Groom of the Tomb: gamifying the book

Episode 5 of the Spare Change Library Podcast explores the popular genre of gamebook stories. On this episode Demian Katz (Director of Library Technology at Villanova) joins us to talk about his original gamebook, Groom of the Tomb; or, Lancelot Darling’s Decisions, followed by a live-playthrough demonstration with my guest Rebecca Oviedo (Distinctive Collections Archivist) and me–your host, Meg Piorko (Distinctive Collections Librarian).

Choose Your Own Ending

The genre of fiction popularly known as ‘choose your own ending’ gamebooks is influenced by traditions of oral storytelling, programmed instruction, and Role-Playing Games. Both entertaining and pedagogical, these interactive stories teach adolescent readers low-stakes decision-making skills all while experiencing the game from the perspective of the main character. Additionally, game-novels allow the reader to participate in the story with a degree of agency from the perspective of a fictional character, thus stepping outside the realm of their own lived experience.

Pioneering the Genre

The ‘choose your own ending’ concept was pioneered by women authors as a very much adult genre to enhance readers experience of romance novels. The earliest example of this is Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins who published Consider the Consequences! in 1930. The romance novel, which included 43 alternative endings, gives agency to the reader to choose the fates of Helen Rogers and her suitors Jed Harringdale and Saunders Mead.

It is interesting that the first interactive game-books were created within the romance genre, which particularly lends itself to interactive decision making. Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller’s 1883 Bride of the Tomb and Queenie’s Terrible Secret, is written in such an engaging and playful style, which was not lost on our guest and author Demian Katz, who took inspiration from the twists and turns of Mrs. Miller’s romance pulps and for his own choice-driven gamebook, The Groom of the Tomb; Lancelot Darling’s Decisions. 

Find out the fate of Lancelot Darling during our live-playthrough by tuning into Episode 5, Groom of the Tomb: gamifying the book.

A digital version of the 1883 edition of The Bride of the Tomb as well as full-length audio recordings are available open access through Villanova’s Digital Library at digital.library.villanova.edu

Spare Change Library Podcast is a dime novel and popular literature podcast, featuring audio editions of stories and scholarly discussion–available through a shared RSS feed on dimenovels.org

Welcome to the April installment of The Shelf List, a monthly blog series to highlight recently cataloged materials in Falvey’s Distinctive Collections.

An Italian edition of Don Quixote, illustrated by Gustave Doré and Héliodore Joseph Pisan, was added to the catalog this week.

Don Chisciotte della Mancia, di Michele Cervantes di Saavedra. Ilustrato con 120 quadri grandi e 250 disegni di Gustavo Doré.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s epic novel, Don Quixote, was first published in two parts ten years apart-in 1605 and 1615. The illustrated Italian edition of Don Quixote was published c. 1880-1881, however, our copy is missing a title page and thus lacks publication information.

Lacking a title page, the book opens immediately to the prologue, featuring the first of the 120 full page engravings and 250 smaller sketches that illustrate this text.

The engravings illuminate the adventures of the protagonist, Don Quixote, a low-ranked member of the nobility on a quest to achieve knighthood. The satirical and playful narrative, which pokes fun at popular tropes of the chivalric romance genre, is represented in the elongated, dramatic, and at times cartoonish illustrations throughout.

Full-page plates showcase the iconic dynamism of Doré through the strong diagonal lines and deep contrast that has come to be associated with the artist, a style which he hones in his later illustrated works of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, and The Bible.

Many of Doré’s bible illustrations are featured in the recent digital exhibit, Divine Inspiration: Revealing the Sacred in Biblical Texts and Imagery. Additionally, Mike Sgier has published on Doré’s Paradise Lost and Inferno in his blog series, The Printed Image.

This Italian illustrated edition of Don Quixote is an exciting addition to the Distinctive Collections and complements our growing collection of Doré illustrated books at Falvey.

Divine Inspiration at Falvey Library

Digital exhibit Divine Inspiration: Revealing the Sacred in Biblical Texts and Imagery is now live on the Digital Library.

Jacob’s Dream, Gustave Doré

 

 

The digital version of the Divine Inspiration exhibit, featured in the Spring 24 issue of Mosaic, expands upon the themes highlighted in the physical exhibit installed on the first floor of Falvey Library (on display Fall 23-Spring 24).

This complementary digital exhibit showcases the historically significant Bibles featured in the physical exhibit cases with additional supplemental biblical material from Falvey Library’s Distinctive Collections.

