childbirth practice, advances in obstetric education, development of medical science, and transition from female midwife to male physician, through a compelling account of Dr. Channing's long life. Friends of the Library will host a talk by Kass on April 30 at 4:45 p.m. in the Margaret Clapp Library Lecture Room. A reception honoring the author will take place at 4:15 p.m., and books will be available for purchase and signing.

Dr. Walter Charming was born into an illustrious New England family. His grandfather, William Ellery, signed the Declaration of Independence for Rhode Island. Walter Channing's brother was the Reverend William Ellery Channing, one of New England's most noted Unitarian ministers. Deeply committed to helping the poor, Dr. Charming founded The Boston Lying-in Hospital, now Brigham and Women's, where indigent pregnant women could receive medical care.

The theme of Kass's moving book is loss. Channing's personal losses began early with his father's death, then continued with the equally untimely deaths of both of his wives, a daughter, brothers, and sisters. Loss also marked his professional life. Even if a woman survived childbirth, she still faced puerperal fever, with death rates as high as 80 to 90 percent. Charming studied the disease and, well before others, came to support Oliver Wendell Holmes's theory that it was spread by physicians and attendants themselves. Not until the 1860s and 1870s would bacteriology confirm this. Not until the 1940s would a cure be found.

At Wellesley, Amalie Kass majored in history. She holds an Ed.M. from Boston University and has taught high school in Newton. A Lecturer on the History of Medicine, Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Kass is the author, with her late husband, Dr. Edward Kass, of Perfecting the World: The Life and Times of Thomas Hodgkin, in addition to numerous articles. Her many volunteer activities for Wellesley College include Class President, 1979-84; Chair, Alumnae Association Task Force on Racial Diversity, 1990-91; and Chair, Class Fund Programs, Alumnae Association Board, 1988-91. She has been a Trustee since 1992 and Chair, National Development and Outreach Council, since 1995.

Visit the author's Web site

I want you and Friends of the Library to know we've received the Book of the Master facsimile. It's even more impressive than we expected: enormous, beautifully bound in leather with metal corner pieces, and close to 30 pounds. The Music Faculty has already begun using it for history classes. Sally Sanford, Director of the Collegium Musicum, plans to perform from it in the Spring. This is a long message, but the gist is: Thank you very much!

Pamela Bristah,
Music Librarian

Coffee Hour: 9:45 a.m.
Program: 10:30 a.m.

Wellesley College Club

For reservations and information,
call 617-232-2757.

Changing of the Guard

In June, Mary (Polly) Gambrill Slavet '68 will become Alumna Co-Chair of Friends of the Library. She succeeds June Milton Stobaugh '66, who is completing her fifth year as Co-Chair Polly has served on the Membership and Nominating Committees as well as spearheaded publicity for the newly launched Honor with Books program.

A love of Wellesley runs in Polly's family. Her mother, the late Mary Butler Gambrill, graduated in 1930, as have her two daughters: Jennifer Aydelott Utma '89 and Emily Aydelott Dziedzic '93. Her aunt, Georgia Gambrill '22, was a great supporter of the Library; the Reading Room is named in her honor.

"I'm delighted to become the new Co-Chair," said Polly. "And I'm grateful to June and her Committee for laying such excellent groundwork insuring the Friends' continuity and success."

To honor June for her dedication, imagination, and tireless service as Co-Chair, the Friends presented an artist's book by Shirley Jones, Five flowers for my father, to Special Collections. The core of the book is a set of five mezzotints of wild flowers juxtaposed with objects significant in the life of Shirley Jones's father, originally a coalminer, for whom Jones made this book.

"I look forward to serving on the Steering Committee under Polly's excellent direction," said June. "She'll be a wonderful leader of the Friends."

Heather Ure Dunagan '95

Is the wife an "endangered species" in the Western world, or will she remain a fixture by adapting, as she always has, to changing gender roles? Distinguished cultural historian and Stanford Professor Marilyn Koenick Yalom '54 explored this and other questions on October 23 in a captivating discussion of her fifth book, A History of the Wife (Harper Collins, 2001). The event, sponsored by the Friends in continuing celebration of Wellesley's 125th anniversary, left no seat unfilled in the Clapp Library Lecture Room.

Marilyn Yalom autographs her book for Polly Slavet, incoming Co-Chair

Yalom began by examining Biblical and Greco-Roman civilizations. Both understood the wife as her husband, s "dependent; means of offspring; caretaker of children, cook and housekeeper." However, even Roman and early Christian times saw increasing movement toward "partnerships," models of marriage that have evolved into the relative equality in today's Western marriages. We still cherish, for example, Roman and early Christian legacies of monogamy and the required consent of both parties before entering into marriage.

