BoltoniaBoltonia “When I get a little money, I buy books;

and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.“

— Desiderius ErasmusNumber 4 • December 2002

Finding Ghosts in Old Books

any bibliophiles enjoy search-ing for the identity of a previ-

ous owner whose signature or book-plate is found in an old volume. Even more fascinating is an inscription that may be related to a historical event. Both of these possibilities occurred when I obtained an 1866 biography of Benjamin Silliman (1779–1864), the noted professor of chemis try at Yale from 1802 to 1853.

The book was The Life of Benja-min Silliman, by George P. Fisher (1), and the signature of a previous owner on the flyleaf was “Mifflin Wistar.” I recognized the name Wistar; Casper Wistar (1761–1818), professor of chemistry and anatomy at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania medical school, is a frequent name in early American science.

I could not find a biography of Mifflin Wistar, but an obvious guess was that he might be the son of Casper. Biographies of Casper Wistar mention two sons and a daughter but do not give names. The biographies do observe, however, that Casper’s second wife was named Elizabeth Mifflin, and it was common practice to use a wife’s maiden surname as the name of a child. A letter to the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania brought back the information that Mifflin Wistar received an M.D. degree in 1832 (2). All these facts made me even more confident that my book had once be-longed to Casper Wistar’s son, Mif-flin. Then I found the inscription!

Portions of the book about Silli-man’s life consisted of quotations from a diary that Silliman kept. On page 107, the author quoted from the year 1802 when Silliman was attend-

ing classes at the University of Penn-sylvania medical school in Philadel-phia. Silliman described his profes-sors and mentioned that he had dined with Caspar Wistar and his wife: “Dr. Wistar treated me with marked con-sideration, and I was twice invited to dine at his hospitable table. . . . Dr Wistar was childless.” In the margin of that page, this quotation was bracketed and a handwritten note said, “My dear husband was not born until nine years afterward — H. T. Wistar.”

Now there was no doubt that my copy of Silliman’s biography once belonged to Mifflin Wistar, the son of the noted Casper Wistar, and that the handwritten margin comment was made by Mifflin’s wife. Her comment would place the birth of Mifflin in 1811 (nine years after 1802). This date would support Mifflin obtaining an M.D. degree in 1832, since one had to be 21 years old to be granted an M.D.

But the shocker came a year or so later! While reading in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, I was astonished to see the name “Mifflin Wistar Gibbs.” Both Mifflin and Wistar are unusual names; both together could hardly be a coincidence.

A study of the article (3) revealed that Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was one of Arkansas’s most prominent black citi-zens in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Following business successes in California and British Columbia, Gibbs studied law at Oberlin College and settled in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1871. Well educated and depend-able, he became a banker, lawyer, municipal judge, and leader in Re-publican politics. He held several presidential appointed positions, in-cluding four years as United States

Consul to Madagascar.

And—Gibbs was born in Phila-delphia in 1823. The common name, place and date make it extremely likely that at least one of Gibbs’s par-ents was a servant in the household of Casper Wistar. It seems likely that Gibbs’s mother was nurse to young Mifflin Wistar and named her own child after him. Mifflin Wistar would have been twelve years old at the time of the birth of the Gibbs child in 1823.

Late in his life Mifflin Wistar Gibbs published an autobiography. He did not mention the source of his name, but he did say that when he was eight years old (1831), his father died and he was “put out to hold and drive a doctor’s horse at three dollars per month (4).” It is quite likely that young Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was horseman for Mifflin Wistar during his last year of medical school (1831) and afterward as he began his prac-tice. —William D. Williams 11 Harding Dr. Searcy, AR 72143 billlill@swbell.net

Notes

1. Fisher, G. P. The Life of Benjamin Silliman, 2 vol; Charles Scribner: New York, 1866. 2. General Alumni Catalogue of the University of Pennsylvania; n.p., 1917. 3. Dillard, T. Arkansas Historical Quarterly 1975, 35, 307–333. 4. Gibbs, M. W. Shadow and Light, An Autobiography; M. W. Gibbs: Washington, DC, 1902; p 4.

