#princeton university library

[garadinervi]

Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond, Edited by Sal Hamerman and Javier Rivero Ramos, with contributions by Felipe Becerra, Mónica de la Torre, and Zanna Gilbert, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ, 2024

Exhibition: Firestone Library, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ, February 21 – June 13, 2024 (on the way of Art Books)

[princetonarchives]

Though unrecognizable to us now, this was one of the suggested plans for Princeton University's main campus library ca. 1945, found in Firestone Architectural Drawings Collection (AC411), Box 1. For reference, this is how the library actually turned out:

Firestone Library, ca. 1950s. Historical Photograph Collection, Grounds and Buildings Series (AC111), Box AD04, No 8323.

G. B. Moment, Class of 1928, had this to say on April 17, 1936 about the future campus library, after suggesting that Princeton avoid more Gothic architecture in favor of something more modern:

The library itself would then stand as a monument to the renunciation of sentimentality and sham and obscurantism and at the same time proclaim the spirit (rather than the letter) of the cathedral builders themselves who constructed to the highest that they knew, both conceptually and technically, rather than, with a debilitating combination of cowardice, indolence, and lack of vision, produce competent reproductions of the signatures of past ages.

[costarringyourlocallibrary]

The exterior of the East Pyne Building (formerly Pyne Library) at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023).

[eco-diary-by-poli]

Teenage Beatrix Potter with her pet mouse Xarifa, 1885 (Princeton University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections) @abwwia

[foone]

So a thing I learned about recently is the Testerian catechisms.

They're a set of documents designed to teach Christianity to the native americans of what's now Mexico, from the 16th to 19th centuries.

And they look like this. It's a sort of comic book-looking thing. They're written in an alternating line order, switching from left-to-right to right-to-left on each line.

One of the interesting things about this is that while they were definitely created to be a sort of reinforcement of Christian doctrine through visual elements, there's also aspects of this being a writing system, not just a set of icons. There's descriptions of how to use this to write non-native words, by combining sounds.

There's also debate about how much these were just used by the Spanish to teach Christianity and how much they were used by the natives. Some of the the symbols seem to have pre-Hispanic influences, and may have been written by native authors at the instruction of the spanish missionaries, rather than solely being a missionary invention.

There's one specific document, the Catecismo pictórico Otomí, which we have a translation/decoding for/of. This is from many years after it was created so it's not certain how accurate it is.

There's a lot of information on them in this article in The Princeton University Library Chronicle: Testerian Hieroglyphs: Language, Colonization, and Conversion in Colonial Mexico, by Elena A. Schneider (2007).

[readingsquotes]

"In the name of keeping students safe, you bring the NYPD on campus to break up a peaceful encampment, thereby endangering hundreds of student protesters—many of whom are Jewish students and students of color—and the campus community at large. Given the NYPD’s racist record, the fact that you would subject Black, Latinx, Arab and South Asian students to police repression suggests that you are either unaware or indifferent to the trauma our communities have experienced with the police. And your administration’s decision to evict students from their dorms, strip them of their meal cards, and have them charged with trespassing is nothing less than vindictive. After taking their tuition and fees, you render them houseless and potentially food insecure. How does this make students safe? As president, you must be well aware of the number of financially vulnerable students enrolled at Columbia.

In the name of keeping students safe, you suspend chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for organizing a peaceful protest in order to draw attention to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and its escalation of violence in the West Bank. When two students attacked an antiwar rally on the steps of Low Memorial Library on January 19 by dousing the assembled with a foul-smelling chemical agent, sending several people to the hospital, what did you do to keep students safe? The assailants were not arrested, and although Columbia’s interim provost announced that they were banned from campus soon after the attacks, the decision to suspend them was made public just a few days ago. Instead, you brought the NYPD to campus to suppress a follow-up protest organized to call attention to the attack.

When Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student, received death threats from someone involved in a counterprotest, no one called for an investigation or took affirmative steps to keep him safe. And when will you release a statement expressing deep sympathy for all of your Palestinian students who have lost family and friends to Israel’s military onslaught?

...

I need not say much else. You’ve been condemned by your faculty, by the majority of students, and by scholars and human rights activists around the world. You are keeping no one safe, except for your donors, trustees, and Columbia’s endowment. Among these same trustees and donors are persons who have vowed to punish these students by blocking them from future employment.

...

Sadly, you are not alone in turning to state repression to silence students. The presidents of Yale, Princeton, Emory, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the Ohio State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Emerson, among others, have also called the police against nonviolent protests and encampments. This is a dark day for U.S. higher education, especially at a time when right-wing extremists are waging war on academic freedom and all manner of critical studies.

