RARE BOOKS
Addition to Artists’ Book Collection
From the artist Nava Atlas: “Love and Marriage is an altered comic book utilizing art from the 1950s. The original dialog has been removed, replaced by dry deadpan banter, between male and female characters on the mythology of modern marriage, supermoms, media’s obsession with domesticity, over the-top weddings, and monogamy. Interspersed are ads from the era, whose absurdity is left intact, in their original, unaltered state.”
Atlas, Nava. Love and Marriage. Poughkeepsie, NY: Amberwood Press, 2008.
Documenting LGBTQIA+ History
The National LGBTQ Task Force proved instrumental in achieving political and legal rights for LGBTQIA+ people. Rare Books acquired scattered issues from 1976 – 1980 of their publication It’s Time that document the task force’s effort to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder.
African American Writers from North Carolina
SCUA continues to expand our holdings of works by African American writers. Over the fall semester, we added several works by those authors who have a connection to North Carolina. We added works by James Felton, James McGirt, Estelle Eaton, George Washington McCorkle, and Edward A. Johnson.
Special Collections copy is first edition, in dust jacket, and both signed and inscribed by the author, who was born and raised in Hertford County, of this Civil Rights novel.
McGirt, James E. The Triumphs of Ephraim. Philadelphia: James E. McGirt?, 1907.
McGirt, born in North Carolina, attended high school in Greensboro and graduated from Bennett College in 1895. He moved to Philadelphia in 1903 where he published McGirt’s Magazine for about six years. He returned to Greensboro in 1909.
These two titles join his other work, Avenging the Main, A drunken A. B., and other poems (1899) already in the Rare Books collections.
Her only book. Mrs. Eaton graduated in 1936 from Winston-Salem Teacher’s College (now Winston-Salem State University). She later received her master of arts degree from Columbia University of Minnesota. Mrs. Eaton served as an educator in the Forsyth County Schools, Tuskegee Institute, Fayetteville State Teacher’s College, Elizabeth City Teacher’s College (now Elizabeth City University), Barber-Scotia College, and Bennett College.
McCorkle, George Washington. Rhymes from the Delta. Rev. ed. High Point, N.C.: The Author, 1945.
Many of his poems are dedicated to people of High Point, NC. In 1976, The Tribunal Aid ran a multi-part story printing most of the letters Mr. McCorkle received from libraries and other institutions to whom he sent copies of his book. In 1945, M.H. Akins, Principal of Washington High School in Raleigh, NC wrote:” I wish to express my appreciation for this very fine gift. I shall place it in the library in order that it may be an inspiration to the faculty, the students, and to me.”
Edward Austin Johnson was born in Wake County, NC in 1860 to parents enslaved by Sylvester Smith. Johnson received his early education from a free Black, Nancy Walton, and later attended Washington High School in Raleigh, NC. After graduating from Atlanta University, he returned to Raleigh where he served as the principal of Washington High School from 1883 to 1891. His textbook, A school history of the Negro race in America, from 1619 to 1890: with a short introduction as to the origin of the race, also a short sketch of Liberia, was the first textbook by a Black author to be approved by the North Carolina State Board of Education for use in the public school system. Rare Books has both the 1890 edition of that title as well as the revised 1911 edition. Rare Books is pleased to add his other textbook:
‘Tis The Season For Dickens
The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848) is the fifth and final volume in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books series. Like A Christmas Carol, the first novella in the series, it focuses on the Christian spirit of Christmas rather than the holiday itself. Specifically, The Haunted Man tells the story of a lonely professor who is haunted by the sorrows of his past until being visited by a spectral version of himself.
Special Collections’ copy is a first edition, first printing, and illustrated by John Leech, John Tenniel, Clarkson Stanfield, and Frank Stone.
MANUSCRIPTS
SCUA recently required the records and publications of the Brooklyn Arts Press. Brooklyn Arts Press (BAP) is devoted to publishing new works by emerging artists. The purpose of the press is to serve the community by publishing great works of varying aesthetics side by side, subverting the notion that writers and artists exist in vacuums, apart from the culture in which they reside and outside the realm and understanding of other camps and aesthetics. The press believes experimentation and innovation, arriving by way of given forms or new ones, make our culture greater through diversity of perspective, opinion, expression, and spirit. The collection also includes material relating to Augury Books, an imprint of BAP since its incorporation in 2017. Augury Books authors have received awards such as the O. Henry prize for short fiction, the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s “Discover” Award for creative nonfiction, and the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award. Authors have also been nominated for the CLMP Firecracker award, the Lambda Literary Arts award, and have been featured on the Poetry Society of America’s and the Academy of American Poets website. The Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Brooklyn Arts Press, Joe Pan, is a graduate of UNC Greensboro’s Department of English, having studied with Fred Chappell, Stuart Dischell, and Lee Zacharias. He also worked as an intern on the Greensboro Review with Jim Clark.
SCUA recently acquired a collection of monographs relating to the Grateful Dead. We are excited to add to our new and growing collection of American counterculture.
WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
Scrapbooks
Lieutenant Marion Murphy of the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve Band Scrapbook: Murphy’s scrapbook includes photographs of the band at their home base (Camp Lejeune, NC) or on tour at Parris Island, South Carolina, Washington DC, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. These include images of concerts, rehearsals, the band on parade, the band’s tour bus, band members relaxing, a photo of the Women’s Reserve Dance Band (a swing band). The scrapbook also contains concert programs and flyers for band performances, and a nine-page typed script for a 1944 NBC Radio segment featuring the band (“They’re Marines, facing the problems of war fairly and squarely…But they’re also…Women! Women who will someday return to the homes…”)
WAVE ACTIVITY: Album of photographs, circa 1944: 96 promotional photographs depicting women at training or at work in the US Navy WAVES in locations around the country.
UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Ceramics
SCUA recently acquired ceramics transferred from the Alumni House. These ceramics were produced especially for the school with images of first president and founder Charles Duncan McIver and the front of the State Normal and Industrial College (now the University of North Carolina at UNC Greensboro).