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Boltonia Number 4— Page 2

Volumes in Volume: Books in Stock

This new column is intended to be an ongoing feature in Boltonia. Readers are encouraged to submit articles on their “favorite” bookstore or bookseller. —Ed.

n a previous issue of Boltonia (No. 3, p. 5) mention was made of “my

favorite bookstore,” but the actual store was not identified. This over-sight is hereby corrected with the reproduction of a bookmark from that store, “Books in Stock,” courtesy of the owner, Judi Stock.

“Books in Stock” opened in 1989, which does not qualify it for the unique list of bookstores that have been in business for over one hundred years. According to USA Today (Nov. 26, 2002, p. 7A.), “Otto’s Bookstore [in Williamsport, PA] celebrated its 125th birthday with a book signing featuring more than a dozen authors. It’s one of only 14 bookstores con-tinuously operating for more than a century, a trade publication reported in 2000. Otto’s has weathered three floods and two fires in at least seven downtown Williamsport locations it has occupied since 1877.” For more on Otto’s Bookstore, see their web page at www.ottobookstore.com.

The Moravian Book Shop in Bethlehem, PA, claims to be the “old-est bookstore in the world” and has been in continuous operation since 1745. Support of this claim can be found under “info” on their web page at www.moravianbookshop.com. —J. J. Bohning

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Othmer Library Memorials

onor a friend or provide a caring memorial through a tribute gift

to the Donald F. and Mildred Topp Othmer Library of Chemical History.

When you choose to make a trib-ute gift, the Chemical Heritage Foundation will send the person or family you designate a personal letter acknowledging this special contribu-tion from you. In our letter we will also share information about how this gift helps build a stronger library. For each gift of $50 or more, a bookplate commemorating your gift will be placed in a book in the library collec-tion. For further information, please contact the Development Office of the Chemical Heritage Foundation at 215-925-2222 x 328 or contact the Bolton Society Secretary. Your gift is tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. —Elizabeth Swan

Collecting Collections; Chemistry Illustrated in Three Dimensions*

he need to represent data or to show objects in three dimensions

is a problem common to science and to geometry. Illustrations that fold to form three-dimensional structures can be found, for example, in a few edi-tions of Euclid and in other geometry books. Less well known than the ge-ometry books are technical publica-tions that attempt to show data or objects in three dimensions. This note describes the publications with three-dimensional representations related to chemistry that are known to the author. All of the publications spe-cifically cited below are in the author’s collection.

The illustration of complex phase diagrams in three dimensions is the subject of a 1910 publication (1) by a professor of chemistry, R. Kremann, at Graz. Contained in a small portfo-lio are a 36-page booklet and five printed-cardboard-and-string models (zusammenlegbaren Raummodellen) to be folded together. The subjects of the five models are the systems: 1) AgNO3 - H2O 2) MgSO4 - K2SO4 - H2O 3) Pb - Sn - Bi 4) Salt, water, and two alcohols 5) NaCl - NH4HCO3 - NaHCO3 - NH4Cl

The cardboard of the models in my copy is now very brittle, and assembly of the models is no longer possible. I do not know anything of R. Kremann and I did not find his name in any standard history of chemistry texts.

Crystal systems and structures are obvious subjects for attempts to use three-dimensional representations, and a variety of means have been used to illustrate publications on crystallography and chemical struc-tures. The only 19th century publica-tion known to the author is the treatise by Jordan with colored “nets” on folding plates. The nets are figures to cut out and fold together with glued

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tabs. The first edition of Jordan’s book, which I have not seen, has the nets printed on cardboard. Subsequent editions (2), as a part of Murby’s Sci-ence Series, have the nets printed on folding plates in a small format. The introductory section of Jordan’s book provides a contemporary summary of the different names applied by various authors (Dana, Naumann, Mohs, and Weiss and Rose) to the six basic crystal systems. Jordan uses Nau-mann’s names and assigns a color to each system for the plates. Today the names originally used by Danaex-cepting cubic is often substituted for isometricare typically the standard ones, if the trigonal is lumped in with the hexagonal, for the six crystal systems that represent the dominant symmetry elements of structures.