[metamorphesque]

Photograph of Anaïs Nin (Princeton University Library)

[the-first-man-is-a-cat]

1. Instructions in Mourning Customs

2. Funeral Procession

3. Burial

Manuscript made ca. 1450 - 1500, currently in Princeton University Library.

[extinctionstories]

Lost Animals | Extinction and the Photographic Record, by Errol Fuller. Princeton University Press, 2013. 256 pages

This is a special one. In this book, Errol Fuller, author of many works about extinct animals, presents the stories of 28 different lost species, together with a collection of rare photos taken during the lives of some of the last survivors. A number of these images were never published before this book. Most works on the topic of extinction include only a smattering of actual photos, owing to their rarity, so it feels a bit magical to leaf through a compilation like this. Another excellent addition to any extinct animal library.

[en-abime-updates]

June 15th

Morning

Mal posts the player-made zine on FreeDF. You can find it by adding the URL slug /dans-des-circonstances-eternelles to en-abime.com. She has decided to visit Tati, although it is unknown where she is right now.

Since the zine mentions a twin by name, they visit it and share a PowerPoint of all the information they had about Thomas (accessible through clicking the glitch on the page.) (It is unknown where the twin is right now.) A letter in a different font (the “T” on “The Incident”) links to w-h-a-t-h-a-p-p-e-n-e-d.

Summary: This PowerPoint includes a photo of Thomas and the details around his disappearance: He was a freshman exchange student at Princeton University in New Jersey whose parents had died 2 years before of the flu. He went missing in October of 1915 – he checked into a carrel in the library and never checked out. (The footnotes note these carrels are now in Firestone Library.) He was “kind of an introvert” but an “excellent student,” so no one noticed he was missing until months later. The Works Cited page of the PPT only lists en-abime.com as well as the page for requesting visitor access to Firestone Library. Players speculate this may be the site of a geocache.

The zine page also links to Mal’s Favorite Gigs in NYC. This page begins as a blank page and populates with pop-ups addressing the reader as you scroll down, before showing a list of Mal’s bands and performance venues – potentially another geocache lead? It also features a voice that speaks in blackout poetry, similar to the blackout poetry sections of the CYOA.

Summary: The pop-ups ask the reader to record information about themselves (to presumably join the abime) – “Log on now!” “Share abundantly your photographs, experiences, and stories with your friends.” It then presents Mal’s list of gigs as “a gift.” The list of gigs lists the band and location of each performance, as well as a short description of Mal’s experience performing with them. Mal’s handwritten note at the top reads “if you haven’t got an I.D., even a fake one, FORGET ABOUT IT, DUDETTE!” Below the gig list, the pop-ups ask the reader to “Match them with the right keys to the kingdom” for an “instantaneous cure,” “but hurry, a machine for living won’t be hanging around for long.” Below this, the blackout poetry voice begins, imploring the reader to “stop feeding us.” Their requests and cries for help are similar in tone to the ones in the CYOA.

Mal’s Favorite Gigs page leads to HELP, what looks like a customer service page with a set of Q&As and a form. The page is written by (and the Q&As are answered) by the same voices from the Mal’s Gigs page (Ad pop-ups and blackout poetry). The header at the top of the page toggles between “archive” and “appetite” on hover, and “appetite” is “all” while “ARCHIVE” is “NOTHING.” The form is “for Urgent Retrieval Concerns” and asks the reader to “DESCRIBE: WHAT YOU SEE. WHERE YOU ARE. WHERE YOU HAVE SOUGHT. WHERE YOU HAVE NOT YET SOUGHT.”

Summary: The two voices describe themselves as brothers, and have very different personalities. The popup voice describes itself as our “friend,” and encourages the questioner to find “these things” and “make them happy.” The question text eventually goes off the rails: (“Why is my skin so heavy? Why are my eyeballs so dry? Why are my bones so wet?”) to which the popup text voice answers, “You aren’t there yet, friend, but you’re doing well!” In contrast, the blackout poetry voice describes itself as our “bastard creation” and says that if we are “here” it has “failed.” It begs us to “please don’t go looking for this [...] please instead forget all about this. About them. About me.” On the left side of the page are a list of what seems to be various manifestations of HEAVEN, a series of tips that seem to be for geocaching, and there is a form at the bottom that asks for location, time, name of who they are looking for, and a description of their location.

Afternoon/Evening

Players submit form responses to HELP, most of which receive unhelpful answers via email. 

Players submitting questions to the form received a response from the email en-abime-dot-com@gmail.com from a username THE ARCHIVE THE APPETITE. Most contained a screenshot of their question and a popup image reading “USE TOOLS FOR THEIR INTENDED PURPOSE.” Some emails contained an additional image reading “HA!HA!HA!” 

