Although I’m more inclined to show my school spirit by wearing pink and green more often than scarlet and gray, I was glad to be a Buckeye last night. I went to The Ohio State University’s Longaberger Alumni House to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Nick Anderson talk about “Humor and Opinion: The Art of the Political Cartoon.” 

Anderson joined Lucy Caswell, founding curator of Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and Herb Asher, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State, for a conversation about how editorial cartoons influence the discussion about politics. Fred Andrle, former WOSU Open Line radio talk show host and current associate at Ohio State’s Humanities Institute, moderated the discussion.

Lucy began by describing how editorial cartoons are used in a democracy. Designed to inform, persuade and advocate, an editorial cartoon is the signed personal opinion of its creator. By combining words and pictures to comment on current events, editorial cartoons encourage readers to think about issues. Using visual and verbal cues from popular culture helps them convey messages that readers most likely will understand.

To illustrate how editorial cartoons provide commentary about leaders, Lucy showed Thomas Nast’s “Compromise with the South,” an editorial cartoon which ran as a two-page spread in Harper’s Weekly in September 1864. Its detail drew readers to return and look at it again, seeing new things they might have missed before. The powerful message of this cautionary tale about what would happen in the event of a Southern compromise led voters to re-elect Lincoln, she said.

Lucy also shared “No Honest Man Need Fear Cartoons,” Homer C. Davenport’s caricature of Senator Thomas Platt and Boss Tweed, as well as a detail from the November 11, 1919 edition of “The Passing Show,” the weekly full-page editorial cartoon that Billy Ireland created for The Columbus Dispatch in the early years of the 20th century. As we looked at Ireland’s depiction of the east bank of the Scioto River — today’s newly refurbished “Scioto Mile” — Lucy told us that Ireland was commenting on the fact that Columbus residents had voted on a referendum to clean up this view of the city the week before.

Then, Anderson described how he became interested in cartooning and how he relies on cartoons to get people thinking about current events.

Born in Toledo, Ohio as the youngest of 11 children, Anderson resolved to do something different from his siblings. As a boy, he bought a book on cartooning and became interested in the art form, following the work of Jeff MacNelly and Pat Oliphant. Later, Anderson studied political science at Ohio State and drew cartoons for The Lantern. He received The Charles M. Schulz Award for best college cartoonist in the United States.

The unusual graphic style and thoughtful, powerful messages that Anderson created in his editorial cartoons for the Louisville Courier-Journal won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Among other awards, he won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award in 2000. He submitted a question in animated form to the Republican CNN-YouTube presidential debates, which aired on November 28, 2007.

Today, Anderson, an avowed independent, draws cartoons for the Houston Chronicle. He is syndicated in over 100 newspapers by The Washington Post Writers Group. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and USA Today.

Anderson’s cartoons are the result of a lot of hard work. To get his insights and opinions across in a way that differs from other editorial cartoonists, Anderson constantly follows the news and researches topics to form his ideas. While he has the confidence of his opinions, he doesn’t always have the confidence of his ideas, so he’s glad to share his rough drafts with his editors for their input, he said.

While Anderson can draw most of his cartoons in a couple of hours, depictions of more complicated topics can take him four or five hours to execute. Complex subjects lend themselves well to multi-panel cartoons.

During the course of Anderson’s career, the art of drawing a cartoon has changed. Before, cartoonists drew their work in pencil, traced it over with India ink, and then erased the original pencil lines. Now, many aren’t using paper at all, creating their work completely on the computer. Anderson uses Corel’s Painter software, which he uses in conjunction with the Wacom Cintiq computer touch monitor and a stylus.

While he loves creating original artwork, Anderson said he doesn’t have the leeway of time. Using the computer, he can undo his drawings, work in layers, and create cross-hatching much faster. Corel Painter allows him to color a cartoon in 20 to 30 minutes and gives a nice watercolor effect to his work. Whatever his technique, Anderson hides the names of his two children in each of his cartoons, providing a unique scavenger hunt for some of his followers.

Since cartoonists have to innovate more these days, Anderson has also tried his hand at clay animation. Herman Cain and Rick Perry  have been the subjects of his experiments with Claymation. These expressions can take him about eight hours, between splicing the audio together and creating the clay models.

Social media is redistributing Anderson’s work in more interactive ways. Establishing a presence on Facebook and posting to a blog are also giving him more opportunities to receive instant feedback from his audience.

Anderson appeared on WOSU’s “All Sides with Ann Fisher” on Wednesday. Click here to hear what he had to say. To follow Anderson’s work, bookmark his blog.

While attending this alumni event provided me with the perfect opportunity to visit the Longaberger Alumni House, it also gave me a chance to see some unique Ohio State-themed ephemera and artwork. Buckeye license plates and an alumni edition of Brutus Buckeye are displayed near watercolors by local artist (and cartoonist) Leland McClelland and Ralph Fanning, an art history professor at Ohio State University who produced more than 3,000 watercolors and paintings. For more information about Fanning, read “A Painter and a Gentleman,” an article by George W. Paulson in the May-June 2000 issue of TIMELINE.

1962 marked the debut of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Dubliners. That same year, Andy Warhol painted Campbell’s Soup Can. Marvel Comics introduced Spider-Man. Rachel Carson released Silent Spring. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. Marilyn Monroe died. Juan Carlos of Spain and Princess Sophia of Greece were married. Lawrence of Arabia premiered. And my mother graduated from The Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in education and a primary teaching certificate. 

On June 5, 1962, she received her diploma at Ohio Stadium. 

Last Sunday afternoon, she joined hundreds of her classmates — including several of her fun Bexley friends — at the Ohio Union for their 50th reunion. 

Beginning this year, Homecoming and Reunion Weekend combined into one campus-wide celebration for alumni. While each college had its own events, there were plenty of activities that all returning alumni could attend. On Friday, they could participate in a book discussion about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, take campus tours and join in the Homecoming Parade and Pep Rally. On Saturday, they could tailgate and attend the Ohio State vs. Nebraska game. And on Sunday, the celebration concluded with a special alumni event for the Class of 1962 that was hosted by President Gordon Gee. 

From “Buckeye casual” clothes to table settings, scarlet and gray were everywhere. Watching a slideshow of photographs from the 1962 Makio that played on two large overhead screens, my mother and those sitting at her table wondered whether their fellow classmates — basketball legends John Havlicek, Jerry Lucas and Bobby Knight and accomplished golfer Jack Nicklaus — would be there. 

Baskets of Ohio-grown apples, bottles of apple cider from Grobe Fruit Farm in Elyria, and caramels not only decorated the tables, but also became take-home treats when the party was over. 

Chocolate-covered Ohio State Oreos from Emlolly Candy in Worthington, a special 50th reunion pin, and bookmarks with the words to “Carmen Ohio” and the “Buckeye Battle Cry” were party favors. The Class of 1962 also received a class button as another souvenir of their reunion.

Archie Griffin, president and CEO of the Ohio State Alumni Association, visited each table, posing for photos and welcoming alumni to the 17,389-square-foot Grand Ballroom named in his honor. 

For lunch, the Class of 1962 and their guests feasted on mixed greens with assorted vegetables, cheeses and candied pecans; a wheatberry salad with apples and cranberries; a grilled sweet potato salad; a variety of rolls; tomato bisque soup; pasta; mashed potatoes; roasted vegetables; chicken; salmon and prime rib. Apple crisp, crème brulee cheesecake, cookies and pumpkin mousse topped with gingersnap crumbles were for dessert. 

After lunch, the class enjoyed its own mini-pep rally led by Brutus Buckeye, the Ohio State Marching Band and Ohio State cheerleaders. Buck That!, Ohio State’s all-male a cappella group, sang “Hang On Sloopy,” “My Girl” and “Stand By Me.”

To conclude, President Gordon Gee told the class about the But For Ohio State campaign, in which the university hopes to raise $2.5 billion. 

“What does Ohio State mean to you?,” President Gee asked. For my mother, Ohio State meant the opportunity to achieve a 40-year career as a teacher. But for Ohio State, she couldn’t have taught over 2,300 children how to read, count, write, appreciate music, create art and enjoy physical education.

There’s been a change to the editorial calendar so that I can share some breaking news with you. Woody is blooming!

This morning, The Columbus Dispatch reported that the rare titan arum, fondly known as the “corpse flower,” was about to bloom at The Ohio State University’s Biological Sciences Greenhouse. Late this afternoon, the flower was opening.

Since I’ll be at the Ohio Library Council all day tomorrow, learning about library directorship, and then at the Westerville Public Library in the evening, watching a live stream of Dan Brown speaking from Lincoln Center about his new Inferno, Nails and I saddled up Lucy Long and cantered down High Street after dinner to see the plant, nicknamed “Woody,” for ourselves.

Located at 332 West 12th Avenue, on Ohio State’s main campus, the Biological Sciences Greenhouse is home to an insectary of 130 species of insects and arthropods, a mosquito-rearing facility, and research greenhouse space. Its conservatory includes a collection of more than 1,200 tropical and desert plant species, including this beauty that is native to the Sumatran rainforests.

Arriving on the ground floor of the building where the greenhouse is located, we joined five other people waiting for the elevator. A jolly man sporting a bandana entertained us with tales of waiting hours to see the plant when it bloomed in the past. The elevator door opened, and one of Mr. Selfridge’s Elevator Girls whisked us up to the seventh floor.

A welcoming trio clad in titan arum tee shirts directed us down the hall, telling us not to miss the display of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches.

After making another turn, we entered a long hallway with a crowd-control rope down the middle, with glass-doored rooms on either side. As we passed them, we looked in and saw all sorts of interesting-looking plants. “I’d like to go to school here,” Nails remarked.

Then, I caught a whiff of it. It was strong and stinky, like fermented sauerkraut with a side of rotten fish. Nails didn’t smell a thing.

Turning the corner, we saw Woody. Wow! Standing 72.5 inches tall, this was one big plant. When the tuber was repotted in November 2012, it weighed 49 pounds.

This is the second time that Woody has flowered. The first flowering was on April 23, 2011. Under the right conditions, titan arum can rebloom in two to five years. The flower’s stench attracts special pollinators who love decaying flesh.

This is what it looks like before it’s unfurled…

And this is how it appears on the inside.

I loved its velvety, frilly purple skirt, also known as a spathe, that surrounds the spadix, or spike.

More tee-shirted staff pointed out an emerging bud of another titan arum…

“Jesse,” a dormant tuber that blossomed last year…

two titan arum seedlings, aged six months and one year…

and some of the plant’s seeds, which came from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Across the hall, we saw an example of the plant’s leaf dormancy, lying on the floor.
It felt like a soft leather glove.

Since Woody will stop blooming tomorrow, the greenhouse has extended its normal business hours to accommodate the plant’s admirers. It will be open until 11 p.m. tonight and from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. tomorrow (Wednesday, May 15). If you’d like to say hello to Woody in person, park in Parking Garage K, make two quick lefts as you walk out of the garage, and look for the star-shaped balloons marking the double glass doors in the breezeway between Aronoff Laboratory and the parking garage. For those who’d like to admire Woody from the comfort of home, log on to bioscigreenhouse.osu.edu/titan-arum and click the links on the right of the page to view the plant on two live webcams.

Watching a live webcast of Dan Brown’s recent Lincoln Center appearance to promote Inferno, I slouched in my chair at the Westerville Public Library and took in his show-and-tell-style remarks about how his childhood influenced his love of puzzles and his views on religion and science. But when he shared a quote that expressed what he thought constituted good writing, I sat up straight, grabbed my handbag and jotted it down in my ever-present reporter’s notebook.

“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote in What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures. “It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head.”

Lately, I’ve been engaged by the colorful, captivating prose used by two local naturalists to share their abundant knowledge.  Their writing has encouraged me not only to think much more about the natural world, but also to realize that science can be a great deal more interesting than it appeared while struggling through my CSG chemistry class. If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you know who one of those authors is. On his recommendation, I checked out the other author’s work and was equally engrossed. Let me tell you more about him.

Edward Sinclair Thomas was born in Woodsfield, Ohio on April 22, 1891. After growing up in Columbus, he graduated from The Ohio State University with an undergraduate degree in 1913, followed by a law degree in 1916. Thanks to a tip from my friend and fellow archivist, Kevlin, I found Thomas’s entry in the 1913 Makio, which I accessed through a new digital resource from University Archives called the Makio Digital Archives. Besides serving as editor of the Sun-Dial, Thomas was a member of the Glee Club; Student Council; Junior Social Committee; Commercial Club; Pan-Hellenic Council; Bucket and Dipper, the junior honorary; Sigma Delta Chi; Delta Tau Delta; and Phi Beta Kappa. His yearbook entry mysteriously concludes, “Bring forth the royal jester!”

After 15 years of practicing law, Thomas decided to take a different career path. From 1931 to 1962, he was curator of natural history at the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, now known as the Ohio Historical Society.

Thomas inherited his interest in natural history from his parents. His mother, Tempe Sinclair Thomas, was fond of wildflowers, while his father, Edward B. Thomas, loved birds.

At the Ohio Historical Society’s Archives/Library last Saturday, I paged through three handwritten journals that Thomas kept from 1908 to 1910. Reading them, I saw the young naturalist’s talent for describing his interest in natural history and ornithology. Here are some highlights. 

In his introductory journal entry for June 24, 1908, the 17-year-old Thomas comes across as a real Renaissance man. Besides collecting stamps, coins, insects, marbles and natural history relics, East High School’s junior class president enjoyed playing football, baseball, tennis, hockey, handball and croquet. When the 6’ ½”, 160-pound, “rather wiry” and “not very graceful” fellow wasn’t scratching on the violin, he monkeyed around with his Brownie camera. 

On a trip to Platte Lake, Michigan in July 1908, Thomas saw many novel things. He took in Larkspur, birches, aspens, Moose Maples, ferns and all sorts of other strange plants. Catbirds, English sparrows and Kingbirds were some of the birds that were new to him. Penning about his visit to Bass Lake, Michigan on August 7, 1908, Thomas described seeing “a squealing nest of Chimney Swifts calling for their mommy.” Spotting a hawk in Honor, Michigan the following week, Thomas confessed in his August 14, 1908 journal entry, “I almost felt in sympathy with the ‘monarch of the air’ when its dignified flight changed to a wild dash for safety, as it was followed by a pair of chattering Kingbirds.”