Another approach to help the stu-dent of crystal structure was the in-clusion of stereo cards with a book. In 1921, Paul Groth published a book (3) with 25 cards of stereo pairs (stereo-skopbilder) in two pockets fastened to the paste-downs of the book. The images were made from photographs taken of ball-and-stick models. In addition to the stereo cards, Groth’s book contains 962 illustrations in the text and four plates, two of which are in color. Although Groth’s research is cited in Lima-de-Faria’s Historical Atlas of Crystallography,** his text with the stereo cards is not noted in this historical bibliography.

Small publications (4,5) edited by Max von Laue and R. von Mises with stereo pairs appeared in 1926 and 1936. Both are in the form of a small book-like portfolio with a booklet in one pocket mounted on the front board and with 24 stereo cards in two pockets mounted on the rear board. The text is in German and English. The distraction associated with the rods and wires in the images in Groth’s earlier book is noted, and von Laue and von Mises used purely geometrical constructions created mathematically to draw the stereo pairs. A reference to the mathemati-

cal means used to create the stereo pairs is given.

Two more modern texts with stereo pairs on the printed pages are the books by A. F. Wells (6) and Ivan Bernal et al. (7). The book by Wells includes 16 photographic plates with numerous stereo pairs and provides instructions to make a stereo viewer from two lenses. However, the illus-trations are easy to fuse into three-dimensional images without using a viewer by just relaxing the eyes. The book by Bernal has upwards of 100 drawings of stereo pairs, created by a computer program, in the text and a stereo viewer is provided in a pocket on the rear paste-down. As the title suggests, the emphasis is on fun-damental concepts of symmetry and their application to understanding chemical structures. —Ronald K. Smeltzer 162 Cedar Lane Princeton, NJ 08540 rksmeltzer@att.net

Notes The books listed below were accu-

mulated over many years, more or less at random. I did not know specif- ically of their existence. There may be more; readers who know of others are invited to extend this list. 1. Kremann, R. Leitfaden der graphischen Chemie; Gebrüder Borntraeger: Berlin, 1910; 36-page booklet and five models. 2. Jordan, J. B. Elementary Crystal-lography [cover: Elements of Crystallography]; Thomas Murby & Co.: London, 1873, and revised edi-tion (n.d.); six folding plates of struc-tures. 3. Groth, P. Elemente der Physika-lischen und Chemischen Krystal-lographie; R. Oldenbourg: Munchen und Berlin,1921; 25 stereo cards. 4. von Laue, M, von Mises, R., Eds. Stereoskopbilder von Kristallgittern (Stereoscopic Drawings of Crystal Structures) Vol. I; Julius Springer: Berlin, 1926; 43-page booklet and 24 stereo cards.

5. von Laue, M, von Mises, R., Eds. Stereoskopbilder von Kristallgittern- (Stereoscopic Drawings of Crystal Structures) , Vol. II; Julius Springer: Berlin, 1936; 56-page booklet and 24 stereo cards. 6. Wells, A. The Third Dimension in Chemistry; Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1956. 7. Bernal, I.; Hamilton, W.; Ricci, J. Symmetry– A Stereoscopic Guide for Chemists; W. H. Freeman: San Francisco, 1972; with viewer. _______________ * Presented at the Bolton Society Meeting, October 30, 2002. ** Lima-de-Faria, J., ed. Historical Atlas of Crystallography; Kluwer: Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1990.

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Eventual Events March 24, 2003: 225th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, New Orleans, LA, Division of the History of Chemistry. Antiquarian Chemistry Book Col-lectors and Their Public Collec-tions IV (A symposium organized by Herbert T. Pratt and sponsored by the Bolton Society). Papers will be presented by Katherine Kominis (Lyman C. Newell collection at Bos-ton University), Daniel Lewis (Wil-liam Cole collection at the Hunt-ington Library), Herbert T. Pratt (James Young and John Ferguson alchemy collection at Glasgow University), Robin Rider (Dennis Duveen and William Cole collections at the University of Wis consin-Madison), Elizabeth Swan ("Whose book? Provenance: the Paper Trail of Ownership”) and Laird Ward (“Growing Up to be a Chemist: A Young Boy’s Memories”). April 21, 2003: Bolton Society Bian-nual Meeting, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, PA. The business meeting will be followed by a “show-and-tell” session.

