From McFarlin Tower

Today, I am writing my last blog post from the McFarlin Tower. My two years Master’s program has come to an end and I am finishing up my commitment to this assistantship next Friday. In lieu of writing a new post about a new topic, I thought I would share some of my favorite photographs from the blog posts that I have written over the past two years.

I don’t know that I can describe the wonder that comes along with working in an extensive archive like this one. A stroll down an aisle of books is never boring. Someone can find something new to marvel at here; I often refer to the items in our collections as “treasures” in these posts, because finding them really does feel like finding some treasure.

The face of the Gertrude Stein Stein

Picture of the Spotlight Theater taken from the Tulsa Art Deco collection

Since poking around in our Art Deco collection, I find myself noticing Tulsa’s unique architecture whenever I’m downtown. I performed at the Spotlight Theatre as a young girl and was drawn to the subject for my first blog post. Plucking stories out of the collections can be overwhelming initially! The Gertrude Stein stein was another early favorite find of mine.

One of the slides from “American Woods” under a microscope

14 volumes of American Woods

A botany class’s visit drew my attention to some of the most delicate and unique books I have ever seen. “American Woods” by Franklin B. Hough contains hundreds of very thin slices of trees that allow researchers to observe their cell structure under a microscope.

I love all of the really cool glass that Jacalyn and I were able to set up for our first exhibit. We learned so much about Depression glass and glass blowing techniques while we curated our “American Glassware” exhibit. This exhibit was taken down as the pandemic ramped up and we were sent to work from home for the rest of the semester.

Two men discussing the final x-ray photograph of the Liberty Bell

Quite possibly my favorite story was the post about the mysterious X-ray of the Liberty Bell. A few months after writing the post, I received a letter from the mustached man in this photograph. He found my post while searching for information so that he could tell his grandson about it and decided to send me a letter here at the library, identifying himself in the photographs and telling me more about the project.

Jacalyn and I have curated one more exhibit to go on display in the Reading Room next week. It will be made up of books, big and small, that captured our attention.

The Special Collections is still closed to the public but open to TU students and affiliates. Please email speccoll@utulsa.edu to set up an appointment or request scans of our materials.

We recently acquired a new first edition of a book entitled “The Black Swallow of Death”, by P. J. Carisella and James W. Ryan. This book, published in 1972, tells the story of the world’s first Black combat aviator, Eugene Jacques Bullard.

Bullard was born in Georgia in 1895 and was one of ten children. His father, William Bullard, was from Martinique, and would often tell his son stories of France and described a country where all men were equal, regardless of race. At just 11 years old, Bullard ran away from home with the intention of moving to France.

He did eventually make it Paris by first stowing away on a ship and then becoming a professional boxer. He was living in Paris when the WW1 began and he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. After being wounded in battle in March of 1916, he volunteered to be a gunner in the Lafayette Flying Corps, becoming the first Black combat aviator. He served until after armistice and was awarded copious medals for his service in WW1.

Bullard returned to Paris and became a drummer at a nightclub. He was very active in Parisian nightlife for many years, before spending some time playing with a band in Alexandria, Egypt. During his time in Egypt, he would fight in multiple prize fights. Back in Paris, Bullard managed and owned nightclubs that were frequented by many famous people of the time, such as Langston Hughes and Louis Armstrong. Many years later, he would cover the walls of his American apartment with photographs of the many friends that he made throughout his life.

In 1939, Bullard volunteered to use his position in the nightclubs to spy on German visitors to his clubs. Bullard volunteered and served in the 51st Infantry Regiment after France was invaded by Germany. He was badly wounded and his club was destroyed during WW2, so he ended up back in the United States in 1945. Unfortunately, his fame from Paris did not follow him and his injury never fully recovered. Bullard spent the last fifteen years of his life in the United States with anonymity, working as a security guard, perfume salesman, and eventually an elevator operator in Rockefeller Center.

This blog post can barely scratch the surface of this man’s incredible life. The book includes excerpts from Bullard’s personal journal, allowing the reader to read his own words. He passed away in 1961, leaving behind an incredible legacy.

There are thousands of other people memorialized in Special Collections, where their stories fill the books that line our shelves here in the McFarlin Tower. If you would like to see any of those books in person, send us an email at speccoll@utulsa.edu.

Happy Spring! The weather is getting warmer this week and the birds are chirping. Have you ever wondered what kinds of birds are chirping at you? If you did wonder, you probably googled it. When people used to want to identify birds (or plants or insects or lizards…), they had to look the bird up in a book.

In the mid-1800’s, many books were being published with color illustrations of birds. John James Audubon was publishing books from the 1820’s until almost 1840, and many more were showing up on the market. These books were rarely cheap, with a complete collection of Audubon’s illustrations costing subscribers $1,000 at the time. We have some copies of Audubon publications, but none of the famous illustrations from “The Birds of America”.

Shortly after Audubon was selling his illustrations to the affluent, Jacob Studer (1840-1904) published a much more affordable book of birds. Studer was a printer, lithographer, painter, and ornithologist active in Columbus, Ohio from the 1860’s to 1880’s. He published  “Studer’s Popular Ornithology: The Birds of North America” in 1878. The illustrations in this book are based on the art by Theodore Jaspar, an artist also from Colombus, Ohio. Studer wrote the extremely thorough descriptive text that accompanies Jaspar’s artwork.

Don’t you wish we still used fonts like this?

The copy in our collection is an original first edition and the outside is in delicate condition. The front cover is completely unattached from the rest of the book. Luckily, the illustrations inside are still immaculate, most of them with the original tissue paper in between the pages for protection.

The book includes 700 species of birds from North America, many of them with both male and female coloration and other life stages depicted in the paintings.

A bald eagle and chicks

Cormorants- notice the one in the back, under the water, with the fish!

Snowy Owl

Green Heron and others

This painting of a prairie hen, or a Pinnated Grouse, even depicts a person and his dog on his way to hunt the bird. The accompanying text for this bird mentions their rarity at the time and unfortunately they are even rarer today. Some of his descriptive text is questionable, and today a bird guide would contain no alliterative text and the accompanying photos would not include a hunter! The prairie chicken can still be found here in Oklahoma on our prairies and is protected in the United States.

Some of the text accompanying the Pinnated Grouse painting

Pinnated Grouse

If you would like to see this book or others like it from our collection, we are still open to TU students and affiliates. Our visitor policy can be found here. 

If you have a question or are not a TU affiliate and would like scans of something from our collections, do not hesitate to reach out to us as speccoll@utulsa.edu.