A month after purchasing a guide to the wildflowers of America, Thomas received a pair of field glasses for Christmas. After he and his father went out to the woods to see if he could glass any birds with them, he wrote in his December 25, 1908 journal entry, “At first we didn’t see any, but after a while we scared up some shy birds that I thought surely were something rare, judging by the way they skulked through the brush. They proved to be song sparrows! What a change from the roadside bird we see in the summer! Later we saw some tree sparrows and juncos together in a company. I got the best view of a junco I ever had through the glasses. We then went into another piece of woods where we saw at least ten cardinals in a company, more than I ever saw together at one time. On the way back to the carriage we saw a flock of birds dash up with a chorus of twitters. They lit near us, but soon rose and dashed away again. I followed them and at last came where they were feeding. They were without doubt Horned Larks. It was almost wonderful the way in which their colors blended with the ground.”

On August 29, 1909, Thomas wrote about his plans to start a “crawlery” so that he could raise some caterpillars to moths in order to study their habits. He placed three eggs of a Cabbage Butterfly, a Wooly Bear and three other caterpillars under an inverted glass, gave them a leaf to feed on, and watched two Cabbages hatch. He reported they were “the funniest-looking things you ever saw.”

During a sojourn at Boston in July 1911, the Ohio State student wrote of his walk through Franklin Park, “I had hoped to see some birds not common in Ohio, but to my disappointment, all the birds, excepting the Common Purple Grackles, were species very common in Ohio, including the super-multitudinous English Sparrows, which take up every space.”

Eleven years later, Thomas began documenting experiences like these in a much more public way. In 1922, The Columbus Dispatch invited Thomas to write six short articles about songbirds to generate interest in a birdhouse contest sponsored by the newspaper and a downtown hardware store. The articles were so successful that the Dispatch asked him to continue writing stories related to natural history for a weekly column that was first titled “Our Birds” and then “In Woods and Fields.” Later, Thomas and artist John Hazlett created the “Professor Nature Bug” cartoon series for young Dispatch readers. When he handed his column over to Jim Fry in 1981, Thomas had contributed over 3,000 articles to the Dispatch.

In Ohio Woods & Fields, a book published by The Dispatch Printing Company in 1981, is a compilation of reprints of 100 of Thomas’s columns.

Your blogger at Bigelow Cemetery State Nature Preserve, soon after it was dedicated in 1979.

The columns were a perfect way for Thomas to share what he discovered while leading bird hikes to places like Buckeye Lake; conducting nature tours of favorite haunts like Cedar Bog State Memorial, Old Man’s Cave, and near his cabin at Neotoma Valley, in Clear Creek (Hocking County), Ohio, where the rare Allegheny wood rat was discovered in 1923; and during the field excursions he made to destinations like Blacklick Woods, Black Hand Gorge, Kelley’s Island, and Lawrence County, where he found an abundance of prairie grasses and a rare large colony of the Compass Plant in October 1952. He also used the column to report on important developments like the restoration of original prairie vegetation at Kildeer Plains in 1953 and the dedication of the Bigelow Cemetery State Nature Preserve in 1979. “Cinderella of the Trees,” his April 6, 1947 description of the Juneberry, or Serviceberry tree, made me take a closer look at the little tree in my yard whose delicate white flowers are a welcome sight to people hungry for spring.

The book includes a few photographs of Thomas. In one on the page opposite the publisher’s statement, he’s perched on the steps of his Neotoma cabin in 1933, nattily outfitted for the outdoors in a cap, a sweater and trousers, a white shirt and a tie, and one great pair of boots.

I also tracked down a few of Thomas’s other publications, such as Insect Friends and Foes (1932), Insect Life-Stories (1940), and The Orleton Farm Mastodon (1952), his account of the consultations that took place after workmen discovered a mastodon skeleton about 11 ½ miles northwest of West Jefferson in Madison County in November 1949.

Thomas was instrumental in the formation of the Metropolitan Park District of Columbus and Franklin County. In 1975, a 310-acre nature preserve in Sharon Woods Metro Park was named for him. He was a member of numerous professional and fraternal societies, including my favorite Kit-Kat Club, a social and literary club formed in 1911, in which membership is limited to 39 noted Columbus men.

In 1938, Thomas married Marian Washburn. The couple had one daughter, Elizabeth Zane Thomas Smith. Thomas lived to the age of 90; he died on February 16, 1982.

The Edward S. Thomas Papers (MSS 751) and the Edward S. Thomas Audiovisual Collection (AV 193) are part of the collections at the Ohio Historical Society’s Archives/Library. Besides those three journals, the manuscript collection includes typescript copies of Thomas’s Dispatch articles, his field observation notebooks that he kept from 1943 to 1980, extensive material on his bird banding activities, documentation of his travels from 1938 to 1978, and his unpublished book on Ohio orthoptera, among other things.

“Portrait of Professor Naturebug,” a seven-minute interview with Thomas from March 1980, is part of the audiovisual collection. It also includes 68 Dufay color transparencies that Thomas took of flowers, plants, natural landscapes, insects, birds and reptiles in the late 1930s.

A lapidary caddy that Thomas used as a camera field kit, together with the circa-1937 Kine Exakta I 35 mm camera from Dresden, Germany that Thomas used from 1931 to 1962, are part of the Ohio Historical Society’s museum collections.

If you haven’t been to Gibraltar Island, near Put-in-Bay, you’ll soon have a special opportunity to visit my second-favorite Lake Erie destination.

Named for the resemblance of its dolomite ledges to the Rock of Gibraltar, Gibraltar Island was originally a territory of the state of Connecticut. In 1864, Jay Cooke, a native of Sandusky, Ohio, bought the six-and-a-half-acre island for $3,001.

Cooke was a successful financier who sold bonds that raised millions of dollars to support the Union during the Civil War. He also financed the construction of the Northern Pacific Railway, which encouraged the development of the northwest part of the country.

Not long after Cooke acquired the island, he erected a monument commemorating Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory in the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813. During the War of 1812, Perry, who commanded the American forces on Lake Erie, used the island as a lookout point to spot the approaching British fleet. The spot became known as Perry’s Lookout. Cooke also built a 15-room home for his family on the eastern end of the island, near Perry’s Lookout. Known as Cooke Castle, the three-story High Victorian Italianate building is constructed of native limestone.

Decorative ironwork, multistory bay windows, and hood window mouldings adorn the house. A wide porch fronts its lake and bay sides, while a Gothic octagonal tower provides a panoramic view. A flag usually flew from a flagpole atop the tower when the Cookes were in residence.

Inside, Cooke Castle features a hardwood rotunda and a winding staircase. The ground floor of the tower was used for a library, where two glass-fronted wooden book cases elaborately carved in the Gothic style remain.

French doors open onto the porch from the dining room. The parlor includes a marble fireplace and an elaborate cast-iron decorative piece in the center of its high ceiling. The master bedroom, located above the parlor, contains its original marble washstand. All the rooms have their original woodwork.

Cooke and his wife, Dorothea, had eight children; four died early, but two sons and two daughters survived. For nearly 60 years, the Cooke family visited the island for three to six weeks in late spring and for a similar period of time in late summer. Rutherford B. Hayes, William Howard Taft, Salmon P. Chase and General William Tecumseh Sherman were among the guests who visited Cooke Castle, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Cookes recorded their island adventures in a series of leather-bound journals that they called The Gibraltar Record. Son Henry, a minister who was also an amateur photographer, captured many of their visits on approximately 2,000 glass plate negatives. These delightful archival sources show and describe the Cookes posing on the steps of their castle, fishing, racing rowboats, swimming, picnicking, reading, taking excursions to other islands, and rolling the lawn for tennis.

You’ll also discover them riding bicycles, knitting, playing croquet, picking peaches and grapes, swinging, repairing a flag in time for the Fourth of July, playing ping-pong, and lounging by the Perry monument on “A Hot Day at Gibraltar.”

After Cooke’s death in 1905, the island remained in the family until 1925, when they sold it to Julius F. Stone, a member of Ohio State’s Board of Trustees. That same year, Stone presented the deed to the island to the university as a permanent home for the Lake Laboratory, which was established in 1895 for teaching and research on Lake Erie. Now known as the Franz Theodore Stone Laboratory, it is the oldest freshwater biological field station in the United States.

In 2005, I attended the annual Friends of Stone Lab Open House so I could see Cooke Castle and pose on the porch like the Cookes did. This year’s open house will take place Saturday, September 7, 2013 from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. In addition to viewing Cooke Castle, you can tour Stone Laboratory and learn more about the scientific pursuits that happen there. Free transportation to Gibraltar Island will be provided from OSU’s Aquatic Visitors Center on South Bass Island. Click here for more information.

To read more about Jay Cooke, his family and their castle, see The Journal of Jay Cooke; or, The Gibraltar Records, 1865-1905, by James E. Pollard. The first four volumes of the Gibraltar Record (1864 to 1888) are part of The Ohio State University’s archival collections.  The other three volumes, covering the years 1889 to 1920, are housed at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center. The Ohio Historical Society Archives/Library holds the Jay Cooke Papers (MSS 129) and the Reverend Henry E. Cooke’s glass plate negatives (P 117).

Spend some time in The Ohio State University’s Thompson Library Exhibit Gallery and you’ll want to brew a pot of Bewley’s tea, bake a loaf of barmbrack, and curl up with the literature that reflects the Irish people’s pride in their Gaelic heritage and their national identity.

“Of What Is Past, or Passing, or to Come: The Irish Literary Renaissance,” an exhibit of The Ohio State University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, presents rare books, first printings and signed editions of works by some of the most influential Irish writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The exhibit features works by William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as well as contemporary Irish writers like Patrick Kavanagh, Liam O’Flaherty and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, who died on August 30, 2013.

Emerald-hued exhibition panels bordered with Celtic knots present a timeline of Irish literary history and author biographies.  A photographic map locates the origins of several authors of Ireland. Several historical pamphlets document the Irish quest for independence from Britain. Recordings of James Joyce reading the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of Finnegan’s Wake, as well as William Butler Yeats reciting The Lake Isle of Innisfree in 1937, bring the acclaimed writers to life.

Three distinctive publishers’ bookbindings are worth the trip in themselves.

The gold-stamped covers and spine that Althea Gyles designed for The Secret Rose, Yeats’ 1897 poetic work, are rich in Celtic symbols. Trees with intertwining roots and branches are reminiscent of the interlaced Celtic knots so prevalent in the Book of Kells and other illuminated manuscripts from Ireland’s past. The lettering of the title looks like Gaelic type. “A last-minute shopper entering a London bookstore on Valentine’s Day in 1928 with six shillings to spend on a gift for his or her beloved could hardly have made a better investment – either poetically or financially – than one of the 2,000 copies of a volume Macmillan & Co. had published that morning: The Tower by W.B. Yeats,” Richard J. Finneran wrote in his introduction to the 2004 facsimile edition of this influential volume of verse. Yeats wrote this collection of poems at and about Ballylee Castle, the romantic County Galway hideaway he purchased in 1917 and christened Thor Ballylee. Plenty of Valentines must have fallen for the image of the castle’s 16th-century Norman tower stamped in gold on olive green boards that T. Sturge Moore designed for the cover.

Moore also designed the binding for Yeats’ The Winding Stair (1933), which depicts Thor Ballylee’s spiral staircase, a dolphin and classical motifs.

Equally breathtaking are works from the Cuala Press, a small but influential hand-printing press established by Elizabeth and Lily Yeats, the poet’s sisters. First known as the Dun Emer Press between 1902 and 1907, and active until the 1970s, the private press contributed to the revival of the old Irish heroic literature, the Gaelic language, and the artistic craft of book-printing by issuing 60 small quartos featuring an old-style Caslon font, handmade rag paper and a pressmark known as “Lone Tree in Irish Landscape,” after a line drawing by Elizabeth Yeats.

Cuala Press works include first editions of the work of William Butler Yeats; George William Russell, who wrote under the pseudonym AE; Augusta, Lady Gregory, the Irish dramatist and folklorist who co-founded the Abbey Theatre with Yeats and Edward Martyn; and John Millington Synge. The Love Songs of Connacht, a volume of Gaelic poetry collected and translated by Douglas Hyde, and Lady Gregory’s copy of Wild Apples, a collection of poetry by Oliver St. John Gogarty with a preface by Yeats, are on display.

From 1908 until 1915, the Cuala Press printed monthly broadsides that contained poems and ballads by traditional and contemporary writers. They were illustrated with hand-colored drawings — many by Jack Butler Yeats, the poet’s brother — that were printed from line blocks. The Cuala Press also designed and printed bookplates, prints and hand-colored greeting cards.

The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library owns over 90 percent of the titles published by the Cuala Press, as well as 36 of its hand-colored broadsides.

The library’s Irish Collection includes over 189 works related to William Butler Yeats; two copies of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as a 1935 Limited Editions Club copy of the work with illustrations by Henri Matisse; and original Samuel Beckett manuscripts, including a notebook that included early drafts for Endgame and a ten-line fragment intended for Waiting for Godot that did not appear in the published text. Other highlights of the collection include Gleanings in America, printed in 1814 in Cork; the first edition of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars; and the unpublished typescript of Thomas H. Nally’s The Spancel of Death, a play that was to open on April 25, 1916, but was canceled and never performed because of the Easter Rising.

More recent works in the collection are manuscripts of contemporary Irish writers Ena May, Mick Egan and Mike Finn, as well as a rare copy of the first issue of Verses for a Fordham Commencement. Seamus Heaney read this poem during the commencement at which he received his honorary degree from Fordham University in 1982. When a downpour erupted during the ceremony, most of the pamphlets containing the poem were lost or ruined.

“Of What Is Past, or Passing, or to Come: The Irish Literary Renaissance” is on view in the Thompson Library Exhibit Gallery on Ohio State’s main campus through January 5, 2014. The gallery is open Monday through Wednesday, 10 am to 6 pm; Thursday, 10 am to 8 pm; Friday, 10 am to 6 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 pm.

One afternoon in January, I was hit with a question: What are some ways to track federal legislation? I shared a handful of options, then decided to confer with a knowledgeable source to make sure I had presented all of the possibilities. 