Boltonia Number 4— Page 4

Raphael Meldola –Cycling Professor

On Student Numbers, the Image of Chemistry,

Technical Recruitment and Advice to a Worst

Enemy in 1900

his article describes a letter written by a chemist to a

physicist in England in 1900. The writer had witnessed “the miserably backward state of English chemical industries” at an exhibition in Paris. The experience drew him to view the image of chemis try at that time as being unable to generate interest among potential chemists seeking a technical career.

In 1980, for £3.50, I purchased a letter I had found in a dusty box-file of unsorted letters, shelved at knee-height in a well-established London bookshop near Piccadilly Circus. The overall search had been a somewhat hurried affair, typical of some book-hunting forays in London, squeezed in at the end of a seemingly “long” day, after the close of a scientific meeting and whilst following a preselected tortuous route by foot and the Underground to King’s Cross railway station for the train home to York.

Initially, by my way of thinking, the letter was an interesting one —later research proved it to be fasci-nating. Ultimately, the cost of the item was trivial when measured against the time spent tracking down the information required to place the letter. Along these lines I hope this article will encourage other Boltoni-ans to pursue items of provenance and publish their findings for the potential benefit of interested minds, particu-larly so, those belonging to our friends the biographers!

The letter covers all four sides of a folded sheet of paper measuring 226 mm x 180 mm overall. The corre-spondent gives a telling account of having witnessed the performance of English chemical industries at an in-

ternational exhibition and how this, seemingly, could be linked to student numbers of the day.

Professor Raphael Meldola (l) was 51 years of age, when from Sycamore Villa, West St. in Bognor, Sussex, England, he penned this 500-word letter simply dated “Sept. 23/00,” a Sunday, to “My dear Thompson.” Silvanus Phillips Thompson (2), pro-fessor of physics, was his friend and Finsbury College colleague, two years his junior.

When reading of Meldola’s then recent novice cycling escapades, in-cluding riding with “my brother-in-law on a tandem which is very differ-ent to riding on a single machine, although we cover the ground easily at 12 -15 m. per hour,” it should be noted that as a young man he was small and not fond of games, being myopic and never robust (3,4).

Following on from Meldola and his wife jointly wishing Mrs. Thomp -son a speedy recovery from “your let-ter says ‘strained’ ancle [sic]—not ‘sprained,’ so I suppose it is not very severe,” perhaps the result of a cy-cling accident, for “we hear of such serious accidents from cycling now,” and the telling of Mrs. Meldola being able to “walk for short distances fairly well without a stick” leads me to wonder if both ladies had suffered cycling mishaps. Either way, the per-ils of cycling at a time when both it and car ownership were still relatively new and adventurous forms of travel can be readily imagined.

After his experiences in Paris, Meldola, who attached “no impor-tance whatever to mere numbers” was “surprised that we get any students at all!” into his chemistry department, adding “one result of the Exhibition has been to bring out into painful prominence the miserably backward state of English chemical industries.”

Some 15 to 20 or so years earlier Meldola had made discoveries of then new dyestuffs, including the first oxazine dyestuff, Meldola’s Blue, 1879, and Alkali Blue XG, 1883 (5), but this work had not been taken up in

England and had instead been used by the dye industry in Germany (6,7). Meldola states, “There is no doubt we are a languishing nation as regards chemical industry & Germany is at the head of European nations in this direction.” Interestingly, just three years after this letter, H. G. Wells mirrored this assessment with “the most efficient nation in the World today is believed to be Germany (8).”

