Ohio University Libraries’ rare books digital collection highlights the material culture of book production, focusing on local imprints and books created by women and African-Americans. So far, Digital Initiatives has photographed 85 “publishers’ bindings”– brightly-colored machine-made books designed to attract an emerging middle class audience beginning in the mid-19th century. In addition to the covers, we have until now mostly confined our digitization efforts to documenting evidence of marketing, manufacture, and ownership, such as bookplates, booksellers’ advertisements, binders’ tickets, inscriptions, and the like. The digital collection is not designed to function as a comprehensive full-text repository of public domain works, as this has already been accomplished on a massive scale by Google Books, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive.
DI made an exception, however, for “The Eclipse,” for Hotel and Home Cooking, Suitable for Rich or Poor, because of the wealth of handwritten supplemental recipes and clippings added to our copy by an unidentified former owner. Unfortunately, the names of both creators have been lost to time. The “authoress” of “The Eclipse” identifies herself only as “Mrs. H. J. Hawhe.” She never published again under that name and no Hawhes appear on the 1880 census for Columbus, Ohio, where the book was published. Likewise, no record of an Eclipse Hotel or printer named Glenn could be located during a survey of 19th century Columbus city directories. As for the person who customized their copy of “The Eclipse” with so many additional recipes and household hints, we can be reasonably certain they worked as a professional cook because of the huge volume of ingredients required by some of the recipes. The below recipe for hand soap, for example, requires “four boxes Lewis lye, sixteen pounds clear grease or eighteen pounds cracklings, [and] twelve gallon[s] rain water.”
Our copy of “The Eclipse” is also distinct from those available through the Internet Archive and HathiTrust because it was never rebound and retains the orginal advertisements for local businesses inside the front cover, including one for “KATE SHEPARDSON BLACK, Homeopathic Physician, Women Diseases a Specialty.” Advertisements for Columbus stores and companies now long gone have also been included in the header and footer of every page, which would have defrayed the cost of printing.
Using our newly-acquired Phase One medium format camera, DI’s student imaging lead Kelly Wallace photographed “The Eclipse” from cover to cover, taking care to include all pieces of loose ephemera. The handwritten recipes have been fully transcribed and DI has committed to backing up our master files with the MetaArchive Collaborative, ensuring that access to this singular copy of a local history resource is preserved for the future.
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