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Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections and Archives in Burke Library, recently published “Baseball, Beards, Bands, and the Babes: Michigan’s House of David Religious Community” in Ephemera Journal, the quarterly publication of the Ephemera Society of America.

Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections and Archives in Burke Library, recently published “Baseball, Beards, Bands, and the Babes: Michigan’s House of David Religious Community” in Ephemera Journal, the quarterly publication of the Ephemera Society of America.

Leigh Gialanella ’15 will be continuing along the path that she started at Hamilton by pursuing master’s degrees at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor this fall. Gialanella, a history major with dual Hispanic studies and anthropology minors, hopes through her studies to specialize in Archives and Records Management (ARM) and Preservation of Information (PI).

In the age of eReaders and online libraries, the story of books gets lost. Not the story within the book, which is arguably more permanent, but rather the story contained on its faded pages, in its stretched spine, on its battered covers. Hamilton’s Burke Library has an impressive selection of rare books and other special collections; of particular note are the Ezra Pound Archive and the abundance of Adirondack-related acquisitions. Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections and Archives, is currently cataloguing a recently procured collection: The John Quinn and Jeanne Robert Foster Library, a generous gift from Jim and Carol McCord.

“Mummy Jum: The Shaker-Pilgrim Encounter of 1817-1818,” an article by Director and Curator of Special Collections and Archives Christian Goodwillie was published in Communal Societies. He also co-edited a three-volume set that is part of a series on communal societies.

You never know what you’re going to find in the Hamilton College Archives. With a collection as extensive and varied as Hamilton’s, it can sometimes be months or even years before documents in the collection are fully processed and understood. For example, Special Collections Coordinator Mark Tillson recently unearthed a file of letters from noted suffragist Charlotte Wilbour, wife of Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour, whose papers the College also possesses.

While every book in Burke Library features treasures of its own, the holdings in Special Collections and Archives are the library’s gems. Three major collections anchor the department: the Beinecke Collection on the Lesser Antilles; the works and papers of poet Ezra Pound, Class of 1905; and imprints by and about American communal societies.