Viewers can navigate the exhibit to investigate digitized materials pertaining to biblical translations, hand-press printing practices, the history of bible production and education, as well as biblical imagery, engraving practices, and the extremely prolific 19th century biblical illustrator, Gustave Doré. For those who are curious to learn more about bible production, history, and illustration, see the Bibliographical Resources section, which includes the Susan Dunleavy Collection Of Biblical Literature. 

Curators Meg Piorko (Distinctive Collections Librarian) and Mike Sgier (Distinctive Collections Coordinator) are excited to present the digital version of this exhibit to showcase more materials and details of materials from the physical exhibit to a much larger audience.

 

A recent donation to Villanova’s Distinctive Collections leaves us with more questions than answers about the “rediscovery” of Gregor Mendel OSA‘s theory of hybridity, today called ‘the laws of Mendelian inheritance’ after the Augustinian friar.

Dutch botanist and pioneer of the field of genetics, Hugo de Vries, came across Mendel’s original work on genes published 34 years earlier and hurried to publish his own research findings in the paper, “Sur la loi de disjonction des hybrids,” which first appeared in 1900 in the hefty tome Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de L’Academie des Sciences, now held by Distinctive Collections.

De Vries’ paper, together with two others from the same year by Carl Correns and Erich Tschermak, laid the foundations of the new scientific discipline of genetics.

Puzzling Comparisons: The German Paper

De Vries’ French publication appeared just four days later in German as “Das Spaltungsgesetz der Hybride”. The two papers contain identical descriptions, translated from French into German, however the German paper includes three explicit references to Mendel’s work, whereas in the French publication Mendel is noticeably absent.

Intentional Plagiarism or Scientific Similitude?

De Vries is credited with “rediscovering” Gregor Mendel’s principles of biological inheritance in 1900. However, in the original French essay Mendel is not explicitly credited or even mentioned. This was amended by de Vries in his subsequent German paper, published less than a week apart. De Vries claimed that he was unaware of Mendel’s work on hybridization when conducting his own experiments, and that the two scientists, working 50 years apart, had happened to draw the same conclusions.

Did de Vries intentionally exclude Mendel from the original French, only to include him in the German version after realizing that others were aware of Mendel’s discoveries and his obvious influence on de Vries work?

Despite his efforts to separate his own conclusions from those of Mendel years prior, de Vries did indeed help scholars rediscover and credit the important work of Gregor Mendel.

Falvey Library’s Distinctive Collections has a new acquisition to our Dime Novel and Popular Literature Collection just in time for Halloween! Vanity fair, v. 1, no. 1, December 31, 1859 contains a spooky poem about poison and pharmacies.

“The Modern Mithridates.”

The poem opens with a plea for breakfast. It quickly becomes apparent that it is not sustenance that the narrator requires, but poison.

O! bring my breakfast—give to me

Bread that is snowy and light of weight—

Of alum and bone-dust let it be,

Chalk, and ammonia’s carbonate :

Within the poem, the narrator references Hydromel, the ancient Roman word for mead from the Latin hydro (meaning water) and mel (honey, the main ingredient of mead). The following line calls for assistance from the ancient pharmacologist Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus (fl. 1st century BCE) who was known for his mythical remedy Mithridate, which was thought to be a powerful antidote to many illnesses.

Bring sugar, and sweeten the potion well—

Sugar of lead, and iron, and sand,

Sweet as honey of Hydromel

Or the Pressure of Mithridates’ hand!

The poem concludes with a witty twist—that all of the poisonous chemicals and minerals named in the poem can be found at your local grocery store.

Ha! you start! you think that I

Being a man of mortal clay,

After my meal will surely die,

For these are deadly poisons, you say :

Poisons? yes! Yet one and all

Are found on every grocer’s shelves

Our bills of mortality are not small,

—But how can we help ourselves?

G. A.

The author, George Arnold (d. 1834 – 1865) was an American poet and regular contributor to Vanity Fair. A contemporary of Walt Whitman, Arnold was born in New York City and was known to frequent one of Whitman’s local haunts—Pfaff’s beer cellar.

Walt Whitman and George Arnold at Pfaff’s, 1857.

Divine Inspiration: Revealing the Sacred in Biblical Text and Imagery

The first floor of Falvey has a new exhibit installed that showcases historically significant Bibles from Falvey Library’s Distinctive Collections with a focus on the impact of the printing press on Sacred Texts.

From scroll to manuscript codex to the hand-press printed book, Bible production has been a driving force behind global textual revolutions. The selections featured in this exhibit demonstrate the multitude of ways in which producers of Sacred Texts incorporated new media technologies into existing Biblical traditions to create the Bible anew.