Yalom continued with discussion of how emphasis on spiritual companionship in Protestant Europe and then America led to love 's ultimately becoming "a prerequisite" and even "primary criterion" for marriage during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her chapter "Toward the New Wife: 1950-2000," she identified the "two main streams" of this period: increasing emphasis on work outside the home and sexual freedom.

While "Imbalances in domestic and parenting responsibility" persist, . . Yalom cited positive signs of equality. For example, "We are no longer fazed by the sight of a man carrying a child in a front pack." She ended with invigorating wisdom: "To be a wife today, without so many proscriptions and prescriptions, is truly a creative endeavor."

Online journal research at Clapp is getting faster and easier, thanks to a study of e-journal locators completed recently by the Library's e-Journal Access Group (e-JAG). After reviewing locator tools from a variety of academic, public, and commercial sources, the e-JAG identified three attributes of a successful locator: a unified, "onestop" entry point for all holdings; simplified search and selection procedures; and a minimized burden on Library staff to create and maintain.

The e-JAG recommended a locator in use by the Tri-College Consortium: Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore. Updates are straightforward: Library staff recast the brief bibliographic records provided by each e-journal into the Library of Congress's Machine-Readable Catalog format and add them to Wellesley's online catalog. When the e-journal source does not provide a direct URL to the full-text article, the locator includes a default link to access instructions.

The new locator is already a reality. By the beginning of spring semester, we had downloaded 12,000 new bibliographic records for full-text electronic titles.

How might you celebrate a twenty-fifth anniversary, reunion, or both? To mark her twenty-fifth Wellesley reunion and their quarter century of marriage, Donald C. Clark, Jr. surprised Ellen '76, his wife and a practicing librarian, by renovating a Clapp Library reading area in her honor. Dedicated August 18, 2001, twenty five years to the day after the Clarks' marriage, the Ellen Boates Clark '76 Reading Area is a premier location for students and faculty to read, study, and admire a restoring view.

Situated at the front of the main floor formerly occupied by the newspaper collection, the space became bare walls, floor, and ceiling last June. To ensure a full view, including the Rhododendron Dell and Severance Green, Founders, Jewett, and Severance in the background, curtains came off all windows. A large, rectangular alcove of about 1,200 square feet remained. Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, the Library's original architect, advised on developing the space and provided construction documents.

New teak lamps light oak library tables and captain's chairs, among the building's earliest furnishings and remembered by every alumna who ever used Clapp Library for serious reading and writing. The area's new color scheme brings the outside in: silvery-green carpet; loveseats upholstered with a tapestry fabric that subtly echoes the rhododendrons; and handsome lounge chairs in colors drawn from the tapestry.

A wireless transponder as well as conventional network connections make the Clark Area technology-friendly. Not everyone chooses to use a laptop, however. Students who prefer to write with a pencil or pen and others who favor curling up with a book or periodical find accommodation here. Since lounge chairs and loveseats are clustered, friends often work together. Carrying forward a time-honored tradition, some like to nap.

We thank Don Clark for honoring dual affections: Ellen, his wife, and Clapp Library !

For more information ...

For more information ...

Two larger-than-life outdoor bronzes flanking the front entrance to Margaret Clapp Library underwent major treatment during the summer by noted conservator Rika Smith McNally.

Given by the Class of 1887 in June 1912, Lemnia Athena, Greek Goddess of Wisdom, stands at the right of the front door. Hestia Giustinian, given by the Class of 1888 in June 1913, stands at the left. Originally made from plaster casts by the Caproni Brothers, a Boston plaster-casing company specializing in sculpture reproductions, the two statues had suffered over the years from such indignities as adhesive tape, graffiti, abrasions, paint drips, and acid rain. Fortunately, the plaster cast of the Lemnia Athena still existed at McNally's Skylight Studios. She was able to use it to restore the sculpture correctly.

At the beginning of her eight-week treatment, McNally set up scaffolding around each 6'8 " statue. She washed the surface of the bronzes; removed loose fills and refilled them; applied a very dark bronze tone in keeping with the original shown in archival images; then applied a protective coating of Incralac followed by a hard paste. Finally, she established a regular maintenance program with employees from Buildings and Grounds.

Louise Freedman, highly regarded stone conservator, repaired the 38" high limestone bases.

Nneoma V. Nwogu '02:
A Passion for Learning

1. POSTCARDS
Archival photographs of Wellesley College (1880-1915). Set of 16 cards (2 each of 8 images) Price: $10.00

2. POSTCARDS
Archival photographs of Wellesley College (1920s and 1930s). Set of 16 cards (2 each of 8 images) Price: $10.00

3. FRANCESCA'S ANIMALS
Delicate line drawings reproduced from 4 pen and ink sketches by Esther Frances Alexander (1837-1927), Special Collections. Box of 8 cards with envelopes. Price: $10.00