It was Meldola’s opinion that fail-ure to continue industrial research had led to the downfall of the English dye industry (9). In such circumstances, credit is due to him for promo ting English entries at the exhibition where he “managed to do well for our exhibitors in the way of Grand Prix & Medals but they did not deserve to be put on the same platform as the Ger-mans or even the French.”

Asked by the French commis -sioner general, M. Picard, to prepare a short report (for the official report) on what he considered to be the most noteworthy advances in British chemical industry since the last exhi-bition, ten years earlier, Meldola “could not honestly record any real discovery of industrial importance made by England.” He continues, “Nothing of the nature of original discovery was to be seen. . .all our ‘advance’ seems simply to have been made by increasing the scale of pro-duction.” In telling words he relates how in soaps, one of “our strongest points,” that an exhibitor received the Grand Prix “simply for their colossal turn out.”

In researching this letter, I turned to Henry Carrington Bolton (10) for advice. The masterful bibliographies listed under Technical Chemistry, during Meldola’s lifetime up to 1900, has 95 titles, of which 43 (45 percent) were originally published in German, ten in French, seven in England and five in the United States, overall a somewhat novel and interesting com-parative!

As a professor of chemistry, Meldola saw the performance and projected image of England’s indus-

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trial chemistry influencing potential career recruitment to the point where he writes, “I do not wonder that par-ents wishing to launch their sons into a ‘technical career’ should avoid chemistry.” Telling words indeed.

It would, no doubt, be illuminat-ing to have Thompson’s reply. I searched in the box-file at a later date, without success, particularly to Mel-dola’s final sentence, written by a professor of chemistry to his friend and colleague, a professor of physics, “I would not advise my worst enemy to make his son a technical chemist in England now.” Some advice, some letter, and. . .some hobby! —Reuben B. Girling Badger Hill, York, YO10 5HW, United Kingdom girling@onetel.net.uk

Notes

1. Eyre, J. V.; Rodd, E. H. in British Chemist; Findlay, A., Mills, W. H., Eds.; The Chemical Society: London, 1947; pp 96–125 with portrait. 2. Dictionary of Scientific Biography; Gillespie, C. C., Ed.; Charles Scribner: New York, 1976; Vol. 13, pp 356–7. 3. See Ref. 1. 4. Webb, K. R. Chem. Brit. 1977, 345–348. 5. See Ref. 4. 6. See Ref. 1. 7. Schuster, A.; Shipley, A. E. Britain’s Heritage of Science; Constable & Co., Ltd.: London, 1917. 8. Wells, H. G., Mankind in the Mak-ing; Chapman & Hall: London, 1903. 9. See Ref. 1. 10. Bolton, H. C. A Select Bibliogra-phy of Chemistry 1492–1892; Smith-sonian Institution: Washington, DC, 1893; First Supplement 1492-1897; Smithsonian Institution: Washington, DC 1899; Second Supplement 1492-1903, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1904.

Raphael Meldola’s letter. Top: page 1 (left) and page 4 (right)

Bottom: page 2 (left) and page 3 (right)

Boltonia Number 4 — Page 6

Reader’s Retorts: On Memories

Provoked by Elliott Alexander

read Ned Heindel’s offering in Boltonia (Number 3, p. 1) with

interest and pleasure. It provoked three small memories, tucked away in their cubbyholes that had not been dusted off for a very long time. I, too, remember the arrival of the Alexander book; it was the first or-ganic text I had seen stressing mecha-nisms which did not offer balloon-encircled “H” and “OH” to indicate the reaction pathway of the dehydra-tion process. I was much impressed by the book, not least for its conden-sation of so much significant material into a modest number of pages. Early in the 1960s a major pub-lishing firm considered updating Al-exander’s original work with a new edition, and somehow I was part of a small group invited to consider the desirability of such a project. We checked the book for errors and filled several legal-size sheets, using both sides, border to border, with tele-graphic-style language.

