Video

Speaker(s): Ian McCallum,Melissa Moreton,Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Related events: Bookbindings Academy 2025 – Day 1

Releated Working Group(s):

Collection: Bookbindings Academy

Recorded: January 17, 2025

Abstract:

Printed in Basel in 1645 and bound in blind-tooled leather, a copy of Buxtorf’s Hebrew Lexicon made its way to the Americas, where it was eventually owned by preacher David Brainerd (d. 1747) and used as a source for sermon-writing. Brainerd lived among the Lunaape (Lenape or Delaware) communities in what is today New Jersey. When his well-used book broke some time in the early 1740s, it was repaired, likely by Lunaape women, who covered it with a brain-tanned and painted beaverskin overcover which has stabilized it to the present day. This presentation traces our careful approach to the study of this book, which is both a settler colonial object as well as an Indigenous belonging.

Now in the collection of Princeton University Libraries Special Collections, the book has been visited annually by Munsee Delaware (Lunaape) community members in an ongoing, shared process of learning about its history and its relationships to that community. These collaborations have also facilitated work in progress with Anishinaabe communities on a birchbark book, which will be described in brief. This lecture provides a methodological overview of the collaborative approach to research on Indigenous books from Turtle Island (North America) currently underway as part of the Mellon-funded project, “Hidden Stories: New Approaches to the Local and Global History of the Book.” The project (https://hiddenstories.library.utoront..., co-located at the University of Toronto and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), offers methodological insights into collaborative work that centers the object or belonging within a web of relations.

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