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Students expect a rare book librarian to be a stuffy antiquarian, but John always manages to communicate through example the excitement, mystery, and joy of working with old books.
John Mustain, rare book librarian and classics bibliographer, and Jennifer Summit in the Barchas Room, Special Collections, Green Library. |
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My favorite room in Green Library is the reading room in Special Collections. Airy and light-filled, it's the antithesis of the monastic, eye-strainingly dim English reading rooms in which I wrote my dissertation. Whenever I teach undergraduate medieval courses, I try to schedule a class visit. Students are always astonished to be able to see medieval books at close range. The tiny illuminations in a book of hours have retained their original, brilliant golds, blues, and reds: a full-page depiction of the Last Judgment, with the dead cautiously peeking out of their graves; a small domestic scene of St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary as a girl to read; the disembodied images of Jesus's wounded hands and feet, all presented for the reader's contemplation. A scholastic theological text preserves its earliest users' compact marginalia, with the chain that bound it to a library bookshelf or desk still hanging from its spine. Students are even more astonished to learn that they are able to call up these books on their own, and several do so every year for research projects. Stanford owns a copy of William Morris's glorious Kelmscott Chaucer, which for my Chaucer classes is a high point when we survey the history of Chaucer in print from Stanford's collection, starting with the sixteenth century. I've had some wonderful papers analyzing its illustrations for the ways in which they interpret Chaucer through nineteenth-century eyes. A visiting colleague from Cambridge confided that, though a senior scholar, he had never been allowed to see his college's Kelmscott Chaucer. Stanford students may not know how lucky they are to have such riches to hand, but I try to make sure they know how to take advantage of them. In this aim, my greatest ally-and one of Stanford library's greatest resources-is John Mustain, our boundlessly knowledgeable and enthusiastic rare book librarian. If students are initially intimidated by the books, John makes them feel welcome and comfortable; no question is too basic, no show of interest unrewarded. Students expect a rare book librarian to be a stuffy antiquarian, but John always manages to communicate through example the excitement, mystery, and joy of working with old books.
Jennifer Summit
Jennifer Summit is an associate professor in the department of English. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Summit returned to California to join Stanford's faculty after receiving her PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1995. Her scholarly interests bridge the medieval and early modern periods, focusing on changing notions of books, authors and literature across this time span. In both her teaching and her research she brings to the study of early English literature an interest in both traditional texts and methodologies and theoretical issues relating to feminist studies and the broader formation of literary canons and practices within the discipline. She has published articles on the poetry of Elizabeth I, early English print culture, and medieval pilgrims' narratives, as well as a book, Lost Property: the Woman Writer and English Literary History, c. 1380-1589 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000). Her current book project (under contract with University of Chicago Press, and supported by fellowships from the NEH and ACLS) examines post-Reformation libraries and their reconstruction of the medieval past. At Stanford she has been awarded the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching and was made Dean's Fellow in the Humanities in 1999. She teaches courses on topics such as Chaucer, medieval and early modern women writers, and the history of books, reading, and writing . |
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