Calling my reference desk of choice led to more than a thorough answer. Besides being invited to give a presentation on processing archival collections to the Columbus Bar Association’s Legal Research and Information Resources Committee in April, I made some new friends who work as reference librarians at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law’s Michael E. Moritz Law Library.  After traveling at a snail’s pace through Downtown gridlock caused by an exploding transformer and throngs of Arnold Sports Festival-goers last Friday, I emerged victorious from the #2 North High Street COTA bus and took a tour of their nifty workplace.

Founded in 1891, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law is consistently ranked as the top law school in the state. Approximately 570 students receive their legal training from more than 50 faculty members in a building at the corner of North High Street and West Twelfth Avenue in Columbus. 

Situated at the southeast entrance to the Ohio State campus, the original brick-and-limestone-faced building was constructed in 1958. In 1992, a $16.5 million building renovation and expansion was completed. A 95,000-square-foot addition nearly doubled the building’s size, with about two-thirds of it devoted to the law school’s library. Bohm-NBBJ of Columbus and Gunnar Birkerts and Associates of Birmingham, Michigan designed the addition to reflect the law school’s important status as the first campus building seen by those coming from Downtown. 

Latvian-born Gunnar Birkerts is a Modernist architect who spent four years working for Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. He designed the Corning Museum of Glass; the United States Embassy office building in Caracas, Venezuela; Domino’s Pizza corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and the National Library of Latvia, among others. His law school-related work includes the University of Michigan law library addition, the University of Iowa law building and the Duke University law building addition. 

In “College of Law Addition/Renovation, The Ohio State University,” a March 1995 Architecture + Urbanism journal article, Birkerts described how the original campus development plans designed by Olmstead Brothers in 1905 and Charles St. John Chubb in 1910 placed the important buildings at the major entrances to campus. The most prominent buildings surround the Oval, the lawn that Buckeyes recognize as the geographic and symbolic center of campus. To maintain the building’s important image, Birkerts designed a curved exterior wall to guide visitors toward the Oval, and an arcade to invite them to take a detour and experience his creation. 

Birkerts framed the new public entrance on the north side of the building with pairs of limestone columns. The façade is like a long porch, ending at the northwest corner of the building with a staircase housed in a long, narrow glass enclosure. Lit from within after dark, it becomes like a lantern pointing to the center of campus, Sven Birkerts and Martin Schwarts observed in their book, Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist. 

Birkerts’ years in Latvia taught him how important daylight is, and how to use it well. As a result, he employs different strategies to bring light into rooms from various directions. The walls of the addition have wide rusticated masonry bands and lots of windows, arranged in what Birkerts described as a basket weave pattern. 

Light is also an essential element of the law library. Existing and new spaces meet at a skylighted stairwell. White-painted walls and pale wood veneer paneling throughout the interior further reflect the light. 

Birkerts achieved compatibility between the old building and the new by linking them with a cascading staircase. Its spreading stairs lead visitors from the ground floor entrance and communal spaces to the classrooms and the law library. 

The law library was formed in December 1891 when the widow of the Honorable Henry C. Noble of Circleville donated his library to the newly established law school at Ohio State. It was renamed the Michael E. Moritz Law Library in 1998, after distinguished College of Law alumnus Michael E. Moritz, and has become the largest library in the state. The Ohio State community, together with attorneys, judges and citizens, are welcome to use the collection. 

A space in the library’s reading room honors Ervin H. Pollack, a lawyer-turned-librarian who directed the library from 1947 until his death in 1972. In addition to devoting a great deal of effort to solving the challenges of cataloging law-related books, Pollack taught legal bibliography and legal writing, jurisprudence, and legal regulation of business practices. He also authored several scholarly publications, most notably Fundamentals of Legal Research.

Pollack acquired many volumes in the library’s rare book collection.  Of the 2,500 rare volumes in the collection, Jurisconsultorum Vitae (1538) — a biographical dictionary of Roman jurists, written in Latin — is one of the oldest imprints. Others include a 1680 reprint of the first edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and The Roycroft Press’s 1899 edition of lawyer Clarence Darrow’s first book, A Persian Pearl. For more on the library’s rare book collection, see “Storied Treasures: Law Library’s Collection of Rare Books, Artifacts Number in the Thousands,” from the Summer 2013 issue of All Rise, the law school’s magazine. 

If you can’t visit the library in person and see its striking home for yourself, you can benefit from how it fulfills its mission of supporting scholarship and instruction in the law by reading the Moritz Legal Information Blog.  Posts cleverly tie current events and issues with legal information resources available at the library.

For example, Puppy Bowl fans learned about books covering careers in animal law. Those following the dispute over heiress Huguette Clark’s estate, previewed in Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune, by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., discovered essential library resources on estate planning, alternative dispute resolution, mediation and negotiation. Students looking for innovative ways to improve their writing received a list of well-written novels recommended by legal writing professors. And new books like The Little Book of Elvis Law, by Cecil C. Kuhne III, part of the American Bar Association’s “Little Books of Law” series, offer a possibility for law students puzzling over an employment path.

If Ferragamo patent leather t-strap heels and magic lanterns are some of your favorite things, drop by The Ohio State University and catch two exhibitions. 

“History’s Closet: Teaching History through Clothes,” the Historic Costume & Textiles Collection’s current exhibition, showcases an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded grant project that helped to support digital photography of artifacts that could be used to teach history in accordance with Ohio’s curriculum for grades 8 through 12. The grant also provided for workshops in which teachers received information and resources to create lesson plans using the digital images. 

Five periods of history are highlighted in the exhibition. This brown-and-green striped silk velvet man’s coat with floral embroidery, made between 1780 and 1815, is one of three artifacts demonstrating how changing political ideals were reflected in the popular fashions of the early American republic. During this period, stiff, heavily decorated ensembles were replaced with simpler, Greek-inspired styles of clothing. 

This gold silk satin evening gown dating from 1867 represents how women followed fashion trends around the time of the Civil War. Readers of fashion magazines either hired a dressmaker to reproduce the clothing pictured in periodicals like Harper’s Bazaar and Godey’s Lady’s Book, or they constructed the garments themselves with the help of paper patterns and a home sewing machine.

 Ready-to-wear wool walking skirts like the one teamed with this white cotton shirtwaist with a lace and embroidery panel were some of the many items of clothing that were mass-produced in the early years of the 20th century. 

World War II led to fabric shortages. Since wool, silk and leather were needed for the war effort, rayon, nylon, acetate and other synthetic fibers were used instead. This wedding dress, robe and gown were all made from parachutes in 1945 and 1946. 

Newly developed textile fibers like synthetic leather, polyester and Ultrasuede became available in the second half of the 20th century. Their easy-to-care-for nature contributed to their popularity. This ensemble of a Courrèges orange vinyl coat, white vinyl modified cloche hat and white stretch vinyl go-go boots with front scalloped faux lacing is a terrific example of fashion popular from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. 

When I spotted a familiar-looking light brown suede fedora, I checked my exhibit list and made quite a discovery. Dating from the 1970s, this stylish hat once adorned the head of Dorothy Littlehale, a local landscape painter and arts patron who passed away at age 83 on April 24, 1987. 

Mrs. Littlehale was a Columbus Art League officer who received the Ohioana Library Award for excellence in art, but I knew her as the stylish lady my grandparents, parents and I saw almost every Sunday morning for breakfast at The Christopher Inn, that nifty circular “motor inn” at 300 East Broad Street that opened in 1963 and was demolished in 1988. (If you don’t remember the Christopher Inn, check out this photo of it from the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Columbus in Historic Photographs database.)  Her equally dapper husband, Bob Littlehale, owned an advertising agency and was equally involved in the arts, serving as president of the Columbus Arts Council and as an instigator of the Columbus Arts Festival. He passed away in 2002. 

Wireless access to the museum’s Fashion2fiber website is available in the gallery via ipads to retrieve information regarding other artifacts that were not included in the exhibition.

Walk across Neil Avenue to Thompson Library and up the stairs to the exhibit gallery on the main floor to see “Theatre Magic: Technology, Innovation, and Effect.” This exhibition of items from the special collections of the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute explores the secrets behind special effects. 

Artifacts illustrate how lighting creates a mood; how different production team members are responsible for the properties, or “props,” the smaller items that are found on the stage; and how magicians make objects appear to float or disappear with “black art” illusions. They also explain how an actor transforms himself into different characters through costumes, masks, vocal and physical exercises, and “sense memory,” a technique in which he recalls how his own personal experience is similar to a situation faced by the character. Let’s look at some objects included in the display. 

A dancer wearing these “Sparky” shoes would give off sparks when she moved over metal plates on the stage floor. How? A flint stone was placed in a holder on the toe of the shoe. 

Toy theatre was a popular home amusement from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. Sheets containing drawings of characters, costumes and scenery from popular plays — together with condensed versions of the scripts — were sold at the concession stands of theatres. After cutting out the characters and sets, people could recreate the performances at home. The exhibit contains a toy theatre from 1922; an augmented reality exhibit shows it in action. Sets convey the story or message of the production. This model is a scale version of the set William Barclay created for a 1984 production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at the Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York. 

This 2004 working model of a 17th century Italian theatre was constructed with inspiration from a manuscript from the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, Italy. The manuscript probably illustrates the stage house of the Teatro San Salvatore in Venice and a production of the 1675 play, La Divisione del Mondo. 

If you’ve never seen a magic lantern, now’s your chance! Magic lantern shows were a hip form of entertainment in the days before motion pictures. Similar to slide projectors, magic lanterns were first powered by candles and oil lamps, then by electric light. Crowds gathered in private homes, meeting rooms and theatres to watch a “lanternist” show a series of glass slides and give accompanying remarks about subjects like world landmarks and fairy tales. 

“History’s Closet: Teaching History through Clothes” is on view in the Gladys Keller Snowden Gallery at Campbell Hall, 1787 Neil Avenue, through June 28, 2014. The gallery is open Tuesday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Saturday, 12-4 p.m. It will be closed for spring break March 8-15.

Half ball buttons were covered in dark purple to imitate a clump of grapes, placed on the left hip of a light green short-sleeve gown made in 1942.

“Theatre Magic: Technology, Innovation, and Effect” continues through May 11, 2014. The Thompson Library Gallery, at 1858 Neil Avenue Mall, is open Monday-Wednesday, 10 am to 6 pm; Thursday, 10 am to 8 pm; Friday, 10 am to 6 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 pm.

If you visit the exhibits on a weekday, treat yourself to a meal or a snack at Heirloom, a restaurant on the lower level of the Wexner Center for the Arts. The soups, salads, sandwiches, entrees and baked goods on the menu are made from locally grown or produced ingredients. Breakfast dishes are served all day. Heirloom is open Monday through Wednesday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Thursday and Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

The arrival of spring means two great things to anticipate — more bike rides on the Olentangy Trail, and more Subway lunches at the Urban Coffee at the head of the trail in Worthington Hills. 

Besides being my favorite place to split up a Subway, this popular coffee shop is also the meeting place for a Sunday-afternoon book discussion group. As they arrive, take their seat, and join the conversation, the group’s members and facilitators exude so much happiness and enthusiasm that it’s hard not to want to chime in, especially when the book being discussed most recently was Little House on the Prairie. Let me introduce you to the Next Chapter Book Club! 

Next Chapter Book Club members at Urban Coffee, courtesy of Jillian Ober

The Next Chapter Book Club (NCBC) is a community-based literacy and social program that provides adolescents and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities with the chance to be members of a book discussion group. It was established in 2002 by Dr. Thomas Fish and his colleagues at The Ohio State University Nisonger Center, an interdisciplinary program that promotes the meaningful participation of people with disabilities in communities through education, service and research. Today, there are more than 250 NCBC clubs in 120 cities worldwide, with over 20 groups meeting in the greater Columbus area. 

Five to eight members with a wide range of reading skills and abilities belong to each NCBC group. For one hour each week, club members meet with two volunteer facilitators in a local bookstore or café to read aloud from and talk about a book of their choice. Because the same people purposefully gather in a neighborhood setting every week, the program provides members with opportunities to develop friendships, foster lifelong learning and enjoy being out in the community. 

Club members choose the book they want to read and how they would like to structure their club. They also select and order their own refreshments when they get together. In Franklin County, there is no cost to join an NCBC group. 

NCBC started by offering its members copies of classic stories adapted to the third or fourth grade reading level, like Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Treasure Island and Peter Pan. Then, the list expanded to include books that have not been adapted, such as Charlotte’s Web, The Boxcar Children, and selected books in series like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson & The Olympians, and The Hunger Games. The Columbus NCBC operates its own lending library of about 125 titles, listed here on Goodreads. Club members can borrow a copy of a book for however long it takes to read it. 

After reading plenty of books where the protagonist was either a child or an animal, participants expressed interest in reading a book about adult life that was written in simple language. NCBC tried to find hi-lo (high interest-low reading level) books whose content was geared towards adults, but discovered that there was a void in the current market for this particular population. In 2012, NCBC received a grant from The Columbus Foundation to create a book that would be written specifically with adults with developmental disabilities in mind. NCBC conducted focus groups on what members wanted to read about and discovered that relationships and emotions were the most popular subjects.  The result was Lucky Dogs, Lost Hats, and Dating Don’ts: Hi-Lo Stories about Real Life, written by Thomas Fish and Jillian Ober and published by Woodbine House.  This collection of hi-lo short stories for people with intellectual disabilities or other learning challenges presents tales about roommate difficulties, bad hair days, how to find a girlfriend and wanting a pet.  A set of questions at the end of each story encourages discussion and further self-reflection. NCBC will be celebrating the publication of Lucky Dogs, Lost Hats, and Dating Don’ts on Wednesday, March 26 from 4:00 to 6:00 pm in Ohio State’s Hale Hall. At the event for interested members of NCBC clubs and the Ohio State and Columbus communities, readers will take turns sharing a few lines from the book. 

Being an NCBC facilitator sounds like it’s as rewarding as being a member. While one facilitator focuses primarily on literacy activities during club meetings, the other encourages social interaction within the group. Facilitators rely on activities to increase comprehension (relating reading to personal stories), vocabulary (learning to use a dictionary or making an easy crossword puzzle), phonemic awareness (rhyming games), and participation and fluency (engaging nonreaders through the illustrations). They also employ strategies that encourage social interaction (discovering things in common) and increase community inclusion (teaching members how to use their local library). Tammy and Becky, the facilitators of the Urban Coffee group, do a terrific job engaging the club’s members in their discussions. 

