Rebekah Irwin loves to hear the sound of students hammering away on manual typewriters in the Special Collections room.
It means that the 100-year-old machines, and the feather quills and fountain pens that are also placed nearby, are doing exactly what Irwin acquired them to do—offer students and their professors the opportunity to reflect on the writing process and how it might change based on the tools they’re using.
As director and curator of Special Collections at Middlebury, a role Irwin has held since 2014, she gets to do what she likes to do best: acquire objects that tell stories, and then make those storytelling opportunities available to students.
“I like the idea of Special Collections at Middlebury as a laboratory,” says Irwin, a Wisconsin native who speaks in the low, melodious voice of an NPR classical music host and often punctuates her sentences by running her fingers through her mass of long, brown, curly hair.
Irwin wades through Middlebury’s undergraduate course catalog every semester, looking for classes that could include a hands-on learning visit to Special Collections in the syllabus, then invites faculty to consider bringing their students and building the experience into their coursework. It’s an activity she enjoys.
“The process of browsing the course catalog is kind of like studying a text. I’m asking myself where I can make interesting connections across the curriculum. For example, we offer a class called Pioneers of the Brain, which explores the history of neuroscience, and we have valuable antiquarian books on the history of psychology and medicine—even if those books are often inaccurate and deeply biased. I’m grateful our professors are willing to take time to expose their students to centuries-old books that detail bloodletting or the use of leeches to treat everything from fevers to depression. These medical treatments were understood at the time as cutting-edge, and many of the books were the very textbooks used in Middlebury classrooms. My hope is that students gain a new familiarity with the historic texts, but maybe a sense of humility too. Our antiquarian books lay bare for visiting students remarkable discoveries and human progress, but also discredited theories that seem quite appalling to us now. Everything has a past, even in the most forward-looking STEM fields.”
Irwin’s work is all about the long view, including—or especially—on Special Collections acquisitions. “We buy things that have staying power—and we bear a certain weight to choose things that are useful. If I acquire something and it sits on a shelf, unused, for a half century, that’s a greater risk than it being used too much. One of my many ambitions is that our collections are seen and used by each new generation of Middlebury students.”
Irwin is passionate about “demystifying” Special Collections at Middlebury, which is housed in the lower level of the Davis Family Library. Rather than guarding a forbidding collection behind locked doors, she’s made the space brightly lit and welcoming, and she encourages interaction with what’s housed there. “What I often tell students is that we are less like a museum and more like a petting zoo. Books don’t belong behind glass, they need to be activated by our interacting with them. We turn pages, run our hands across paper, and breathe in the smells of old books.”
Hence her creation of the writing lab project, which isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, but rather a way to understand the history of writing, and the history of the tools that writers used, not that long ago. “Most students, and even some faculty, have never used goose feather quills, fountain pens, or hundred-year-old manual typewriters,” she notes. “One philosophy professor required his students to reflect on what it felt like to write in these different ways, asking them, ‘How does the writing tool affect the thinking process? Are the noises distracting? How is it different from writing a paper on a laptop? Perhaps the tools really do matter? Is writing essentially different using a manual typewriter versus typing out a text message with your thumbs?’ It lends a deeper understanding to students about the ways to think about reading and writing, and how the many, many texts they send on their cell phones are connected to historic texts preserved in archives and libraries like ours.”
Irwin has always been interested in what she calls “quotidian objects, like pottery, furniture, and textiles that are both functional and beautiful.” She thinks books fit into this category too. She grew up in Milwaukee with few family heirlooms. Her mother was born in a German refugee camp after World War II; her family immigrated to the United States “with very few personal possessions,” she says. “I didn’t grow up in a family with antiques or collectibles. If you’re forced to leave your home to escape war or persecution, you generally don’t have time to take things with you. As an adult, I’ve surrounded myself with other people’s old things—their books, letters, old photographs, and archival family movies. I sometimes wonder if I’ve chosen this work as a way to restore what my family lost. I get to spend my days preserving the archival heirlooms of total strangers so that their stories survive.”
She’s currently on a quest to find books with lavishly embroidered covers and bindings that were produced by women and professional workshops from medieval times to the 1800s. “These books were wildly popular during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a bold historical figure that we don’t associate with needlepoint and embroidery. Books like these that were lovingly personalized and decorated can reveal to us what women were reading centuries ago,” she says. “Studying old books is very interdisciplinary. We’re interested in the book as literature, as history, and as art. We’re also interested in economics and commerce. ‘How much did it cost? Who could even afford such a luxury object?’ We’re concerned about the safety of our collections too, essentially, their chemistry—do our bindings contain arsenic, lead, or other toxic chemicals? Can we collaborate with scientists at Middlebury to analyze the proteins and DNA of our books made from animal skin? All of these things—the economics, the science, the artistry, and the literary aspects—are like a constellation around a text that makes the physical book a teaching object.”
Irwin has always been entranced by libraries. Growing up, she appreciated how libraries were places where book lovers could pull piles of books off shelves and curl up in a chair, versus museums, which, she says, “were a place with rules and guards and objects behind glass.” But she didn’t really think libraries were a place to work. She “didn’t make a connection about the occupational path of libraries” while she was considering a career.
Instead, Irwin earned her undergraduate degree in fine arts and art history, and as a student worked for a PBS station, assisting with the production of history documentaries. “It was the Ken Burns era,” she recalls, and she was sent to archives to scan historic photographs. She loved the work, and one of the archivists she collaborated with encouraged her to go to library school. She was finishing a master’s degree in education from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and heeded the suggestion, earning another MA in Library and Information Studies.
Irwin spent eight years in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library before joining Middlebury as head of Collections and Digital Initiatives, then becoming director and curator of Special Collections and Archives in 2014.
When she arrived, there was very little religious diversity in Special Collections—Middlebury’s history as a college founded by Protestant Congregationalists meant that there were many Protestant texts, and only one Catholic manuscript. During her tenure, she expanded the collection to better reflect global religious traditions, noting that Special Collections has gone from having “one Hebrew manuscript, a single Islamic manuscript, no Hindu texts to speak of, and a small collection of Buddhist works to now having dozens of each.”
“Every curator in Middlebury’s Special Collections has left their mark,” she says. Her hope is that her legacy is to have brought in books and texts that weren’t given a place here for the first two centuries of the College—things that always belonged, but that took centuries to arrive.
She’s also intent on ensuring that Special Collections is part of students’ lives, no matter what area of the liberal arts and sciences they study. She knows she’s succeeding: over the past academic year, Special Collections had over 2,000 student visits. Every student who participates in the orientation visit for First @ Midd, the College’s program for first-generation students, also visits Special Collections as part of their orientation. All newly arriving faculty, during their late summer orientation, also make a visit to the rare book room as part of their introduction to Middlebury.
And Irwin has learned to never take for granted what students know—and don’t know. During one class’s visit for the typewriter exercise, she saw a student sitting quietly at the machine. “I assumed the student was having a moment of repose before beginning the exercise, perhaps thinking about how a typewriter is less forgiving when we make mistakes, so I stepped over to see what was happening. He sheepishly admitted that he didn’t know how to put paper in the typewriter. And why should he know? It’s a 100-year-old, obsolete machine. I’m asking students to conduct experiments of a sort, to make observations, and to ask questions. Sometimes those experiments require antiquated writing tools, vintage cameras, manuscripts written on animal skin, or delicate books embroidered in gold and silver thread. Special Collections is a storehouse for rare books and archives, yes, but also a space to throw ourselves into the messy history and uncertain future of writing and reading, and our shared burden to preserve these tools and objects.”
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