At 2:41 PM EST, player sylvan receives a reply to his email “bonjour” with the additional image “I DON’T SPEAK FRENCH” and the subject line “19/20” A minute earlier at 2:40, another player Vincent received a similar email with the subject line “20/20.” Later, Vincent receives another, this time with the subject line “18/20.” Players decide not to send more emails until figuring out more about the “INTENDED PURPOSE” so the countdown stops. 

At around midnight, player charles entertainment cheese sends a question: “We have looked everywhere. We are Thomas stretched across En Abime. I want to know where he entered from - Princeton? New Jersey? The Library? We have looked across as many pages as we have. We have found him in PDFs and websites where his past self is recorded and archived.” This receives a different response, without a countdown number, hinting that these questions are closer to the “INTENDED PURPOSE” and “for greater knowledge on more subjects, use your library often!”

Overall Theories

Players think these pop-ups and blackout text are two new characters, the Archive and the Appetite, which may be made up of the Abime itself. They seem more powerful than the other characters and may have placed the flyers around the different locations. They seem to want us to find whatever information they don’t yet know, and are interested in physical geocaches. 

Next steps from this update:

Follow these geocache leads

Crack w-h-a-t-h-a-p-p-e-n-e-d

Figure out the purpose of the HELP form

[misterlemonztenth]

03-15-24 | Today in 1879 Albert Einstein was born in Wurttemberg, Germany. He would be 145 today. He died in 1955 in Princeton, NJ.

Happy Birthday Albert.

Here are some insights from the one and only Albert Einstein. He is most known as a popular scientist who dramatically changed humanity’s engagement with the world. This post illuminates some of his equally amazing insights beyond the science and beyond the physical.

“I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”

2. “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”

"Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think.

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world."

“Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me."

"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”

"A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"Our separation from each other is an optical illusion."

“When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

“We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”

“When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.”

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”

“The ancients knew something, which we seem to have forgotten.”

“The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.”

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.”

“I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.”

"The common idea that I am an atheist is based on a big mistake. Anyone who interprets my scientific theories this way, did not understand them."

"Everything is determined, every beginning and ending, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper."

“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It will transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology.”

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

“Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

"I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future." misterlemonztenth.tumblr.com/archive

[garadinervi]

A draft page of 'Paradise' (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998) by Toni Morrison [Photo: Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ]

[princetonarchives]

Headline from the Daily Princetonian, January 17, 2005

[rotzaprachim]

Author: 

Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Alan Elbaum

Wed 22 Jun 2022

Alan, which fragment are you looking at today?

My job description at the Princeton Geniza Project is to look at uncatalogued or minimally catalogued documentary fragments, and while looking for these I came across T-S NS J479, a single page covered with strange symbols written in all directions. I’ve probably glanced at around 50,000 Genizah fragments by now, and I’ve never seen anything that looks like this.

What is it? Which language is it?

Most of it is written in what I think is a made-up code, though whether it was invented or borrowed by the writer, I don’t know. There’s also some Arabic and Hebrew script (the Arabic is a petition formula). At first glance one of the symbols reminded me of one from the Voynich manuscript, so that set me wondering whether the symbols were meaningful. I noticed the same set of around 22 symbols all in a row, written a number of times, and wondered if the letters could be assigned to an alphabet. As there are roughly 22, the Hebrew alphabet fits better than Arabic. The language seems to be Judaeo-Arabic though. I’ve annotated an image of the fragment showing the ‘translation’ of the cipher into Hebrew script.

Why do you think he wrote out the alphabet several times?

Maybe he was trying to work out his alphabet. Towards the end he’s a bit inconsistent with some of the symbols assigned to each Hebrew letter, so perhaps he was refining it. He also writes the cipher alphabet from left to right at one point, which was interesting to me.

We keep saying ‘he’ – do we know who the author was?

He writes his name – ‘al-faqīr Isḥāq al-Yahūdī’ – as well as two verses from the revered Sufi poem known as Qaṣīdat al-Burda by Al-Būṣīrī (fl. 13th century), so that helps to date the fragment somewhat. Here are the lines in Stetkevych's translation (Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mantle Odes: Arabic Praise Poems to the Prophet Muhammad (Bloomington, IN, 2010), p. 92.):Was it the memory of those you loved at Dhū Salam / That made you weep so hard your tears were mixed with blood? Or was it the wind that stirred from the direction of Kāẓimah / And the lightning that flashed in the darkness of Iḍam?

It’s Mamluk or perhaps Ottoman era. There’s also some pornography. I’ve learned two different words for penis and all sorts of other terms while studying the text. It’s fairly graphic. It ends ‘all of this is lies’, so perhaps Isḥāq was covering his tracks in case his parents cracked his code! Kind of frivolous but also kind of interesting.

