A Repository of Human History
The D.C. alumni chapter recently visited head curator Leslie Overstreet ’71 at the Smithsonian’s Cullman rare book library to learn what clues lie within the materiality of books.
On a frigid Saturday in January at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Leslie Overstreet ’71 carefully took 60 rare books down from their shelves and placed them on wooden tables. That way, on a tour of the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History, the D.C. alumni chapter could analyze their details up close: their bindings made of pigskin and vellum; their differing print formats, whether folio, quarto, or octavo; and their hand-colored illustrations of delicate foliage, colorful fish, and vibrant birds.
The contents of books tell stories, of course, but their physical characteristics tell their own tales, too, which was the inspiration for the theme of the tour led by Leslie: the materiality of books. “Every book we look at tells us something new, and every day is fun, in a way, going to work,” Leslie says. She joined the Smithsonian Libraries in 1980 and has headed the Cullman Library since it opened in 2002.
When she graduated from Reed with degrees in English literature and teaching, Leslie says she didn’t envision her career turning out the way it has. But, “I do feel that what I am doing now is in harmony and in tune with the values and interests and skills that I learned, or were reinforced at least, at Reed—a commitment to scholarship, to service, and to inquiry,” she says.
The selection of books Leslie chose for the tour was only a tiny portion of the Cullman Library’s 20,000-volume collection spanning the period of 1450 to 1840, mostly covering the fields of zoology, botany, mineralogy, and anthropology. On the tour, alumni guests got the chance to survey and handle—with freshly washed hands—some of these books, ranging in period, genre, and style.
Leslie has led many tours of the rare books library in her decades at the Smithsonian, but she gets particularly excited when alumni chapters come to visit. They always have great questions, she says. And whether exploring Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, or Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands—which Leslie has dedicated the bulk of her own research to—the hope is that tour goers begin to understand why the rare book library exists, how it’s useful, and what kind of important research happens at the Smithsonian.
The information these rare books provide is often important to natural scientists, because the books contain historical clues relevant to their fields. Part of Leslie’s job involves helping scientists uncover those clues in the rare book collection.
“We literally have books that are 500 years old, and they’re in better condition than books 100 years old because they’re made of linen-paper and leather, and they’re literally sewn together, and they will remain useful for another 500 or 5,000 years if they’re properly preserved,” Leslie explains. “And I mean, that’s my job, to make sure they are here 500 years from now. I want people to appreciate that they are the repository of human history.”
Tags: Alumni, Books, Film, Music