As this exhibit illustrates, the Bible is not dead, but continues to be a dynamic object with enduring spiritual impact for readers from its inception to today.

The exhibit reception, Envisioning Celestial Beings, will be held Thursday, October 19th 2023 from 4:30 PM to 6:30 PM at the Falvey Library Speakers’ Corner. The physical exhibit will be up for the fall semester–stay tuned for information on the digital exhibit!

If you’ve ever wondered: ‘What exactly is a Dime Novel?’ You are not alone.

The latest, two-part Spare Change Library podcast episode unpacks some of the issues surrounding Dime Novel bibliography discussed in the 1982 Edward T. LeBlanc interviews between the former Dime Novel Round-Up editor and Dime Novel scholar Lydia Schurman, exclusively digitized by Falvey Library.

Over 40 years later, questions such as ‘How do we define the genre Dime Novel?’ are still pertinent today. Demian Katz, Falvey’s Director of Library Technology, joins me for this two-part podcast episode.

Photos of the LeBlanc collection at Northern Illinois University, provided by Matthew Short.

An Oral History of Dime Novels with Edward T. LeBlanc, Cassette 1

In addition to his role at Falvey Library, Demian is also an active collector and scholar of Dime Novel and Pulp Literature, specializing in choose-your-own-adventure type stories.

‘What’s in a Dime Novel?’: Revisiting the Edward T. LeBlanc interviews episode features audio clips from the first of the 24 60-minute cassette tapes from the LeBlanc interviews, to explore topics ranging from defining the genre of Dime Novel, the influence of women authors, English Penny Dreadfuls, and the future of pulp literature.

Photos of the LeBlanc collection at NIU, provided by Matthew Short.

Searchable transcriptions of the LeBlanc Cassettes featured in this podcast can be accessed through Villanova’s Digital Library.

Spare Change Library Podcast, a dime novel and popular literature podcast, features audio editions of stories and scholarly discussion–available through a shared RSS feed on dimenovels.org

The Spare Change Library – The Dime Novel Bibliography (dimenovels.org)

A Mutually Beneficial Relationship between Religion and Science

“There is no conflict between religion and science” – Abbé Lemaître

Popular culture today frequently portrays Science and Religion as two opposing forces that understand the natural world in drastically different ways. A new acquisition to Falvey’s Distinctive Collections paints a very different picture.

Mendel’s principles of heredity. A defense. / With a Translation of Mendel’s Original Papers on Hybridisation. Cambridge: William Bateson, 1902.

Last month an anonymous donation of a first edition Defense of Mendel’s principles of heredity, by William Bateson (1902), was generously gifted in honor of the outstanding career of Professor Angela DiBenedetto, Villanova University Biology Department. This is the first book on Mendelism in English, and the first English textbook of genetics. It contains a reprint of the English edition of Mendel’s ‘Versuch uber Pflanzen-Hybriden’ together with the new English edition of Mendel’s second paper on ‘Hieracium’ (1869). The author, Bateson, is responsible for naming this scientific study “genetics” (c. 1905-06).

A signature on the front pastedown of this copy reads “J. Aldrich”. John Merton Aldrich (1866-1934) was an American entomologist interested in the study of flies and North American Diptera. Aldrich was a prolific collector, known for his ability to find rare species previously unknown to Western naturalist classifications, and likely the first owner of this copy. Aldrich also taught religion at All Souls Unitarian-Universalist Church in Washington D.C. As the Associate Curator of Insects at the United States National Museum, he donated his collection of over 45,000 specimens / 4,000 named specimens to the museum, which today is one of the most important Diptera collections in the National Museum.

Lemaitre Follows Two Paths to Truth: The Famous Physicist, Who is Also a Priest, Tells Why He Finds No Conflict Between Science and Religion by Duncan Aikman. The New York Times Magazine, February 19, 1933.

Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, astronomer, and professor of physics. He is known for proposing the Big Bang theory, from which he derived the Hubble-Lemaître law: the observation that galaxies are rapidly expanding. This article was printed in 1933. The very next year, Villanova awarded Lemaître the Mendel Medal.

Einstein and Lemaître—“They Have a Profound Respect and Admiration for Each Other.”