It became clear that the book had never been proofed. The explanation was eventually forthcoming and is implicit in Ned’s narrativethe plane crash and the push to get the manu-script in print despite the absence of the author to proof his book resulted in the omission of this customary and essential step. Two other memories, unrelated to Alexander’s book, also surfaced. Mention was made of Professor Wil-liam Mosher at the University of Delaware. At one time I wanted to discuss some research interests with one of his students and felt it would be appropriate to obtain Mosher’s approval. I met him for the first time at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society, and we shared a lunch. He proved to be a thoroughly extroverted, appreciably overweight, cheerful, and delightful person.

Some years earlier I had met his brother, Harry Mosher, at Stanford University. (We shared an interest in some highly unorthodox Grignard additions to ketones; I don’t believe an explanation for these results has ever been published.) Harry Mosher was thin, soft-spoken, and highly reserved. He was also a charming person but, in almost all physical ways, the very antithesis of his brother. This became, and remains, the single most striking example in my experience of how different two siblings could be. Among other topics, William Mo-sher and I talked about the “care and feeding” of graduate students. He pointed out that they could be divided into two categories: those who re-quired appreciable attention to extract their best laboratory efforts and those who needed much less attention. He went on to say that there is also a very rare breed of graduate student, a kind that you almost never see, one that makes you realize that the best thing you can do for such a student is to “get out of his way.” It seems he had one such student at the time and he identified him by nameNed Heindel. —Jack Stocker Dept. of Chemistry University of New Orleans New Orleans, LA 70148 Stocker also sent the following excerpt from an advertising flyer mailed by Edward R. Hamilton, Bookseller, Falls Village, CT. Ed. Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, by John Michell. Offers a window into the lives of 22 amazing, and sometimes inspiring, oddballs, repre-senting the widest range of eccentric-ity, from Cyrus Teed, who believes the earth is a hollow shell we live in, to the bibliomaniac who filled six houses entirely with books. 24 photos. 240 pages. Black Dog and Leventhal. $9.98

Serendipity n 1991, I bought a small (64 pages, 5 x 6 inches) volume, Nomencla-

ture of Chemistry, published in Ful-ton, New York, in 1862. Its author, A. Boothby, B.A., was a “teacher of the Natural Sciences” at Falley Seminary. The book was dedicated to J. D. Fletcher Slee, B.A., professor of Greek and German and a colleague of Boothby’s. So far, I have not been able to learn anything more about either Boothby or Slee. What caught my attention, though, was the pencil-written presentation on the flyleaf:

Hon. Arthur McArthur with the Highest

Regards of the Author July 1862

I have found considerable infor-mation about MacArthur. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on June 2, 1845, and entered the Union Army in August 1862 as a first lieutenant when he was only 17 years old. He saw action at several out-of-the-way places and in the Atlanta campaign. For bravery during the battle of Mis sionary Ridge (Chatta-nooga) in 1863, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Choosing the military as a career, he rose through the ranks, was promoted to brigadier general in 1892, and to lieutenant general in 1909. He retired in 1909 and died three years later. I often wonder about the impact that teachers like Boothby have on their students. Assuming that young Arthur was a student of Boothby’s, I like to believe that the impact was considerable. Arthur MacArthur's son, Douglas (born 1882), followed in his father’s footsteps and also had a brilliant military career, ultimately rising to five-star general. He is best known for his winning the war with Japan in 1945, his disagreements with President Truman in 1955 as how best to prosecute the war with Korea, his ultimate dismissal by Truman, his hero’s welcome and his ticker-tape parade in New York, and his farewell

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address before the joint houses of Congress. It was here that he closed his speech with the immortal words, “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

If Professor Boothby had ever so small an impact on Arthur MacAr-thur, and through him on his son, Douglas, I believe that, as a teacher, he would have been very, very proud. —Herbert T. Pratt

F F F F F Antiquarian Chemistry Book Collectors and

Their Public Collections III

he Bolton Society’s third half-day symposium was again co-

hosted by the History of Chemistry Division at the American Chemical Society’s 224th meeting in Boston and attracted more than 25 attendees. Presenters described personal collec-tions now housed at Cornell, Purdue, and Wesleyan Universities.

