Fables Go Digital
Creighton also offered another turning point when I was nominated in 1997 to be a U.S. West Fellow, participating for a year in an intensive seminar to train faculty in using computers. There was little doubt - in my mind, and that of the seminar mentor - that my project for the year was to get our collection of books and objects beyond Word files and to make it available through the web. No more printed catalogues! The project I undertook was to transcribe the collection's 2,800 books from simpler Word documents into strong databases and html documents. Experts recommended two databases, FileMaker Pro as user-friendly and Access as powerful. I chose both and worked out ways - ways that I still use - to catalogue in Acess and transition the information into FileMaker Pro and from there into html and Word documents. I still find both FileMaker Pro and Access helpful. A collector in my shoes needs, for example, to be able, in the middle of a bookstore, to check whether a book is already in the collection.
One of the great used book sellers of my experience was Peter Howard of Berkley's Serendipity Books. Peter and his wife, Alison, ran the quintessential antiquarian bookshop: books everywhere, books in boxes on the floor, books stacked up. They honored my interest in fables. My annual Christmas visit to family in San Francisco meant stopping by erendipity. I would go straight to the special shelf in the back kept for fable books and me.
Prior to my Christmas visit in 2008, Peter notified me that he had found a 1544 treasure, Joachim Camerarius' Historia Vitae Fortunaeque Aesopi, cum Fabulis Illius: "An Account of the Life and Destiny of Aesop, with His Fables." I knew of this edition and was excited to have it in my hand, though I paid little attention to the exact title. We negotiated and settled on $2,200, and I was thrilled to get the book! I hardly notice that the spin of the book had a one-word title.
Back at home, it was time to catalogue this important book. I could not find it! I looked everywhere. I was mortified to have lost so expensive a book. How careless of me! I called Peter: had I left it with them? "No" was his clear answer, but I wondered. In the meantime, Peter finally succumbed to a long battle with poor health, and his shop and stock were soon sold. I wondered if my Camerarius was gone forever, lost in his stock.
Housecleaning several months later, I needed to clear the shelves in my room, including an old "history" book, Historia. When I opened it, I realized that the Camerarius had been sitting on my shelf the whole time!
This seminar gave me comfort and familiarity with trying things on the computer. As a teacher and presenter, I was also keenly aware of the need to make the process of finding information comfortable and engaging. I did not meet some goals, particularly that of making the whole collection easily searchable for visitors to the website. Still, I found several ways to give people access to our books and objects and to my assessment of them as help for understanding and enjoying fables.
A later follw-up seminar in 2008 introduced me to making videos of parts of the collection. Our mentor was unsparing in his insistence that we develop an in-home studio and produce our own videos. That experience led to YouTube videos on unusual fable objects, story blocks, and musuem exhibits which I will report on shortly.
So Many Objects! So Many Kinds of Objects!
I have been amazed not only by the diversity of presentation of fables, but also by the surprising kinds of objects I have found and the numbers of them I have encountered. The pattern of my finding them tends to be the same: I did not know that they existed. Then I found one or two. I kept looking. Then I found many!
Here are some of the more surprising:
Cards: I have found over 3,500 cards. Most are postcards or trade cards. I have found sixteen other kinds of cards.
Tableware: I have found 8 manufacturers' series of fable-themed tableware, featuring some 80 plates, platters, cup, saucers, and serving dishes. Tableware objects not belonging to a manufacturer's series total another 196 objects, including 90 plates.
Stamps: I have found stamps presenting fables form 27 countries.
Blotters: I have found 111 blotters, advertising 37 different companies.
Matchboxes: We have 30 French, 18 Russian, and 5 British matchboxes.
Buttons: I have found 21 different representations of fables on buttons, not counting the same representation in different sizes.
Tiles: I have found 7 different series of tiles, including 28 individual tiles.
YouTube Video for Joslyn Fable Exhibit. January, 2018.
If readers get a sense that I enjoy engaging new and different activities, they would be right. On YouTube one will find videos which I have made ranging from religious reflections to Greek tragedy to bucky balls to my extensive toy train. Video experience also made me more confident in serving as talent for several videos on fables produced by more professional videographers, one of which still graces the first page on our fables website.
Collector's Comment: This computer and video experience touches on a major question for a collector: How much - and how - does the collector want to share the collection with others? As I look back now, I can see that I long limited myself too much to developing the collection. What would become of it from there, I had reasoned, was up to others. My own instincts as a teacher and comminicator, in the course of time, pushed me beyond the view, as I see now looking back. One friend had visited the collection earlier and gave me a long set of admonitions on how to promote the collection better. I had thrown them away. I was enjoying too much the collecting itself to worry much about the collection's use. In these later years, the collection's development and those communicative instincts, stimulated by the seminar experience, brought me into wider and wider circles of sharing the collection.
I had long enjoyed telling fables and engaging people in experiencing them. Now I was starting to look for ways to do that. I am particularly grateful to that seminar mentor, Wayne Young, for urging me to use creative ways to engage more people in enjoying fables. Growing interest in expanding the net of engagement outwards received a major impetus in 2012. A colleague had recommended me to "Now You Know Media," now know as "Learn25," a producer of high quality DVD videos exploring Roman Catholic theology and spirituality. Their CEO, Michael Bloom, contacted me and asked if I would want to contribute. When I demurred and said that he probably wanted higher ranking scholars, he pushed back and said that they also wanted good teachers. I do believe that I am that. Their format is challenging. They produce their Rockville, Maryland, studios sets of 12 DVD conferences, each conference 25 minutes in length. The conferences are to be taught from notes, not read from a text. Michael asked me to think it over.
I asked my good Jesuit friend Fr. Larry Gillick, and he leapt at the chance to say "Greg, do it!" Larry had been urging me for some time to give a "fable retreat," and my usual response was "Fables are one thing and spirituality is another." I am glad that Fr. Larry encouraged me. When Michael and I next taked, I said that I could offer a typical Jesuit retreate enhanced by poetry and visual objects, or I could explore a contemporary spirituality through fables and parables. His answer was: "We'll take both." In one of the most strenous work-weeks of my life, I videotaped 24 lectures in five days in their soundproof, temperature-controlled studio. By Friday evening, I was happily exhausted!"
UPLOAD THE WOLF AND LAMB DVD DID NOT SEE ON WEBSITE SO WILL NEED TO PULL THAT ASIDE FOR PROCESSING.
Also happily, I was able to bring together two great loves of my life, Jesuit spirituality and fables. The "Now You Know" video helped me to integrate two major energies in my life: Christian spirituality and engagement with fables. I see as my deepest desire my wanting to be a Christian and a priest. And each of us, I believe, learns to live his or her way. We each find - or at least seek - ways to integrate the energies of our lives. My energies had never conflicted, but now I was enjoying a way of finding them enhancing each other. That was a gift! I appreciate what Michael and Larry did in expanding my world yet again!
Use of the computer also marked for me another result of collecting. For those first 2,800 books originally given to Creighton, I could remember individual books quite accurately. I might not remember exactly where a specific text or illustration originated, but I recognized them quickly. Since that time, sheer numbers and the inevitable memory slippage of aging have meant that, at times, I will now finish cataloguing a "new" book only to realized that we already have it! That is one source of the sizeable "duplicates" collection we have developed. Another large source is that friends have given me a number of books, some of which were already in the collection.