Do you know of any other ciphers that have been found in the Cairo Genizah?

Gideon Bohak has written about at least one cipher that he’s found in the Genizah, and Oded Zinger has found a letter in Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic with a portion in an incomprehensible cipher. Almost all the words begin with alef, which makes us think it’s not a straightforward substitution cipher. Amir Ashur pointed out that some merchants in the India Book use Coptic numerals to create a secret code that hasn’t yet been cracked. I put this fragment up on social media after I started working on it, and people offered up all sorts of interesting parallels. Arianna D’Ottone-Rambach shared her article on an encrypted Quran manuscript that I hadn’t known about, for example. I’m so excited to join the field when this spirit of collaboration is recognised and valued. If I can make a discovery that lets someone else discover something further, then that’s all the better.

Thanks, Alan!

Alan Elbaum is a Senior Researcher at the Princeton Geniza Project.

[yr-obedt-cicero]

Do you know why Jefferson place a bust of Hamilton in his entrance way? Or why he even had one at the very first place?

According to one of Jefferson's grandchildren;

After gazing a moment at these objects, the eye settled with a deeper interest on busts of Jefferson and Hamilton, by Ceracchi, placed on massive pedestals on each side of the main entrance “opposed in death as in life,” as the surviving original sometimes remarked, with a pensive smile, as he observed the notice they attracted.

Randall, Henry Stephens. The Life of Thomas Jefferson. United States, Derby & Jackson, 1858.

[Jefferson, Randolph, and Trist Family Papers, 1791-1874, #5385-ac, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.]

When a guest had questioned the scenery, Jefferson wryly replied that they were “opposed in death as in life.” [x] But despite the vague phrasing, he never gave more of a reason. It is believed by some that it was a metaphor for Hamilton's and Jefferson's divide, yet essentiality in the building of America. Or Jefferson found it amusing, as it is said that his bust was on a green marble pedestal decorated with the signs of the zodiac and the twelve tribes of Israel, towering over Hamilton's. Although Jefferson's bust doesn't survive to this today, but we have a small description of it;

This rough pencil sketch, made by an unknown hand on the verso of a retained copy of a letter written by Jefferson's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph in December 1826, is the only extant image of a bust of Jefferson that Giuseppe Ceracchi modeled from life in Philadelphia sometime after 2 Mch. 1791. He intended to incorporate it, with other likenesses of prominent Ameri- cans, into a large monument that was never completed. In Florence during 1793 the artist transformed his original terra cotta study of Jefferson into a larger-than-life bust in marble, writing to Jefferson on 11 Mch. 1794 to report the work was finished.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 28: 1 January 1794 to 29 February 1796. United States, Princeton University Press, 2018.

We luckily still have Hamilton's to this day, stylized in a Roman form by Giuseppe Ceracchi. When Ceracchi took a visit to the US in 1791-92, he proposed a monument in honor of the Revolution and appealed to Congress to finance the project. Ceracchi had attempted to raise the funds for the memorial, and Jefferson endorsed him and told Robert Livingston that he was; “a very celebrated sculptor from Rome.” [x] But unfortunately, Congress closed the proposal on May 7th, 1792.

Today, Jefferson's bust has been replaced with a copy that you can find at Monticello.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Mansion for rent for $199K mo. in Boca Raton, Florida has 9 bds. and 13 baths. It’s a lot of money for one month, but it’s a special house. Take a look. 

As you can see in the grand entrance hall, it’s decorated with pop art. 

It has a comfortable sitting room.

And, a formal dining room that can seat 12.

Very large modern kitchen. 

And, a family room/casual dining area. But, that’s not really what you’re paying for.

This is. It has a big pink space-themed home theater.

Plus a space-themed bar with lots of toys and collectibles on display. (I wonder if they take inventory before the renters leave.)

And, this game room. 

Family room/play room.

The upper level is very nice and some of the bds. are geared toward children.

Like this princess themed room. 

And, this bunker-style room.

Here’s a cool nautical room.

I’m thinking this is the main bd. Who’s the creepy little guy on the right?

How do they rent a house for $199K w/clothes in the closet? If they move these out, I wonder if they take the rest of the stuff.

This bd. has a New York University theme.

Exercise room in the library.

Here’s a party kitchen.

And, a bar for outdoor entertaining.

Covered dining area.

Huge pool with a waterfall.

Notice how you walk into the shallow end of the pool, just like the ocean.

Basketball court. I don’t know who would pay such high rent, even a millionaire.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3682-Princeton-Pl-Boca-Raton-FL-33496/2080371993_zpid/