The first speaker, David Corson of Cornell University, described the extraordinary Dennis Duveen Collec-tion of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier material. Duveen’s collection of 2,000 printed and 300 manuscript items includes Lavoisier’s personal library of almost every printing of his publications; 671 of the volumes were from the personal libraries of An-toine-Laurent and his wife. Marie-Anne Lavoisier was responsible for the preservation of most of the Lavoisier items that are now in the United States and France, Dennis Duveen having acquired this part of the collection through a bookseller in Paris.

Marie-Anne’s materials include a description of her efforts to regain Antoine’s library and other posses-sions. Works in her distinctive bind-ings includes rare offprints of Lavoi-sier’s publications, and her drawings and proof sheets for Traité Élémen-taire de Chimie includes a compre-hensive set of preliminary drawings

hensive set of preliminary drawings for the copper plates.

Suzy Taraba then described the Wesleyan University collections of John Johnston, Wilbur Olin Atwater, and Rufus Phillips Williams. Johns-ton published an early chemistry textbook and Williams a laboratory manual for high school students. Williams’s personal collection arrived at Wesleyan via a sequence of un-usual events, but no money changed hands. Volumes from the Williams’s collection are easily identifiable by book plates that include the designa-tion “scientist, author, teacher.”

The Melvin Guy Mellon Collec-tion at Purdue University was de-scribed by Bartow Culp. Mellon is best known for his contributions to the design of chemical laboratory buildings and to the discipline of chemical literature. In 1919, Marion Sparks, chemical librarian at the Uni-versity of Illinois, published the first work to deal exclusively with chemi-cal literature, a pamphlet entitled Chemical Literature and its Use. Sparks’s work was considered to be the first practical book on chemical literature, in comparison with Ost-wald’s earlier work, Grundriss der Allgemeinen Chemie, which was broader and more theoretical in na-ture. Mellon followed Sparks’s work in 1925 with Chemical Publica-tions,Their Nature and Use. Mellon’s book was published in successive editions until 1982, the latest edition including a discussion of computer-ized databases.

By the end of 2003 we anticipate that this symposium series will cover some 25 collectors and their collec-tions, and we hope to publish this series of presentations in due course. —Elizabeth Swan

Collecting Collections: Chemurgy

thought my fellow Bolton Society members would like to know how I

have built up a collection of books on a single topic. Earlier this year, I was thinking of writing a book about chemurgy as a proto-ecological enter-prise that championed sustainability. I had first considered writing about chemurgy in 1987, but I failed to get full funding from the National En-dowment for the Humanities. I soon became aware that very few of the classic books on chemurgy are readily available in the United Kingdom. The obvious solution was to build my own collection.

I compiled a list from the online catalogs of the Library of Congress, New York Public Library (the won-derfully named Catnyp) and the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania. I then used the excel-lent “Bookfinder” at www.book-finder.com to find copies of these books for sale. This site has a link to the Advanced Book Exchange (www.abebooks.com) whose entries give details of the bookseller’s ad-dress (including e-mail). A short e-mail to the bookseller expressing in-terest was usually enough to confirm the availability of the book and agree on the details of mailing it to me.

Generally speaking, the books were inexpensive. I rarely paid more than $15 and never more than $25, but being in the UK, the postage cost inevitably added another $5 to $10. The booksellers were usually helpful in finding ways to keep the mailing costs down. If the book is fairly small, it will often be delivered by airmail, even if it has been sent by surface.

As a result, I now have a collec-tion of twelve books on chemurgy, ranging from the bombastically titled Farmward March: Chemurgy Takes Command, to the more prosaic Crops in Peace and War: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1950–1951. Their condi-tion is generally very good, but the outside of my copy of Southern Hori-

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zons is foxed (and the dust jacket is missing). My most disappointing (and most expensive) buy was a copy of The Farm Chemurgic, which turned out to be a paperback copy, presented by the Chemical Foundation.