Villanova awards the Mendel Medal annually to “outstanding scientists who have done much by their painstaking work to advance the cause of science, and, by their lives and their standing before the world as scientists, have demonstrated that between true science and true religion there is no intrinsic conflict.” The Mendel Medal is named for Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) Abbot of the Augustinian Monastery in present-day Brno, Czech Republic who discovered the laws of heredity which now bear his name. The Medal was established in 1928 to recognize scientific accomplishment and religious conviction.

Two letters from Sir John Franklin (1786-1847)

John Franklin was an English admiral and explorer who led the infamous ‘Franklin expedition’ (c. 1845-1848) in search of a Northwest Passage through Canada. This ill-fated expedition resulted in the death of all 129 crew members and officers on board the two military-grade rocket vessels, ironically named the Erebus and the Terror. Despite efforts from the British navy to retrieve the lost crew and vessels, the exact circumstances of their perishing remain mysterious.

I have recently cataloged two handwritten letters from Sir John Franklin, both of which include machine-searchable transcriptions through our Digital Library.

Letter, To: Rev’d H. Wagner From: Sir John Franklin, undated.

This undated letter was written from Franklin to Rev. Henry Michell Wagner, a very influential clergyman of the Church of England. In this short letter, Franklin is very apologetic about forgetting to invite Wagner to visit with Franklin and his wife, whom he refers to as “Lady Franklin”.

Letter, To: “Dear Sir” From: John Franklin, 13 Sept 1834.

This letter comes with a typewritten transcript of the original document, which is scribed in the hand of Franklin. He sent this letter on the 13^th of September 1834 from 5 Orchard Street, Portman Square, over a decade before his fateful expedition. The note is about a book, the Life of Scott, that the recipient (likely the name at the bottom of the document: E. H. Locker Esq.) had sent to Franklin.

The full title of the published book is Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by John Gibson Lockhart, first published in 1837. According to the date of the letter, Franklin must have had a copy of Scott’s autobiographical manuscript version, “Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott, Written by Himself”, which was completed in 1826. The autobiographical version describes the Scottish author’s ancestry, upbringing, and life up to the age of 22. Franklin describes the affinity he felt towards the renowned historian, poet, and playwright, particularly in the context of the recent death of Franklin’s brother.

The James Wheeler Collection consists of books and items related to the Arctic and Antarctic regions in all aspects – history, travel, voyages, adventure, natural history, science, etc. These items were collected and generously donated by James Wheeler, MD. Only a selection of items are digitized.

Check out the digital exhibit featuring materials from the James Wheeler Collection, curated by Rebecca Oviedo “That Fairyland of Ice”: Polar Exploration in Mind and Memory.  

A Magic Letter from God

A Himmelsbrief, which translates to “heaven’s letter” is a miraculous religious textual object believed to have been written by God himself. The object’s purpose is to protect the owner of a copy from all evil and danger and punish disbelievers, so long as the owner follows the moral covenants detailed in the letter. These divine letters could also be invoked to communicate with someone departed, or to request assistance from God in heaven. Scholars today consider Himmelsbrief to be part of the Folk Medicine tradition.

Pennsylvania Dutch Powwow

The Pennsylvania Dutch participate in a magical worldview, where superstitions and charms have apotropaic properties. The Powwow was a popular method of physical and spiritual healing for believers. The integration of the Native American term “powwow” illustrates the diverse cultural influences of the Pennsylvania Dutch beyond their German ancestry.

Performing a Powwow hinges on repetition of specific Bible verses and other incantations to ensure that their owners would be protected from death, injury, and other misfortune. In addition to verbal repetition of magical and religious phrases, simply owning a copy of a Himmelsbrief can serve as a protective talisman against evils and ailments. Although the text of these letters is often written in a formulaic rhyming scheme, Powwow practitioners charged steeply for these magical letters–with prices dependent on the reputation of the practitioner (referred to as a Hexenmeister or Braucher).

Falvey’s Magdeburg Himmelsbrief

The two most popular examples of these Powwow letters are the Koenigsberg Fire Brief of 1714 and the Magdeburg Himmelsbrief of 1783. Falvey Library holds a copy of the latter, described on the bottom of the page as “Magdeburg, 1783.” The title at the top of the letter reads:

Ein Brief, so von Gott selbsten geschrieben, und zu Magdeburg niedergelassen worden ist. // A letter written by God himself found in Magdeburg.

It is believed that these divine letters miraculously fall from the sky, and are subsequently found by the devout (in this case, found in Magdeburg–historically one of the most populous cities in the Holy Roman Empire). The title is followed by 27 lines of prose, and tacked on the back of the frame are six nails with the note “Original hand-made nails used on frame backing—frame refinished March ‘82”.