While the Columbus NCBC groups meet at places like Barnes & Noble, Panera Bread and Starbucks, 12 NCBC clubs in other cities have expanded into libraries. In February 2012, the Association for Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA), a division of the American Library Association, offered a webinar titled “Next Chapter Book Club: An Innovative and Viable Approach to Meeting the Literacy Needs of Adolescents and Adults with Developmental Disabilities.” This webinar described the NCBC model, how it has been implemented by the Scotch Plains Public Library in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, and the benefits of including people with developmental disabilities in library programming. 

Now, NCBC has inspired another initiative for adults and adolescents with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Jot It Down, a writing club that follows the NCBC model, promotes social interaction and community inclusion for its members. Members work individually and collaboratively to write stories, poems, letters, MadLibs and other projects. 

Next Chapter Book Club: A Model Community Literacy Program for People with Intellectual Disabilities, by Tom Fish and Paula Rabidoux, with Jillian Ober and Vicki L.W. Graff, describes how the program works; offers insight to prospective or current members about what to expect and how to make the most of the experience; provides information to potential volunteers about facilitating a club; and shares a step-by-step guide for active facilitators to manage the group. 

If you’re interested in learning more about NCBC, check out its feature under “Community Spotlight” of the Community Spirit section on page 18 of the April 2014 issue of Woman’s Day.  NCBC also maintains a Facebook page and a Twitter account. 

Those interested in volunteering for NCBC complete three steps. First, they visit a club to get a feel for what it is like and what the facilitator does. Then, they participate in a 75-minute to 1 ½ hour training session at the Nisonger Center, scheduled around their availability, that explains NCBC and how to facilitate discussion during club meetings. Finally, potential volunteers are fingerprinted at their county Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities before being placed with a group. To join NCBC as a member or volunteer facilitator, or if you would like to operate a program in your community, contact Jillian Ober, program manager at the Nisonger Center. More information is available at http://nisonger.osu.edu/ncbc.

It may be hip for Downtown workers to spend part of their Thursday afternoon at Columbus Commons’ Food Truck Food Court, but I’d much rather hop on a COTA bus and take a field trip. That’s what I did last week, when I met fellow librarians in the Central Ohio chapters of Special Libraries Association and the Association for Information Science and Technology for a tour of the newly renovated Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at the Ohio State University.

In 1977, this unique academic research library was established with a founding gift of the artwork and papers of Ohio State alumnus Milton Caniff, the creator of the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon comic strips. Located at the northwest corner of North High Street and 15th Avenue in Sullivant Hall, the library houses the world’s largest collection of comic strip tear sheets and clippings, as well as original art and manuscript materials documenting printed cartoons. Current holdings include 200,000 original cartoons, 45,000 books and 67,000 serials, including comic books. To facilitate research, the library offers searchable databases of digitized cartoon images, biographical files for artists, original cartoon art, images of cartoons that have been digitized to date, and files of cartoons and article clippings that are organized by subject and topic. Although items in the collection do not circulate, they can be requested by appointment for study in the library’s reading room.

In 2009, the library was named in honor of William Addison (“Billy”) Ireland, a Columbus Dispatch cartoonist best known for “The Passing Show,” his weekly commentary on current events that ran from 1908 until his death in 1935.

In the library’s north lobby, you can see Ireland’s drawing table, a representation of the shamrock he used to sign his work, and A Tribute to Billy Ireland, a 2013 art glass creation by Wayne Cain and Daniel White that documents highlights of Ireland’s career. To learn more about this talented cartoonist, read Billy Ireland, a book by former curator Lucy Shelton Caswell, and watch this WOSU Public Media video in which she shares examples of his original work.

Special librarians love to pore over special collections, so Caitlin McGurk, the library’s outreach coordinator, took us on a behind-the-scenes tour of its closed stacks. After we saw an original Charlie Brown drawing by Charles Schulz and an animation cel of  Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast, Caitlin told us about the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. Containing 2.5 million comic strip clippings and newspaper comic strip tear sheets from 1894 to 1996, it is the largest collection of its kind in the world. It is the legacy of the late Bill Blackbeard, who collected discarded bound volumes of newspapers so he could establish a complete run of every comic feature to have appeared in an American newspaper.

Blackbeard’s efforts to keep these rare sections intact are documented in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Nicholson Baker’s book about the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during microfilming projects during the 1980s and 1990s.

Ever since the library acquired the collection from Blackbeard in 1998, it has worked to establish a chronological run of each comic feature, either through amassing a group of clippings or by identifying each feature’s location in the collection of Sunday comic sections. Click here to see the finding aid for the collection.  

To understand how important it was to Blackbeard that the brilliant colors of newspaper comics would not be lost to history, we looked at examples of Richard Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley, one of the first American newspaper comics. From 1895 to 1898, the strip provided a social commentary on the life that immigrant children led in the tenements of New York City. Its lead character, Mickey Dugan, wore an oversized yellow nightshirt, earning him the nickname of the Yellow Kid. The advertising billboard-style messages that Outcault conveyed on the shirt became one of the first examples of the word balloon in comic strips. This detail of an April 4, 1897 Hogan’s Alley comic is one of only four original pages of the comic that are known to exist.

The library’s gallery spaces display a free, permanent exhibit of artwork and artifacts highlighting its collections. Chester Gould’s circa-1921 drawing board and tabaret hint at the working style of the creator of Dick Tracy. A charred area on the right side of the drawing board’s surface is the remnant of Gould’s practice of lighting a kitchen match so that the flame would speed up the drying process of large areas of black ink.

Other treasures on display are Aesop Up to Date, a drawing that Milton Caniff made in 1925 to persuade Billy Ireland to hire him for a cartooning job at the Columbus Dispatch….

…and Fourth of July in the Jungle, Winsor McCay’s original, hand-colored drawing for his first comic strip, A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle, in 1903.

Through August 3, two special, no-cost exhibitions are on view in the library’s galleries.

 Exploring Calvin and Hobbes features original daily and Sunday artwork for the popular comic strip that Bill Watterson created from 1985 to 1995. Even if you weren’t a regular reader of Calvin and Hobbes, you’ll develop an appreciation for the engaging characters, thoughtful writing and creative layouts that Watterson employed in relaying the adventures of six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, a plush toy tiger named Hobbes. The exhibition also includes specialty pieces by Watterson from his collection of more than 3,000 originals housed at the library, as well as original art by cartoonists who influenced Watterson, such as Charles Schulz and Garry Trudeau.

The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object: A Richard Thompson Retrospective includes hand-watercolored Sunday originals and black-and-white dailies from Thompson’s popular comic strip, and Cul de Sac. During its six-year run, Cul de Sac chronicled family life in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

The exhibit also highlights Thompson’s skill as a caricaturist. Examples include his caricatures of well-known figures like Willie Nelson, Ludwig van Beethoven and Oliver North.

To discover more of Thompson’s work, see The Complete Cul de Sac and The Art of Richard Thompson, both upcoming releases from Andrews McMeel. Click here for interviews that the exhibits’ curators, Jenny Robb and Caitlin McGurk, conducted with Watterson and Thompson.

Next, we walked across the plaza to the Fine Arts Library, located on the lower level of the Wexner Center for the Arts. Designed by architects Peter Eisenman of New York and the late Richard Trott of Columbus, the Wexner Center has become a Columbus landmark since its opening in 1989.

I’ve wondered about the Wexner Center’s attention-getting geometric façade, white painted metal scaffold, and the brick turrets recalling the former armory that stood on the site, but I never considered how the building’s sharp angles and slanting walls impacted maximizing space and utility in a library until Sarah Falls, the Fine Arts Library’s head, showed us around.

As a project for a special-topic course on art and the archive, four students and founding members of the Page Collective created Where We Left Off, an exhibition exploring book-marking in library collections that is on view until August 1. Dozens of books from the Fine Arts Library’s collection are on display, opened to pages where the students found bookmarks that range from receipts to personal photographs.

Seeing some of the library’s most colorful collections offered a welcome visual contrast to the space’s grey tones.  For example, as we admired Papillons and Les Fleurs et Leurs Applications Décoratives — two design folios of illustrations and patterns by Eugene Alain Seguy, a French designer who worked in the Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles at the beginning of the 20th century — Sarah told us about pochoir, the printing technique Seguy used that employs a series of stencils to create dense, vivid color.

Cartoon fans should also stop by the Wexner Center to see Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’ Selections from Comics History. In this exhibition, Clowes — the creator of Eightball, a comic book anthology series dating from 1989 to 2004, and the 2010 graphic novel, Wilson — collaborated with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum to select works by great cartoonists like Chester Gould, Otto Soglow, Winsor McCay and Milton Caniff that he admires or considers influences. The exhibition runs through August 3.

Spend a few hours at The Ohio State University’s Ohio Union and you’ll find Script Ohio tiles in restrooms, the Block O on floors and “Carmen Ohio” lyrics carved on chair backs. Meeting rooms showcase memorabilia associated with student service organizations like Ohio Staters, Inc., which sells seat cushions outside Ohio Stadium on home football game Saturdays and provides brochures of “Buckeye Stroll,” a self-guided historical campus walking tour.

In this scarlet and gray paradise, I also discovered that the people of Iceland created something even more beautiful than the Lopapeysa, the iconic Icelandic sweater with a patterned circular yoke that’s knit with lopi, the wool of Icelandic sheep.  The beautiful Medieval manuscripts that Icelanders produced are the subject of research by scholars like Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, a lecturer in Scandinavian history at the University of Cambridge.

Rowe introduced fellow scholars to these remarkable documents during this month’s Texts and Contexts, an annual conference at Ohio State that is devoted to Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, incunables and early printed texts in Latin and the vernacular languages. The conference explored recent scholarly research in epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), palaeography (the study of ancient and historical handwriting), and glosses (annotations written on the margins of a manuscript that explain or comment on the text). 

After Christianity brought writing to Iceland in the 11th century, the bishoprics, monasteries and nunneries of medieval Iceland became active centers of learning and book production.  In their scriptoria, scribes copied, translated and adapted religious books like Bibles and lives of the saints into vernacular language. Some of the earliest examples of Icelandic manuscripts are a circa-1100 Easter table that was used for keeping track of eclipses and volcanic eruptions in Iceland and a circa-1300 plan of Jerusalem. 

It was expensive to produce manuscripts in Iceland because the vellum on which they were written came from cattle. Since cattle had to be kept in barns during the cold Icelandic winter, farmers figured how much hay they had and how many cattle they could maintain, then killed the rest of their herd. The hides of some of those cattle became vellum for writing. Since there was no lime in volcanic Icelandic in which to soak the skin, ammonia was used instead, resulting in darker vellum. 

Since making vellum was such a labor-intensive process, Icelandic scribes wrote in small script and used abbreviations to save the material. Runic writing was used for everyday writing and short notes, liked this collection of runes carved in wood with a knife. This example of runes, carved in wood with a knife, is from Bergen, Norway and reads, “Thorgeir owns this.”

Decorated initials in illuminated manuscripts helped readers keep track of their place or find a passage, such as in the Codex Regius of Icelandic laws circa 1250.  They also provided clues to what a section of the work was about, like a decorated initial in the circa-1330 Jónsbók that depicts manslaughter.

The Flateyjarbók, an important late 14^th-century Icelandic manuscript, is a collection of sagas of the Norse kings. This illustration shows the martyrdom of St. Olaf, who encouraged the conversion of Norway and Iceland.

Icelandic scribes illumined their work with ink made from crowberries native to Iceland and imported plant dyes and minerals. They derived their inspiration not only from pattern books of chivalric and religious illustrations, but also from design motifs seen on carved doors and liturgical vestments.

Rowe also led a workshop introducing participants to medieval Icelandic palaeography. She explained how to interpret the abbreviations that scribes used to write more quickly and save space, and how to recognize individual letter forms, ligatures and styles of handwriting in order to read and understand the text.

Four different types of script exist in medieval Icelandic writings.  Carolingian, developed in the 11th century and named after Charlemagne, became the dominant form of writing in Europe until the first half of the 13th century.  In time, Carolingian script became more compressed, with letters becoming thinner, taller and written more closely together.  Later, Protogothic script came into favor, followed by a formal Gothic cursive that came to Iceland in the 14th century.  Since the Icelandic language called for special letters for sounds that Latin didn’t provide, some script forms are distinctly Icelandic.  

Rowe observed that the development of script reflected changes in medieval architecture. Rounded Romanesque arches are like round Carolingian letters, while taller, more slender letters of Gothic script reflect Gothic arches.

Workshop participants tried their hand at identifying abbreviations developed and used in medieval Iceland, then following the conventions of transcription to document choices about capitalization, punctuation and word spacing in deciphering marginal notes, missing words or letters, illegible letters, text above the line and expanding abbreviations.

In a subsequent conference session, Rowe shared passages from Icelandic books of annals, such as the annals of Einar Haflidason, a 14th-century Icelandic priest.  In these works, scribes used a combination of scripts, employing large writing to indicate the importance of people and church events and a display script to begin the first line of a chapter of a saga.  She also shared examples of digitized Icelandic manuscripts that are collected at http://handrit.is/, http://www.handritinheima.is/ and http://haandskrift.ku.dk/.

Other Texts and Contexts conference sessions focused on manuscripts produced at the scriptorium at Gembloux, a Benedictine abbey in Namur, Belgium, and the famous Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, Italy.

Maria Dobozy, professor of languages and literature at the University of Utah, introduced me to the single-leaf prints of Joerg Daxpach and Hans Sachs, a 16^th-century meistersinger and poet from Nuremberg, Germany, and how woodcut pictures influenced the performance and reception of their songs about the Battle of Vienna in 1529. Hans Sachs works in the collection of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin have been digitized, so you don’t have to travel to Berlin to see them.

Delphine Mercuzot, a stylish manuscripts curator at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shared examples of digitized manuscripts of Roman de la Rose, a 13^th-century poem. The images are accessible not only in the Roman de la Rose Digital Library, a joint project of the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but also in Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Zoom in on individual pages of over 100 examples of the poem that are collected here.