It is interesting to note that some of these books were presentation copies. Crops in Peace and War is stamped “From Sen. Hubert H. Hum-phrey, Minnesota.” A nice bookplate at the front of Cellulose: The Chemi-cal that Grows announces that it was presented by the Celanese Corpora-tion of America in 1953, evidently to Paine, Webber, Jackson and Curtis of Los Angeles. Best of all are Farm-ward March and the oddly entitled Chemivision, both of which are in-scribed and autographed by William J. Hale (One wonders if he actually sold any copies!), the former to Marie Goeddeke (April 21, 1942) and the latter to Leland J. Sloan (November 21, 1952). If anyone can shed more light on these recipients of Hale’s generosity, I would be interested to know.

This collecting activity illustrates how the World Wide Web has trans-formed book collecting. What would have taken years—if it had been possible at all—pre-Internet, was wrapped up in a couple of months. —Peter J. T. Morris National Museumof Sci. & Ind. p.morris@nmsi.ac.uk

A complete list of the chemurgy books acquired by Peter will appear in the next issue of Boltonia . Another good search engine for antiquarian books is www.addall.com/used.—Ed.

In Memoriam: William A. Cole

1914–2002

istorians of chemistry and the University of Wisconsin-Madi-

son libraries lost a good and generous friend with the death this summer of William A. Cole. Cole, like his wife, Nora, a graduate of the University of

California-Berkeley, taught high-school chemis try in California for many years. With Nora he retired to a suburb of Seattle, the better to pursue his abiding passion for chemistry books. Their collection of 18th- and 19th-century chemistry books and manuscripts, assembled over decades, has been described as magnificent. William Cole’s Chemical Literature, 1700-1860: A Bibliography with An-notations, Detailed Descriptions, Comparisons and Locations (Man-sell: London, 1988), the product of “laborious, accurate, and extremely time-consuming scholarship,” has proven an indispensable tool for col-lectors, librarians, and historians (1).

Through the generosity of Wil-liam and Nora Cole, we at the Uni-versity of Wisconsin-Madison are proud to make available to scholars the Cole Collection. The last ship-ment has just arrived, and includes Cole’s notes for a second edition of his bibliography and the records of his careful scholarship and keen col-lector’s eye.

Even as Cole’s health failed, his enthusiasm for history of chemistry never flagged, and he could recall with ease and humor the smallest detail of a prized book in his col-lection. John Neu, bibliographer emeritus of history of science at Mad-ison and a longtime friend of the Coles, has called attention to the re-search value of a collection so rich in multiple editions and manuscript ma-terials and has paid tribute to the “quiet enthusiasm and…patient de-termination that enabled the collector to assemble such an impressive array of books (2).” —Robin E. Rider Univ. Wisconsin-Madison rrider@library.wisc.edu

Notes 1. Neville, R. G. Isis 1990, 81, 156–7, on 157. 2. Neu, J. “The William A. Cole Col-lection,” Messenger Magazine, Friends of the University of Wiscon-sin-Madison Libraries, 1999 (38), 6–7 on 7.

BOLTONIA is the newsletter of the Bolton Society, an organization of chemical bib-liophiles. As a subsidiary of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Bolton Society promotes the individual love for and col-lection of all types of material related to the history and development of the chemi-cal sciences and related technologies. It also advances the cause of the Donald F. and Mildred Topp Othmer Library of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. For more information on the Bolton Society, contact the Secretary. Founder and Chief Bibliophile: Herbert T. Pratt 23 Colesbery Drive New Castle, DE 19720-3201 302-328-7273 htprtcche@aol.com Chief Bibliophile Elect: Ned Heindel Department of Chemistry Lehigh University 6 E. Packer Ave. Bethlehem, PA 18015 610-758-3464 ndh0@lehigh.edu Secretary: Elizabeth Swan Director, Othmer Library Chemical Heritage Foundation 315 Chestnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19106-2702 215-873-8226 eswan@chemheritage.org Newsletter Editor: James J. Bohning Department of Chemistry Lehigh University 6 E. Packer Ave. Bethlehem, PA 18015 610-758-3582 jjba@lehigh.edu

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