Butterflies and Bibles

The lower level of the library has been claimed by butterflies and family Bibles.  Each is a theme for displays in the two  cases just outside the Special Collections and University Archives office.  

The displays are the work of part-time volunteer archivist, Pam Sowers.  In the past, special collection and archive materials were kept safely away from public to protect and preserve them, but Sowers and Library Dean, Scot Harrison, like other archivists around the world want these items to be seen by students, staff, and faculty alike and even used for research by more than just select academic scholars.

Butterflies

The butterfly display was inspired by a Wall Street Journal column on gardening that a friend sent to Sowers.  She wanted to display some of SMU’s large collection of books on flowers and gardening that have been donated over the years.  The display features dozens of butterflies cut from the pages of older used books like out-of-date atlases by student workers in the Center for Student Learning, Writing and Advising, including Luis Lara-Espinoza, Keleen Tork, Madeline Miller, and Savannah Schilperoot.  

Most of the books are non-fiction guides, but two of the books are novels.  The top row features a unique book, Kanzaka Sekka’s A Flight of Butterflies, published by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979.  The book is a fold out that stretches to thirty-one feet when fully extended.  It is actually a facsimile of the original that was published in Japan in 1964.

Family Bibles

Sowers noted that SMU actually has a modest collection of family Bibles from the area.  Some of these Bibles belonged to some of the first white settlers in the region, others are newer.  The oldest Bibles in the collection were printed in the 1700s.  Not as widely kept in the United States now, family Bibles are an old European/American tradition through which families kept their genealogy, recording births, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and deaths.  For many families even into the early twentieth century, the family Bible may have been the only book in the home.  

Sowers said she is fascinated by idiosyncratic language use in the Bibles.  For example, in one Bible, it appears that the same person recorded most of the information, using the phrase “was borned” instead of the now customary “born.”  Later, though, the same writer dropped the “was” and simply wrote “borned.”  Most of the Bibles are in English, although the university holds a French family Bible and a German one, as well.  

“Some of them are just too big for the display case,” Sowers said, but then pointed out that the smallest Bible in the case is a missionary Bible that was published in the 1870s and taken on a missionary journey to China in the 1930s.