The conference also celebrated the centennial of the publication of Elias Avery Lowe’s The Beneventan Script, an important publication describing the development of a bold and beautiful calligraphic form of handwriting that was used in southern Italy between the 10th and 13th centuries.  Lowe (1879-1969) was a Classical scholar who was recognized as the leading Latin palaeographer of his generation.  His great-grandson is Boris Johnson, mayor of London.   

Hope Mayo, the Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, described the work on Lowe that was begun by Virginia Brown, a palaeographer who was Lowe’s research assistant during the last year of his life.  Mayo presented highlights of Lowe’s career, particularly his graduate studies in Munich, Germany between 1903 and 1907.  Sharing excerpts from Lowe’s diaries, Mayo described what a memorable experience this was for Lowe, especially as he studied palaeography at the home of paleographer Ludwig Traube between cups of hot cocoa and rounds of tennis.

The workshop and conference were organized by not only Ohio State’s Saga Club, which offers events to encourage students’ interest in and learning of Old Norse-Icelandic language, literature, and culture, but also the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies. As the only comprehensive research facility for the study of Greek and Latin inscriptions and manuscripts in the United States, the Center maintains a library of books on epigraphy and palaeography, an extensive collection of photographs and squeezes of Greek and Latin inscriptions, and a number of special collections, including Virginia Brown’s personal library and manuscripts on palaeography and Beneventan script. To watch “Language of the Stones,” an interesting video from the Center about epigraphy and squeezes (copies of inscriptions carved on stone which are retrieved for study by pressing damp paper over the lettering), click here. 

To read more, see The Paleography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, by Albert Derolez; Gothic Manuscripts, 1260-1320, by Alison Stones;  The Development of Flateyjarbók: Iceland and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389, by Elizabeth Ashman Rowe; A Marriage of True Minds: A Memoir of My Parents, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter and Elias Avery Lowe, and Other Writings, by Patricia Tracy Lowe; and The E. A. Lowe Papers at the Morgan Library and “E.A. Lowe and the Making of Beneventan Script,” both by Virginia Brown.  

Inside this brick-and-concrete building at 242 West 18^th Avenue on The Ohio State University’s campus, I spent two years learning about reporting, interviewing, news and feature writing, editing and public relations. When I graduated, I took more than a master’s degree in journalism with me. I had dozens of clips from stories I’d written for the student newspaper, The Lantern; a thesis on the image of women in the posters of World War I, and an enthusiastic appreciation for journalism history and literary journalism that continues to this day.

When I walked down West 18^th Avenue last week for the first time in 22 years, I stopped at the Journalism Building to look around, thought about some things that have changed, and left feeling a little sad. The School of Journalism is now part of the School of Communications. The Journalism Library is now the Arts & Sciences Business Services Center. And my thesis advisers and favorite professors, Joseph McKerns and David Richter, are no longer there.

Happily, some other things have stayed the same. The building still houses a branch of the U.S. Postal Service.  And, most pertinent to this blog post, it is still next door to a fascinating feature of campus that I never knew existed until recently: the OSU Planetarium, on the fifth floor of Smith Laboratory.

Since 1967, the OSU Planetarium has been offering educational programs on the night sky to students and the central Ohio community. Once, it used a Spitz A3P opto-mechanical star ball to display up to 1,500 stars, the solar system in the past and future, and the full range of solar and lunar motions on a dome. Now, it relies on a state-of-the-art system that gives participants a fascinating digital view of the planets, stars, and galaxies in the night sky.

In 2012, the planetarium was redesigned and refitted with a 30-foot SciDome digital dome theater with high-definition digital surround-sound projection. The NanoSeam projection dome consists of a hemispherical aluminum support framework to which about 80 curved screen panels are mounted without overlapping, creating a seamless appearance of a virtual night sky.

Sixty-three new custom seats were installed underneath the dome. Upholstered in scarlet with gray headrests, the padded reclining seats are arranged as front-facing semi-circles. Angled seat backs have been providing comfortable views of scenes projected on the dome since the planetarium reopened to the public in October 2013.

Last week, I visited the planetarium for the first time when the Ohio State University Alumni Association hosted “Alumni Night Under the Stars” there. Wayne Schlingman, the planetarium’s director, treated us to a free, hour-long program called “The Sky Tonight.” We learned about basic astronomy, the annual motions of the planets and the sun, the daily motion of the sun and stars, the orientation of the sky, locations of well-known constellations and stars, and light pollution in urban areas.

The planetarium offers several different free programs to the public with an advance reservation on Friday evenings during the academic year. On Saturday afternoons, versions of the hour-long presentations are offered for elementary school-aged children. Students and faculty in Ohio State’s Department of Astronomy take participants on a voyage through the solar system, present the history of telescopes and how they work, provide an overview of the first era of space exploration in the late 1960s and early 1970s, share and what is being designed to create new opportunities to launch and land a spacecraft on the moon, and describe how scientists are using tiny particles called neutrinos to explore exploding stars, black holes and other features of the universe. Special programs are being planned for National Astronomy Day on April 25. For more information, visit https://planetarium.osu.edu/.

If, like me, you learned the basics of astronomy in a high school Planetary Science class and you’re curious to discover more about the night sky, you might also be interested in visiting Perkins Observatory in Delaware for a unique lecture series on the first Thursday evening of the month.  The series explores the relationship between astronomy and other academic disciplines like literature, technology and journalism. April’s program featured a group of Ohio Wesleyan University professors reading some of their favorite passages from works like Goodnight, Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown; Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, by Mark Twain; and Walt Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer. 

“New Vistas in Astronomy” is another once-monthly Thursday evening lecture series at Perkins Observatory in which professors from Ohio State and Ohio Wesleyan discuss their current research and new findings in their area of expertise. All of Perkins’ lectures in these series are open to the public for an $8 per-program fee.

If you’re an Ohio State graduate living in central Ohio, consider attending other upcoming OSU Alumni Association events, such as “Derby Mixology” and Ohio State Day at Cedar Point. For more information, visit http://www.osu.edu/alumni/activities-and-events/events/

While the highlight of Commencement Week at The Ohio State University is receiving a diploma at Ohio Stadium, participating in a “Things You Never Got to See Tour” is a close second.

This week, both the graduating and the curious can pay special visits to almost two dozen locations on campus, including limited-opportunity tours of Ohio Stadium, the Schottenstein Center, and the eight miles of the dark, hot underground steam and electric tunnels snaking below more than 100 campus buildings. I joined the tour of Orton Hall’s bell tower.

In groups of 15 at a time, we climbed three narrow flights of stairs, entered through a locked door, crossed a plywood path beneath the rafters, ducked through a small rounded door…

and entered a cozy brick-lined room housing the mechanics for the bells. We didn’t get to climb the narrow wooden ladders and squeeze through a tiny opening leading to the upper two tiers of the tower that house the bells.

A member of Ohio Staters, Inc., a campus service organization that promotes university traditions, told us about the bells that have chimed across campus for more than a century.

The 14 bells consist of 12 E-flats, an A sharp and a G sharp. The E bells were gifts from the classes of 1906-1914, while the A and G bells were installed in 2003. The original 12 chimes weigh 25,000 pounds. The bells chime every 15 minutes to the tune of the Westminster Chimes.

C.W. Reeder, a member of Ohio State’s Class of 1906, transposed several melodies to the Orton Hall chimes. Fred Cornell, a classmate of Reeder’s and the composer of “Carmen Ohio” (Ohio State’s school song), wrote special songs for the bells to play as students moved between classes. Since the reverberation of the bells prevents playing harmonies, songs have to have simple melodies with a limited range of notes.

Originally, the bells were played with a chimestand, a series of large, heavy wooden levers that were pulled for each note.

Today, the bells are sounded by playing an electronic keyboard that is wired to the bells. As some students played a few notes of “Carmen Ohio,”

others wrote their names on the tower’s bricks, in keeping with a tradition that dates to the early 1900s.

We also learned about this unique building on the Oval and its namesake, Edward Orton, Sr.

Orton Hall was dedicated in 1893, making it the second oldest building on campus. The Columbus architectural firm of Packard and Yost designed the building. Its round arches, bay windows and steeply pitched red clay tile roof are characteristic of the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style that was popular at the time.

All of the stone used to construct the building is from Ohio. The stones are arranged in stratigraphic order, with the oldest limestone rocks at the bottom, progressing to dolomite, and the youngest sandstone at the top.

Each column framing the main entry door has hand-carved red sandstone capitals, and each one is different.

This one is reputed to be the inspiration for the Block O, the visual identifier of Ohio State.

The entry foyer is also constructed entirely from Ohio stone or clay products. It features 24 decorative columns, each from a different variety of Ohio stone which is identified on a sign beside the main entry door. Lintels and capitals are from Berea sandstone, and the hand-carved capitals include medallions of fossils such as trilobites and scallops. The vaulted ceiling has sandstone ribs, and the floor tiles were made from Ohio clay.

Twenty-four hand-carved Hocking Valley red sandstone gargoyles of extinct creatures circle the top of the bell tower. They represent a different type of prehistoric animal life once found in Ohio, including dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs and a saber-tooth cat.

Edward Orton, Sr. (1829-1899) was Ohio State’s first president, serving from 1873 to 1881. Before he came to Ohio State, he was president of Antioch College. Orton was also a professor of geology at Ohio State from 1873 to 1899, and was the State Geologist of Ohio from 1882 to 1899. This influential geologist is known for his work on the petroleum geology of Ohio, stratigraphy and paleontology.

Before the bells were installed, Orton liked to read by lamplight in the tower. Scorch marks left by his oil lamp are still visible on the tower room walls. Legend has it that Orton’s ghost still haunts the tower, evidenced by a flickering light that occasionally comes through the vertical slots of the turret at night.

Orton Hall also houses the Orton Geological Museum and the Orton Memorial Library of Geology.

Orton founded the museum in 1893 to house about 10,000 rocks, minerals and fossils from his teaching collection. Today, the collection numbers more than 54,000 specimens from Ohio and around the world. It is open to the public free of charge on Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Enter the museum and you’re greeted by “Jeff,” a skeleton of a seven-foot-tall giant ground sloth known as Megalonyx jeffersoni. Megalonyx means “great claw” and jeffersoni refers to President Thomas Jefferson, the first person to bring attention to the species. Giant sloths roamed Ohio two million to 13,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene Epoch. Behind Jeff, you’ll see the skeleton of a 20-foot-long carnivorous fish that lived in Ohio during the Devonian period, when the land was covered by a tropical ocean.

The large room on the east side of Orton Hall was the university’s library from 1893 to 1912. When the William Oxley Thompson Library was completed and the library moved out of Orton Hall, the room was used as a large open space for aerial observation. Students stood in the balcony and looked at models of terrain spread on the floor below.

In 1923, the room was renovated to become the geology library, which was established in honor of Orton in 1923.

In 1906, Edward Orton, Jr. presented his father’s personal library to the university and the department of geology. Today, the collection includes over 120,000 volumes of books and series relevant to various aspects of geology and related subjects, including meteorology, mineralogy, paleontology, polar studies, pollution and soils. Countless maps are stored in dozens of drawers.

The artwork in the library was part of the personal collection of Orton, Jr., who was professor of ceramics at Ohio State from 1894 to 1916; Dean of the College of Engineering from 1902 to 1908 and from 1910 to 1916; and Ohio State Geologist from 1899 to 1906.

Petrified Forest was painted in 1904 by Thomas Moran, a noted Hudson River School painter. Orton, Jr. acquired the painting in 1925 because he liked how it illustrated the geological process by which fossils are preserved.

Paintings by Albert Bierstadt, a painter best known for his landscapes of the American West, include Yellowstone Geyser, Yellowstone National Park (1886) and Quartzite Peak in the Canadian Rockies (1890).

Other paintings represent Bryce Canyon National Park, a Swiss mountain valley, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and Mt. Orton in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, which was named for Orton, Jr., who climbed the mountain with other faculty members from Ohio State’s Department of Geology.

Click here to see the Orton Hall bells, hear them play and see how small the tower room is in “The Chimes of Orton Hall,” which aired on the February 4, 2015 episode of WOSU’s Broad and High. 

For those who razz me about my on-the-road recycling program, your days of merriment may be over. If you’ve shopped for ladies’ clothes lately, you might know why the curtain may be coming down on that act.

Never before have I riffled through Von Maur’s markdown racks and walked away empty-handed, time and time again. The dreamy vision of Zac Posen’s “New Romantics” cotton sateen print shirt dress that I beheld in the Brooks Brothers window on the corner of the Avenue of the Americas and W. 51^st St. turned into a horrific nightmare in the dressing room. For someone whose coworkers stop by to see what she’s wearing that day, this is a crisis indeed.

I forgot about my disaster recovery plan for continuing the business of my wardrobe for some recent brief shining moments on the Ohio State University campus, when I stopped by Campbell Hall’s Gladys Keller Snowden Gallery to see American Aesthetics, an Ohio State Historic Costume & Textiles Collection exhibition.

The exhibition featured the work of Geoffrey Beene, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta, fashion designers who created a trendsetting American aesthetic during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. After Beene’s first collection was featured in the cover of Vogue in September 1963, his tastes evolved from his popular sheath dress to soft-draping garments. Blass’s use of tailoring and luxurious fabrics created a classic look, while De la Renta was known for his dramatic colors and embellishments. When you think of fashion designers, your first thought might be of their high-end ready-to-wear lines. But this trio also sought to reach additional potential customers with lower-priced, more casual “bridge lines” like the “Beene Bag,” “Blassport” and “Miss O.”

My make-believe shopping spree began with the minimalist, A-line shifts that were so popular during the 1960s. Their monochromatic color schemes, creatively placed seams and stiff fabrics produced a simple, structured look. I’d live in Beene’s light blue linen dress, but when the occasion called for it, I’d also give an occasional turn to de la Renta’s navy-and-white cotton sleeveless ankle-length gown with circle motifs.

All three designers relied on ruffles to create a romantic look. When the occasion called for it, I’d be very happy to slip on Beene’s 1970s black organza strapless gown with stiff silk organza ruffles at the neckline and hem, but I’d have to bring along my luxurious begonia pink silk wrap in case of a chill.

I’ve loved Lurex sparkle ever since discovering it at Gorsuch during my Colorado ski adventure. In this process, metallic yarns are made by laminating or depositing the metal onto a film, which is then cut into thin strips for weaving. This makes the yarn less expensive and lighter than using gold or silver.  My knees went weak when I saw de la Renta’s 1960s A-line shift dress of light green silk with a silver Lurex Orientalist pattern with silver metallic braid trim. Oh, how I wished I could have taken this dreamy number home with me!

No shopping needed in the “Little Black Dressing” portion of the exhibition – I already have frocks very similar to Beene’s late-1960s black wool crepe sleeveless dress with full pleated skirt, as well as Blass’s 1960s sleeveless black heavy wool crepe princess seam dress with flared skirt and an attached beaded belt at the dropped waist.  But look how those rhinestone bows sparkle on those black satin pumps!

Unexpected combinations are a good way to jazz up a conservative bent for clothes. Beene introduced fabrics normally meant for everyday use, such as grey flannel and wool jersey, to evening gowns. De la Renta combined a V-neck argyle sweater with sequins. Blass paired practical corduroy with luxurious chiffon and covered sweaters with sequins. And I’d snap up this snappy set of a coat with fox collar, skirt, trousers, vest and scarf in brown and ivory wool Glen plaid with a matching paisley silk blouse, all designed by Blass for the 1975-1976 season. Imagine the variety of combinations I could create with this entire wardrobe in itself, I thought!

I imagined spreading this dress with its bright blood-orange double knit short-sleeve bodice and brown wool tweed straight skirt out on my bed, picking the perfect pin and bracelet to wear with it.  Then, for a big reveal, I’d cover the whole thing up with a matching wool tweed A-line coat with an asymmetric one-button tab opening repeated at the wrists, all created by Blass for his 1967-1968 line.

Leave it to my CSG classmate Teddi’s aunt, Gladys Geanekopulos, to buy this sharp “Op Art” pattern coat and chemise dress ensemble of brown and beige wool plaid that Beene designed in 1966, displayed complete with a magazine advertisement for it. True tailored perfection!

Wait! What shoes would I wear with my new outfits? These two-tone beige Salvatore Ferragamo slingbacks would do very nicely indeed.

These Ferragamo gold metallic leather shoes would be just perfect with that Lurex number, but I reminded myself that I already have a similar, but more sensible bronze leather pair, custom-made for my “cookies.”

These outfits took care of what I’d wear to work or for special occasions, but what would I wear during my down time? My make-believe shopping spree continued in the Thompson Library Special Collections exhibition area, where five paper dresses from the Historic Costume & Textiles Collection were on display.

Paper dresses, you might ask? Why, yes, they were quite the fashion trend for a few years in the 1960s! For one dollar, you could order a simple A-line shift, made of cellulose pulp that was reinforced with a nylon webbing to improve durability and drape. Sleeveless and collarless, it fastened with ties or Velcro. It arrived with instructions for using scissors to cut the dress to the desired hem length, and for care — the dresses were not to be washed because soap and water caused them to lose their fire-resistance. “Be a real paper doll with just a snip and a stitch! It’s easy and fun to style your dress to match your mood!,” a vintage order form read.

The Campbell Soup Company’s Souper Dress printed with a repeat of the tomato soup cans that Andy Warhol had been painting since 1962.

Mars of Asheville, North Carolina’s “Waste Basket Boutique” collection included the Yellow Pages dress, featuring a collage print design of Yellow Pages telephone book advertisements. A cap-sleeved paper dress with multicolored paisley and floral motifs came with matching paper fabric yardage, in case you wanted to make a complementary accessory.

Now, how to fix my hair? I found the answer in a nearby display case filled with a collection of circa-1925 hair fashion ephemera related to the Marcel Waver metal curling iron manufactured by the Marcelwaver Co. of Cincinnati. Of course!

A decade ago, I fashioned my own version of a Marcel-waved ‘do, clipping large clamps into damp hair every night before bedtime and waking up to tightly waved tresses. Standing transfixed by the case, I pored over an accordion-style booklet of eight silver-print photos that showed the start-to-finish process for using the Marcel Waver, an instructional pamphlet, and an original curling iron that was used as a salesman’s sample.  Maybe it’s time to resurrect that phase.

American Aesthetics closed on April 30, so here’s one last look at that dreamy Lurex dress. Bookmark and check back on https://costume.osu.edu/ to see what the next exhibition will be.

Tuberculosis killed one out of nine people in Columbus in the early 1900s.

In 1902, it took the life of my 40-year-old great-great-grandmother, Mariann Corcoran O’Connor, who was both the child and the wife of Irish immigrants. Three of her five young children — Mamie, John and Patrick — had already succumbed to tuberculosis. (You can read more of their story here.)

Carrie Nelson Black

People were understandably fearful of tuberculosis, which was also known as consumption or the white plague. The sick poor were most at risk, since they could not afford the nutritious food and medical care that they needed to survive. Their plight became the cause of Carrie Nelson Black, whose own loss of her 20-year-old sister to tuberculosis in 1874 prompted her to assume what she saw as her civic responsibility: caring for those who were less fortunate and improving the state of health in Columbus.

Mrs. Black was the subject of this year’s Friends of Nursing History lecture, which Joanne Spoth, president and CEO of The Breathing Association, gave recently at the Ohio State University’s Medical Heritage Center as part of its History of the Health Sciences lecture series.

In 1898, Mrs. Black said goodbye to her husband, Franklin County Probate Judge Samuel L. Black (who also was mayor of Columbus from 1897 to 1898), and their three children; left their elegant home that once stood at 1000 Bryden Road; and embarked on a journey to Chicago and Boston to study nursing care. She returned to Columbus with a nurse to begin caring for the sick poor and founded the Instructive District Nurses Association, the Columbus Health Department’s first home nursing service. That association is now known as LifeCare Alliance.

Residence of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel L. Black,   1000 Bryden Road, Columbus

Mrs. Black’s humanitarian efforts continued in 1901, when she became the director of the Ohio Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, now known as the Ohio Public Health Association. In 1906, she traveled to Boston, New York and Chicago to visit tuberculosis dispensary services in order to discover best practices she could model in Columbus. That same year, she founded the Columbus Society for the Prevention and Control of Tuberculosis to provide nutrition, medical care and sanatorium services to people who could not afford proper medical care. Its first meeting was held at the Chittenden Hotel.

A 1906 pennant from the Columbus Tuberculosis Society.

Samuel Prescott Bush, the founder of Buckeye Steel Castings and the ancestor of two Bush presidents, was a founding trustee of the Columbus Tuberculosis Society. He chaired its Sanitation Committee to improve the sanitary conditions in Columbus businesses as a way to decrease the spread of tuberculosis.

In those days, isolation, rest and spending prolonged periods out in the fresh air, regardless of the weather, were the only known ways to cure tuberculosis. To prevent the spread of the disease, nurses with the Columbus Tuberculosis Society visited the homes of those most susceptible to the disease, bringing milk and eggs to patients who had the best chances of survival.

In 1906, the society opened a free tuberculosis dispensary at 40 S. Third St. to provide medical care to people needing consultation and treatment. Although the building was razed to make way for the parking lot to the south of the former Columbus Dispatch headquarters, an historical marker was dedicated there on December 11, 2006.

Separated from their loved ones to protect them from infection, tuberculosis patients were lonely. In 1907, Mrs. Black urged Franklin County officials to build a camp with the first tuberculosis cottages in the Glen Echo neighborhood of Columbus at the north end of Summit Street. In 1913, the camp moved to Minerva Park on Cleveland Avenue. The Franklin County Tuberculosis Sanatorium opened the following year.

In 1913, Mrs. Black founded the Open Air School at 2571 Neil Avenue, near Hudson Street, for children who were either predisposed to tuberculosis or were living in homes where there was at least one case of the disease. To take advantage of the healing powers of fresh air, the school’s windows were opened year-round, and children were given hats and hooded woolen coats to wear.

Nightingale Cottage

Mrs. Black bought 20 acres of land on Brice Road in 1931, and began construction on Nightingale Cottage, a home for children who had been exposed to tuberculosis. A chest examination, immunization against diphtheria and a vaccination for smallpox were required for admission. The Columbus Board of Education provided a teacher, and a school schedule was arranged so that children could continue their education while receiving nutritious food, plenty of rest, fresh air and exercise. Nightingale Cottage was demolished in August 1973 to make way for Interstate 71.

Before her death in 1936, Mrs. Black had the satisfaction of knowing that the rates of death from tuberculosis in Columbus had dropped to one out of 20 people, thanks to her efforts.

Promotional item for mobile chest x-ray station

Since then, the Columbus Tuberculosis Society has continued Mrs. Black’s cause to assist the underserved. At first, only stethoscopes could be used to diagnosis tuberculosis, but other ways began to be developed. It introduced tuberculosis skin tests in Franklin County schools and began a mass screening program with a mobile clinic in the 1930s; followed with portable chest x-ray services and antibiotics in the 1950s. As tuberculosis became controllable, it expanded its programs to focus on diseases resulting from tobacco use; emphysema; lung cancer; and chronic lung conditions like asthma and bronchitis. Undergoing several different name changes along the way, the organization is now known as The Breathing Association. Its programs provide the poor with medical supplies, prescription medications and assistance paying for home heating and cooling through the Home Energy Assistance Program.

The program also gave me an opportunity to learn more about the Medical Heritage Center, the special collections library of OSU’s Health Sciences Library that preserves, promotes and provides instruction about the history of health care in central Ohio through rare books, archival collections and medical artifacts.

This style of uniform was worn by students at the Ohio State University College of Nursing from 1916 to 1950.

Through May 15, the library hosted Every Necessary Care and Attention: George Washington and Medicine, a traveling exhibition from the National Library of Medicine. 

Six banners illustrated the concern Washington had for the health and safety of his family, his Revolutionary War troops and his staff and slaves who worked on his Mount Vernon plantation.

Popular 17^th-century books of home health remedies and herbal treatments, such as The Family Physician, and the House Apothecary and The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, were a part of the Washingtons’ personal library. He also had a medicine chest containing glass bottles, a set of scales, and a mortar and pestle.

Washington’s soldiers were at risk for ailments like dysentery, septic wounds, smallpox and camp fever.  To protect them, Washington made decisions about food storage, placement of latrines, disposal of animal carcasses, and general provisions for clothing and shelter on the battlefield. Throughout the Revolutionary War, he carried a bottle of musk, used in perfumes and medicines.

At Mount Vernon, he ensured that slaves receive every necessary care and attention when they were unwell. A dental scaler set is said to have been used to clean their teeth.  Take a closer look at Washington’s traveling dental kit, circa 1795, with a container for tooth powder, tooth brush, tongue scraper, and traveling case.

Both George and Martha Washington wore spectacles for reading as they got older. They also wore false teeth in their later years. This set of Washington’s dentures, circa 1790-1799, are made of human teeth, cow teeth, and elephant ivory, held on a lead base with brass wires and steel springs.  For more on these famous dentures, click here.

The Medical Heritage Center is located on the fifth floor of the Ohio State University Health Sciences Library, in Prior Hall, at 376 W. 10^th Ave.

Historic architecture, attractive landscapes, and thoughtful planning have made The Ohio State University’s main campus a special place for learning within an urban setting. Much of that is thanks to Howard Dwight Smith, the university’s architect from 1929 to 1956.

The Dayton, Ohio native graduated from Ohio State with a degree in civil engineering in architecture in 1907. After further studies at Columbia University and in Europe, Smith joined the firm of John Russell Pope — best known for designing the Jefferson Memorial and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art — in 1911, working on projects like Henry Clay Frick’s Fifth Avenue mansion in New York until he returned to Columbus to design Ohio State’s new football stadium in 1918. During his time at Ohio State, Smith was involved in the design and planning of 30 buildings. While scouting out three of them during some recent campus visits, I made some interesting discoveries.

My first stop was on West 11^th Avenue, near Neil Avenue — sorry, my Government Relations pals, not for Adriatico’s Pizza, but for the Fechko Alumnae Scholarship House. Smith designed this Tudor Revival building in 1931 as a home management laboratory for the home economics department. It became a residence for female students. Rubble stone details, an oriel window, a steeply pitched slate roof and copper gutters and downspouts give its half-timbered and brick exterior a charming residential feel. It is named for Ruth M. Fechko, who helped the cooperative housing program for academically gifted female students succeed.  It’s just my kind of house.

In 1940, Smith turned his attention next door, expanding the women’s dormitory complex to create Canfield Hall. This Jacobethan Revival building features random, rough-patterned brickwork, half-timbered decorative details, steeply pitched gable roofs, a stone wall and limestone window trim, and copper gutters and downspouts.  Sweet Briar wins the Best Dorms award, but this is a fine second, at least from the outside.

Canfield Hall might not stop you in your tracks with its appearance, but its namesakes should. James Hulme Canfield became Ohio State’s fourth president in 1895 and was determined that Ohio State should grow in both size and importance. During his five years as president, he did just that, doubling its enrollment and expanding its activities. His wife, Flavia, was a zealous advocate for women, organizing 26 clubs during her years in Columbus to expose them to new interests and opportunities. Their daughter, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, took violin lessons during her years in Columbus, graduated from Ohio State in 1899, brought the Montessori method of child development to the United States, guided American reading tastes as one of the first selectors for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and wrote 40 books, including the classic Understood Betsy, a book for young readers about how life on a Vermont farm helps a girl become independent and responsible.

I saved the best stop for last. At 181 South Oval Drive, nestled between Mirror Lake and Orton Hall, find the Faculty Club, which Smith also designed in 1940.

The Faculty Club at Ohio State traces its history to 1915; it was first located between Oxley Hall and the Ohio Union, then as part of Bricker Hall. By 1938, it needed a home of its own. Funded in part by member contributions and with Public Works Administration funds, it was the first building on campus that was constructed just for social entertaining. Smith gave it an Art Moderne look, with classically inspired details like corner quoins and sleek touches like a carved crest above the bronze front doors, terrazzo stairs with brass handrails and an Art Deco-styled phone booth. So, when I was invited to attend an event at the Faculty Club recently, I was glad to have the opportunity to look around this eclectic place.

As my gracious host opened these beautiful, but mammoth doors for me, I thought about another gentleman who did that very same thing for me on my last visit to the Faculty Club. It was June 1993, and my adviser, Joseph McKerns, treated me to lunch there to celebrate the graduate degree in journalism that I’d be receiving. This journalism historian and professor who taught newswriting, reporting and communication history also edited the Biographical Dictionary of American Journalism, played the guitar, loved rock music and talked like Alan Rickman would have if he had hailed from Pennsylvania. He rallied to have me return to campus to work on a doctoral degree in journalism with him, and then, just as I was going to, he died in October 2004. He was the greatest, and it just wouldn’t have been any fun without him.

McKerns was with me in spirit as I explored the Faculty Club’s spacious rooms.

In the library, I scanned the shelves and saw a collection of reading material that was as eclectic as its home. New Yorker and Architectural Digest issues keep company with the Bible and Jane Eyre. Lucy Braun’s The Woody Plants of Ohio is displayed beside Keepers of the Green: A History of Golf Course Management.

The Faculty Club offers a unique dining experience, including traditional sit-down service in the main dining room,

several small conference rooms for private parties, and a convenient buffet-style meal served in a lower-level dining room…

that extends onto a pleasant patio built into sloping terrain that descends to Mirror Lake.

In the evenings, the Faculty Club is a social gathering place where meetings, lectures and receptions are held. The meeting I attended began with a program in the Grand Lounge and finished over dinner upstairs in the main dining room.

Almost 20 years ago, the Faculty Club established an exhibition program to highlight fine artists with ties to Ohio State. Rotating current exhibits are hung in the main first floor hallway and members’ lounge; works by members of the John Behling Watercolor Society are currently on view. The upstairs hallway is lined with photographs provided by members of the Ohio State University Photographic Society, which meets at the Faculty Club on the second Thursday of every month during the school year.

A permanent collection of historic artworks is displayed throughout the club. I felt a small tremor when I spotted several Ralph Fanning watercolors on the walls of the main dining room and even the ladies’ restroom. 

But two paintings hanging on the western walls of the Grand Lounge caused the sensation of a minor earthquake when I saw them. “Young Woman with Bonnet, James R. Hopkins, circa 1915-1918,” my host read as we stood in front of one of them.

“Woman Against Patterned Background, James R. Hopkins, circa 1910-1920,” we read as we admired the other.

“James R. Hopkins, of Hopkins Hall?,” I wondered.

I found four more Hopkins paintings around the Faculty Club: Cumberland Man with Shotgun, circa 1915-1918; Market Day in the Mountains, circa 1915-1918; Vanities (Woman at Mirror), circa 1920; and Young Woman, circa 1920. Hunch confirmed!

Hopkins, a native of Irwin, Ohio, studied at Ohio State in 1896, at the Columbus Art School in 1897, at the Cincinnati Fine Arts Academy with noted portrait painter Frank Duveneck from 1898 to 1900, and finally in Paris, in 1902. After he married Edna Boies, a fellow art student he met in Cincinnati, the couple took a year-long wedding trip to China, Japan, Ceylon and Egypt. They returned to live in Paris until 1914, when Hopkins returned to Cincinnati to teach with Duveneck and became the school’s head when Duveneck died. In 1920, they returned once more to Paris, where they came to know Pierre Renoir and Edgar Degas, even painting and studying the flowers in Claude Monet’s famous Giverny garden.

In 1923, Hopkins was invited to be an artist in residence at Ohio State. Soon after, he was appointed the chair of Ohio State’s fine arts department. There he stayed until he retired in 1948, painting portraits, teaching master classes in oil painting and transforming the six-instructor department into a nationally recognized art school.

Hopkins was known as an award-winning academic Impressionist portrait painter who meticulously drew and modeled (mostly female) subjects, then used brushwork and a bright palette to capture the play of light in the scene. In 1915, Hopkins began four years of work on a series of paintings depicting Appalachians living in Kentucky’s Cumberland mountains. This earned him recognition for being the first artist to paint Appalachian scenes.

Edna was internationally renowned for her vibrant, decorative color woodblock prints inspired by Japanese printmakers. The Cincinnati Art Museum purchased 14 of her prints; that collection remains one of the best of her works today. She died in 1937.

After his retirement, Hopkins returned to Darbyland, his family farm in Champaign County, to manage the farm and its herd of Brown Swiss cows, but he was also elected president of Farmers Bank in Mechanicsburg. In his free time, he painted portraits, played chess, raised pheasants, made wooden frames, and worked in his darkroom. He died in January 1969; Ohio State named the art department’s home on the Oval the James R. Hopkins Fine Arts Center, also known as Hopkins Hall.

To learn more about the Canfield family, read “Canfield Family Left Mark on City,” Ed Lentz’s contribution to the April 14, 2016 issue of ThisWeek News; Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography, by Ida H. Washington; Pebble in a Pool: The Widening Circles of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Life, by Elizabeth Yates; Around the World at Eighty, by Flavia Camp Canfield, with an introduction by Dorothy Canfield Fisher; and “Flavia and Her Artists,” a short story by Dorothy’s friend Willa Cather.

For more on James and Edna Boies Hopkins, see “A Dilemma of Riches: The Art of James and Edna Hopkins,” by James M. Keny, in the February-March 1990 issue of TIMELINE; Edna Boies Hopkins: Strong in Character, Colorful in Expression, by Dominique H. Vasseur, a catalogue of an exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art from December 2007 to March 2008; James Roy Hopkins, Ohio Artist, 1877-1969: Springfield Art Center, August 26-September 28, 1977, by Patricia D’Arcy Catron.

And for a unique perspective on the Faculty Club, track down A Design for the Main Lounge of the Faculty Club of The Ohio State University, Phyllis Krumm’s 1944 thesis presented for her Master of Arts degree. Click here to see some archival photographs of the Faculty Club, including those of its original interior.

Do you hang up your wet towel, or do you toss it on the floor, hoping that someone else will pick it up and hang it up for you?

If this makes thoughtful Gallant and thoughtless Goofus come to mind, you’re likely familiar with the fictional twins from the pages of Highlights for Children magazine. The pair conduct themselves very differently as they provide examples of socially acceptable behavior, reminding young readers that doing the right thing makes them likeable. There’s some of Goofus’s carelessness and Gallant’s consideration in all of us, but the power of positive suggestion helps us show our best self to others.

Goofus and Gallant’s adventures are featured in Fun with a Purpose: Highlights and its Contribution to Childhood Education, on view in Ohio State University’s Thompson Library Gallery through September 4.

Highlights for Children was created by Garry Cleveland Myers and his wife, Caroline Clark Myers.

The couple grew up in Pennsylvania, met while attending college, and married in 1912. Caroline taught school while Garry earned his doctoral degree in child psychology at Columbia University.

During World War I, Garry taught soldiers how to read and write, while Caroline became the U.S. Army’s first female teacher. Together, they developed a picture-based intelligence test, the Myers Mental Measure, and wrote The Language of America, a series of books on how to teach English literacy. In 1920, they moved to Cleveland, where Garry headed the child psychology and parent education departments at Case Western Reserve University.

The couple took copious notes on their three children’s development, recording observations on topics like “Boy-Girl Relationships” and “Keeping the Child Happily and Profitably Employed” on the pages of small looseleaf notebooks organized with alphabetical tabs. This was such a frequent occurrence that their son, Jack, would say to his parents, “Take a record,” when he wanted his parents to write down something that he did.

As their careers developed, the couple became known for their work in child psychology, education and parenting. They traveled across the country, talking to parents and teachers on topics like “Helping Our Children Succeed at School” and “How We Parents Annoy Our Children.” They reprinted those lectures in a children’s magazine called Children’s Activities, of which they were the editors. Dr. Myers wrote “Parent Problems,” a syndicated newspaper column that was published for more than 40 years.

By the time they were 61 and 58, Garry and Caroline started thinking about the possibility of producing their own children’s magazine that would focus on family life and help young people become happy, satisfied, productive and compassionate adults. They hoped that young readers would really interact with it, being inspired to play games, read poems and stories, tell jokes, think about open-ended questions, undertake craft projects, sing songs, draw pictures, write letters, and solve puzzles presented in simple illustrated stories that were written especially for them. The magazine cultivated “Fun with a Purpose,” through content that produced concentration, promoted curiosity, encouraged learning and critical thinking, provided satisfaction, and motivated children to want more.

The first issue of the magazine was published in June 1946. Since then, it has become the most-read children’s magazine in the world. Many of its much-loved features that exercise the mind, elicit conversation, encourage attention and successful discovery while helping to develop reading skills continue today.

Generations of children have pored over intricate “Hidden Pictures,” a perceptual puzzle that the Myerses invented and made popular. First presented as a black-and-white drawing, then in full color, and now in an internet-based click-and-play version and an iPhone application, Hidden Pictures invites exercises the mind. Early versions of Hidden Pictures revealed which skills were taught through the drawing at the bottom of the page. In this early Hidden Picture, can you find the fish, bird, turtle, hammer, shoe, arm and hand, woman’s face, child’s face, dog’s head, fairy princess, alarm clock and umbrella?

Each month, hundreds of children write to the magazine to share their stories and ask for advice. Because their friends at Highlights share the Myerses’ belief that children are the world’s most important people, each child receives a personal answer. Dr. Myers continued answering children’s letters until his death in 1971.

In 1962, the magazine hired a world editor, whose job entailed traveling around the world, celebrating diversity by interviewing children from different cultures. Highlights publications are translated in many languages for audiences around the world.

In 1954, the Highlights for Children cover changed to feature a design by Munro Leaf, the children’s author and illustrator best known for best known for The Story of Ferdinand, which featured a black-and-white cartoon drawing of two characters with a teaser for a story about them inside. In 1957, the cover design changed once more to feature geometric shapes in two colors, with the title presented in a font described as “the smiling ‘happy H’” logo, which became the magazine’s recognizable brand. In 1981, the cover featured full-color, full-page artwork, followed by more content teasers.

Although the magazine started in Pennsylvania, in 1960, its headquarters were relocated to 2300 West 5^th Avenue in Columbus, near Riverside Drive, after the Myerses located a printer with an ample supply of paper at a time of a widespread paper shortage. Eventually, the Myers children became involved in the business; Garry, Jr. started a well-known program in which copies of Highlights with tear-out subscription cards were placed both in schools and in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms.

Later, Highlights acquired the Zaner-Bloser Company, a Columbus publisher of research-based handwriting, reading, writing, spelling and vocabulary programs. A Manuscript Alphabet wipe-off mat and accompanying wax crayons or grease pencils is on display; this was included in a writing kit for parents and teachers to help children with their reading and writing skills.

My favorite part of the exhibition was listening to an archival recording of the Myerses.  They talked about their ideas about family life and the power of positive suggestion in shaping children’s attitudes toward taking responsibility, being kind to others, fostering good relationships with siblings and parents, being careful with the property of others, and even fair, honest dealings with other children on the playground.

Visitors to the interactive exhibit are encouraged to post their memories to the “Things Remembered” wall, play games, find hidden pictures, color pictures in the Highlights Hidden Pictures Coloring Book for Grown-Up Children and take photos of themselves as if they were appearing on the magazine’s cover.

For more information about Highlights for Children, see Highlights for Children: A Study of the Editorial Development of a Children’s Magazine, 1946-1968, by Barbara Cordle Ball; The Highlights Way: Inspiring Children to Think, Feel, Connect, and Respect, by Katharine Greider; and a DVD titled The Story of Highlights: Fun with a Purpose. The Highlights for Children Archives, 1946-2007 is a publicly accessible collection of issues of the magazine, letters to the editor, selected children’s submissions, and Garry Myers’ personal papers at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Ohio State’s Thompson Library. 

“There’s an energy and excitement in Columbus that’s going to hit you as soon as you arrive. Big things are happening here. The city is booming, and not just in population. It’s time to get to know the Columbus that grew up when you weren’t looking.”

That’s what the Greater Columbus Convention & Visitors Bureau proclaims as part of its Experience Columbus campaign to make the city an appealing, affordable destination to visitors, meeting planners and convention-goers. And it sounds like it’s working. Central Ohio tourism numbers were strong in 2015; the number of overnight visitors to hotels increased to a record high.

Attending the International Torch Club’s convention in Columbus afforded me the opportunity to be a tourist in my own city. Although I slept in my own bed at night, I indulged in all the special activities that the out-of-town convention-goers did during the day. I sat down to tasty catered meals at the Crowne Plaza Columbus-Downtown, engaging in “reasoned discourse” with my tablemates after listening to presentations and applauding a special Silver Torch Award recipient who serves the local club in an exemplary manner.  I tucked into a German buffet dinner in a banquet room at Schmidt’s in German Village after an accordionist led us in a singalong of songs from The Sound of Music. I held an armadillo from the Columbus Zoo. I listened to a string trio performance. And I rode in a plush scarlet-and-gray Ohio State University motorcoach to tour a few local attractions.

Although I’d been to Ohio State University’s campus treasures, the Thurber House and Franklin Park Conservatory before, I saw new features on all three tours. If you haven’t been dropped off on campus in Mershon Auditorium’s loading zone, had my friend Kevlin welcome you to 77 Jefferson Avenue, or learned local trivia from Columbus Dispatch columnist Joe Blundo while being driven along East Broad Street, you haven’t experienced Columbus.

At the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum on Ohio State’s campus, my fellow convention-goers and I pored over treasured artwork and artifacts from its collections, then hit the highlights of two special exhibitions: Good Grief! Children and Comics, which examines the history, role and tensions of child characters in comic strips and comic books; and Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, a collection of new versions by 100 comic artists and illustrators of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, a full-page comic that ran every Sunday from 1905 to 1926.

We pulled open the black curtain and saw the fluorescent minerals at the Orton Geological Museum in Orton Hall, just like my friend Rosie did.

And at Thompson Library, we admired the picturesque views overlooking the Oval from the second-floor Grand Reading Room and the open study space on the 11^th floor. We were amazed by artist Ann Hamilton’s VERSE in the Buckeye Reading Room: a two-color cork floor laid as a field of words set in relief and organized in a concordance, in which the words are alphabetized within the context of the sentence in which they appear.

Did you know that right here in Columbus, you can see the Underwood #5 typewriter that James Thurber used during his days writing for The New Yorker? It’s in the room of the Thurber family home where the award-winning author and cartoonist slept when he attended Ohio State, reporting for The Lantern, writing plays for the Scarlet Mask Club and editing the humor magazine known as the Sun-Dial. The room’s Wall of Fame closet includes signatures of the authors who have given readings for Thurber House.

Discover other fun facts about Thurber through other artifacts, ephemera, manuscripts and photographs on display at Thurber House, such as how he worked as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch from 1921 to 1924, covering current books, films, and plays in “Credos and Curios,” his weekly column. (For more on the James Thurber Family Collection in the Thurber House archives, see the finding aid I prepared during the winter of 2003-2004.)

A warm afternoon and a soft-spoken trustee emeritus made for a soporific combination next door in the Thurber Center, the literary center’s conference and classroom facility, but we persevered, perking up when we spotted this unpublished Thurber drawing, titled “You Two Ardent Chrysanthemum Lovers Should Know One Another,” on display.

But it was Franklin Park Conservatory – specifically, its barn and its origami exhibit — that made my pseudo-staycation.

The eight-acre Franklin County Agricultural Society Grounds opened in 1852, hosting the Franklin County Fair (1852-1885), the Ohio State Fair (1874-1884), and General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1880, when he delivered his famous “War Is Hell” speech. When a new fairgrounds was established at another site in 1884, the land became a public city park known as Franklin Park.  Inspired by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and London’s Crystal Palace, which housed the first World Exposition in 1851, the city of Columbus commissioned a local architect to design and build its own glass conservatory at Franklin Park in 1895. Zoo animals called it home until 1925. 

From April through October 1992, over five million people flocked to Franklin Park for a $95 million extravaganza called AmeriFlora. The international horticultural exhibition celebrated the 500^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World. It featured gardening demonstrations; an authentic Bavarian Festhaus, Irish-style pub and Hawaiian restaurant; three different seasonal plantings; Walt Disney World-inspired topiary displays; an 11,000-square-foot vegetable and ornamental garden created by the PBS television show, “The Victory Garden;” a “Seeds of Change” exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution that focused on the exchange of plants, animals and people resulting from Columbus’ voyages; and mass floral plantings and plantings inspired by foreign countries, including a floral clock and a traditional Russian summer dacha surrounded by pine trees. Lush turf grasses were surrounded by an ocean-like planting of blue flowers and white-flowering groundcover in a world map. Colorful maypoles with cascading streamers guided visitors toward NavStar ’92, a 30-foot tall, 20-ton stainless steel sculpture representing the three billowing sails of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, the three ships of Columbus’ first voyage.

My AmeriFlora season pass led to countless trips to Franklin Park Conservatory that year, but I petered out after that, returning only once to see an exhibition of over $7 million of Dale Chihuly glass art works displayed throughout the conservatory. I was long overdue to experience the botanical gardens containing more than 400 plant species in four global climate zones, including the Himalayan mountains, a tropical rainforest, the desert and a Pacific Island water garden filled with thousands of tropical butterflies.

During our docent-led tour, I breathed in the heady scents of star jasmine, with its beautiful, fragrant, star-shaped white flowers, and the mature five-pointed, golden-hued, star-shaped flowers of the Ylang-Ylang (Cananga odorata) tree that recall the fragrance of Chanel No. 5. But three highlights will secure my return.

In 2009, the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company sponsored a four-acre community garden in the southeast corner of Franklin Park. Culinary, herb and fragrance gardens, an apiary, a rose pavilion, a berry house and 40 community garden plots inspire food and gardening classes for all ages.

Last year, a circa-1815 Richland County, Ohio barn was taken apart and put back together again on the southeast side of the conservatory grounds. Used for education and outreach programs, as well as a rental facility for special events, the Wells Barn features hand-hewn beams from 300-year-old species of oak, chestnut, beech, walnut, cherry, red elm and poplar trees.

Through November 13, the conservatory is hosting Origami in the Garden, an exhibition of origami-inspired sculptures created by artist Kevin Box and collaborations with other artists who specialize in the Japanese art of paper folding. For example, “Flying Peace” is a collaborative project between origami artist Robert J. Lang, who folded one of the most complicated origami cranes from a single, uncut piece of paper, and Box, who captured the folded result in stainless steel. The work was cleverly previewed in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Columbus-Downtown; several versions of it are displayed in the Himalayan Mountain Biome.

You can also see the unfolded guide and the finished product of an origami cardinal…

And spot several origami versions of Victorian charm strings…

that would make Frieda Warther and Tender Buttons proud.

Articulate. Brilliant. Fascinating. Incredible. A living legend.

Read what former students of Jefferson D. Futch III, professor emeritus of history at Washington and Lee University, have to say about him and you’ll soon get the idea that he was one legendary teacher.  I’m grateful to him because he introduced me to a life-changing book.

Lexington, Virginia was panting-hot in September 1989.  On the first day of my junior year as an exchange student at W&L, my roommates gasped as they watched me enter Newcomb Hall for my European History class.  I took a seat, and was soon surrounded by dozens of guys who grabbed vintage ties from a box by the door and slung them around their necks. Our teacher, Dr. Futch, entered the classroom, looked out of his signature round horn-rimmed glasses, and said, “Gentlemen, we have a lady in our midst.” Talk about a way to begin my first day of coeducation.

The shy girl in the sailor dress soon lost her nervousness and gained an appreciative audience when she correctly answered a question about Queen Victoria. That launched a semester of fascinating discussions about everything from the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Otto von Bismarck to highlights from “Popes for Dopes,” the nickname for Dr. Futch’s course on the history of the Papacy. When the syllabus turned to World War I, Dr. Futch assigned Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.

Named by the Modern Library as one of the 20th century’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, the book explores what the war was like for British soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front, how they got through that “troglodyte world,” and how they expressed their feelings about their no-man’s land experiences in poetry and literature. From the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to the photo on the book’s cover, I was hooked.

“I came across this picture by sheer accident in the War Museum, and sensed that the boy’s expression was unmistakably ‘twentieth century,'” Fussell wrote in a new afterword prepared for a special Oxford University Press 25th anniversary edition of the book. “If anyone ever looked aware of being doomed to meaningless death, it is this boy.”

My fascination with the War to End All Wars didn’t stop at the end of the book. Machine guns, poisonous gas, trench warfare, the after-effects of the war – everything about it was different, and life in the century that promised tremendous progress and improvement would never be the same.

Two years later, I still couldn’t stop reading about the Great War, even when I was studying journalism at Ohio State University. When I learned about how the poster’s concise text, striking illustrations, design make a quick, but lasting impression as a form of mass communication, I thought about how Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, Howard Chandler Christy, Joseph Christian Leyendecker and other Great War poster artists worked much like journalists as they helped the Committee on Public Information mobilize American public opinion about the war. Choosing the subject for my thesis was easy: I explored how posters communicated essential information about World War I, instilled a sense of duty in Americans and shaped public opinion about it.

Sure, We’ll Finish The Job, Ohio History Connection

Narrowing my focus to the image of women in British and American posters of the Great War, I analyzed dozens of posters, describing how the placement of figures, their attractiveness, expression, eye contact, pose, activity, and other details were used to relay the intended message. I discussed how graphic design techniques, symbolism, artistic traditions and language were employed to attract attention, appeal to emotions and evoke reactions in viewers. To provide context, I consulted photographs, researched archival documents, and undertook a terrific independent study on the literature of the Great War.

2017 marks the centennial of the United States’ involvement in World War I. To use the term that British soldiers used to express their thoughts about leaving the safety of their trenches to attack their enemy across open ground, I’m “over the top” about all the new books, exhibitions and special programs about the Great War that are taking place this year. Here are a few of my favorites.

Keep the Hun Out!, Billy Ireland, Ohio History Connection

Susan Talbot-Stanaway, retired director of the Zanesville Museum of Art, is traveling Ohio to talk about World War I posters from the perspective of Ohio history, sharing archival photos and fascinating facts about the artists who created them, their role in the war effort, and and their lasting importance in American culture. When I heard her at the Westerville Public Library this spring, this fellow poster-lover shared all sorts of interesting trivia.  James Montgomery Flagg painted a life-sized version of his “Tell That to the Marines” poster on the New York Public Library steps in August 1918. Gerrit Benecker immortalized a Cleveland factory worker in his “Sure We’ll Finish the Job” poster; in fact, a 24-sheet billboard of the image hung next to the Ohio Statehouse. A snowball-throwing game called “Swap the Hohenzollerns & Ring the Bell for Our War Chest” was played on the Statehouse grounds. Maginel Wright Enright, Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister, illustrated books and posters for the war effort. And my old friend Billy Ireland, cartoonist for The Columbus Dispatch, created “Keep the Hun Out,” a poster for war savings stamps, and “They Took My Daddy And This From Me,” a poster immortalizing civilian mistreatment when Germany invaded and occupied Belgium. Susan is helping to create a database of the 3,000 World War I posters in the Ohio History Connection’s collection, which is housed in State Archives Series 2729 AV: World War I Posters Collection.

“Tommies,” a BBC radio drama series, is being broadcast over a four-year period through Autumn 2018, the same length of time as the Great War itself. Named after the nickname for British World War I soldiers, “Tommies” is based on actual war diaries and follows the lives of those who experienced the war, telling their stories exactly 100 years ago to the day. Learn more about it on this episode of the BBC History Extra podcast.

True Blue (1919), The Library Company of Philadelphia

Together We Win: The Philadelphia Homefront During the First World War, an exhibition I saw at the Library Company of Philadelphia in April, displayed books, posters, photographs, audio clips of World War I-era music, scrapbooks and other ephemera illustrating the contributions that Philadelphians made in supporting the war effort. The exhibition website features recordings and sheet music from World War I, images of posters and recipes for apple brown betty, sweet potato gingerbread and bean loaf from wartime cookbooks in the collection.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has developed a website and a free “Remembering WWI” app for exploring World War I-related objects, photos and digitized archival film footage in its collection.

World War I gas mask, Ohio History Connection

World War I and the Visual Arts, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through January 7, 2018, focuses on how artists reacted to and represented the war. Closer to home, Mobilize for War: American Recruiting Posters of World War I is an Ohio Statehouse exhibit continuing through October 21. A World War I display at the Ohio History Connection presents gas masks, military uniforms, helmets, weapons, patriotic pins, ephemera and souvenirs American soldiers brought home from Europe.

To commemorate the World War I centennial, Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania and Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear, by Lindsay Mattick, are this year’s Westerville Reads selections. The Westerville Public Library is offering several complementary programs this fall, including cemetery tours, reader’s theater, history programs and a visit from Erik Larson, who will discuss his approach to writing narrative nonfiction.

Walter Phalor’s World War I uniform, Westerville Public Library Local History Center

Over There: A World War I Exhibit, in the Westerville Public Library’s Local History Center, presents artifacts such as the uniform jacket Westerville resident Walter Phalor wore while serving in France and Germany and masks to protect the horses which transported supplies and messages to the front from poison gas attacks. A public information notice titled “Avoid Worry, Fear and Fatigue” documents the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which caused 50 million fatalities worldwide. Take home a reproduction of a World War I-era postcard from its collection as a souvenir of the exhibit.

World War I soldier doll, Ohio History Connection

If you’d like some Great War-inspired reading, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, are World War I-inspired classics. Check out World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It, by A. Scott Berg; Working for Victory?: Images of Women in the First World War, 1914-1918, by Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard; Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, by Stanley Weintraub; Christmas in the Trenches, by John McCutcheon; and War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo, as well as the movie it inspired. Regeneration, by Pat Barker, explores the psychological effects of World War I and their treatments.  World War I Remembered, a National Park Service publication edited by Robert J. Dalessandro and Robert K. Sutton, is a new collection of essays by World War I scholars about the contributions the United States made to the Allies’ victory. Wake Up, America!: World War I and the American Poster, by Walton Rawls, and Posters of the First World War, by Maurice Rickards, will always take up prime real estate on my bookcase.

“A woman can never be too fine while she is all in white.”

So Edmund Bertram said to Fanny Price when complementing her on her dress, in a scene from Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park. Now I understand the reason why.

A handful of decades before Austen published her book, the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were discovered after being covered for centuries by thick layers of ash, rock and debris from when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. Excavation finds there not only made them popular destinations on Continental grand tours, but also led to a fascination with classical Greek and Roman art and civilization. Since the ancient Greeks were thought to have worn white clothing, white dresses became the outfit of choice for the ladies of Austen’s day.

That’s what I discovered after taking COTA’s new #8 bus route to the Ohio State University campus.  My mission was to see six Jane Austen-related objects from Ohio State’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and its Historic Costume & Textiles Collection.

As the 200th anniversary year of Austen’s death comes to a close, three first-edition Austen novels and two Austen-era dresses are on display in the first-floor Special Collections exhibit area of the Ohio State University’s Thompson Library through this Friday, December 15.

Since Austen chose to publish her novels anonymously during her lifetime, the author of each book was given as “A Lady.” However, when Northanger Abbey and were published jointly in 1818 after her death, Henry Austen, Jane’s brother, wrote the introduction and identified his sister as the author of those novels and her previous works. The introduction is displayed alongside first editions of Mansfield Park: A Novel in Three Volumes (London: Printed for T. Egerton, 1814) and Emma: A Novel in Three Volumes (London: Printed for John Murray, 1816).

Austen’s life spanned from 1775 to 1817, a period marked by change in politics, manufacturing, society and even fashion. Opulent garments were replaced by simpler ones preferred by the growing middle class. Dresses were either fashioned from plain white or floral patterned or “sprigged” muslin sold by British textile manufacturers who purchased cotton exported from the British East India Company. Gowns were often constructed in what was referred to as an Empire silhouette, in honor of French empress Josephine Bonaparte, who popularized the style.

Evening dresses, like this silk one dating from 1817-1820, also had a columnar silhouette…

but were trimmed more elaborately. Its short puffed sleeves with a slashed design were a common feature of Medieval revival fashions of the day.

The popular columnar silhouette is repeated in this day dress, circa 1797-1810, but it is made from a heavier, stiffer silk that would have been worn by a wealthier lady. It is complemented by a day cap, circa 1810-1820, like a married woman would have worn. Once a woman married, her hair was always covered, either by a bonnet when outside, or by a cap when indoors.

Another Austen-era dress is on view at Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum as part of its Cartoon Couture exhibit. This cotton muslin day dress, circa 1800-1810, with another Greek-inspired silhouette, will be on display there through April 15, 2018.