Contemporary Collectors Research Articles

Bee species richness through time in an urbanizing landscape of the southeastern United States.

Compared to non-urban environments, cities host ecological communities with altered taxonomic diversity and functional trait composition. However, we know little about how these urban changes take shape over time. Using historical bee (Apoidea: Anthophila) museum specimens supplemented with online repositories and researcher collections, we investigated whether bee species richness tracked urban and human population growth over the past 118 years. We also determined which species were no longer collected, whether those species shared certain traits, and if collector behavior changed over time. We focused on Wake County, North Carolina, United States where human population size has increased over 16 times over the last century along with the urban area within its largest city, Raleigh, which has increased over four times. We estimated bee species richness with occupancy models, and rarefaction and extrapolation curves to account for imperfect detection and sample coverage. To determine if bee traits correlated with when species were collected, we compiled information on native status, nesting habits, diet breadth, and sociality. We used non-metric multidimensional scaling to determine if individual collectors contributed different bee assemblages over time. In total, there were 328 species collected in Wake County. We found that although bee species richness varied, there was no clear trend in bee species richness over time. However, recent collections (since 2003) were missing 195 species, and there was a shift in trait composition, particularly lost species were below-ground nesters. The top collectors in the dataset differed in how often they collected bee species, but this was not consistent between historic and contemporary time periods; some contemporary collectors grouped closer together than others, potentially due to focusing on urban habitats. Use of historical collections and complimentary analyses can fill knowledge gaps to help understand temporal patterns of species richness in taxonomic groups that may not have planned long-term data.

Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema by David Church (review)

Reviewed by: Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema by David Church Erin Wiegand David Church. Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema. New York. Bloomsbury Press, 2016. 296 pages, $27.85. While going through a collection of sexploitation film fan magazines as part of my PhD dissertation research, I was flummoxed by a number of photo spreads supposedly taken on the sets of films I'd never heard of and couldn't find any information about. It wasn't until reading David Church's Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2016), that I realized these films had, in fact, been invented. Church explains that a few adult magazines of the 1960s and 70s would recycle production stills from different films (or use newly shot photographs), combining them with a phony synopsis for a film that never existed. In so doing, he argues, these magazines underscored the relationship between adult films and their paratextual framework: first, such pictorial features mirrored commonplace practices of the exploitation film industry, which would itself frequently re-use old footage as well as insert newly shot scenes in creating new product for release. But also, for contemporary collectors of vintage adult-film magazines—as well as for historians and researchers—these magazines' coverage of films that either are now lost or never existed in the first place also invokes an erotic sense of "tease," of desire deferred, that is similar to the pleasures of pornographic films themselves. Such insights about the particular desires stoked by vintage porn's "material legacies" (to quote the book's subtitle) are at the heart of Disposable Passions, which looks at the contemporary collecting, distribution, and appreciation of pre-1980s sex films. Of course, Church does not only look at paratextual items like fan magazines, but also examines the ways in which vintage porn's materiality—that is, imaginings or evidence of its physical existence as a film print—adds to its erotic value for contemporary fans. The book is thus well situated in recent scholarship around adult film, which seems to have growing interest in material cultures. Church's analysis throughout the book rests on Linda Williams' argument (particularly in her 2008 book Screening Sex) that the essence of erotic cinema—and eroticism in general—is a tension between concealment and revelation, or 'itch' and 'scratch'. This idea undergirds not only the form and function of sex films themselves, but also their history, as censorship laws and cultural standards shift and determine what can and cannot be shown on screen. This is, by now, not a particularly new concept—but what Church does in Disposable Passions is to apply the conceal/reveal thesis to several new areas of study, demonstrating this same dynamic at work in the enjoyment of vintage porn by contemporary fans; the content and editorial direction of 1960s sexploitation film magazines; the collecting and curation of vintage porn in archives; and the re-release of these films on home video. Part of what makes vintage porn appeal to its fans, Church argues, is that these films have largely been seen as 'disposable passions', and discarded, banned, neglected, or otherwise concealed from view; fans (and historians) thus have to work to 'rediscover' and reveal them. Disposable Passions is in some ways a companion to Church's previous work Grindhouse Nostalgia (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), which examines how exploitation films (primarily of the 1970s) have been reimagined by contemporary fans: what he calls "retrosploitation." In both books, Church posits that as once-ephemeral, hard-to-find, low-culture films become more widely accessible via video and then DVD, nostalgia operates as a mechanism to regulate the connoisseurship of the fan culture around them. Most importantly, Church finds that nostalgia can fuel both ironic readings of older texts (an appreciation of a film's outmodedness, quaint sensibilities, or 'badness') and sincere appreciations of films that fans champion as having withstood the test of time and which still have the capacity to thrill and entertain. In other words, fans can use nostalgia to enjoy older exploitation films both because of and in spite of their age...

La colección artística de Josefa Marín (1807-1871), condesa viuda de Velle

El artículo se centra en el estudio de la colección de Josefa Marín, condesa viuda de Velle, una de las de mayor interés del reinado de Isabel II y que fue muy diferente a las formadas por otros de sus contemporáneos. El análisis del archivo familiar y de otras fuentes diversas ofrece información sobre su colección, hasta ahora inédita, y permite ponderar la relevancia de esta, así como conocer la personalidad e intereses estéticos de esta coleccionista.

"Anything honest to sell books": Walt Whitman and the Autograph Monster

Walt Whitman claimEd to have rigid rule for dealing with requests, but towards end of his life he had become well known among contemporaries for his cautious approach to swarming signature seekers.1 During mid-nineteenth centur y, persistence of what Whitman called autograph monster-a growing number of men and women who begged and often lied their way to signatures from nation's leading poets and novelists-signaled America's rapidly increasing appetite for collecting and consuming celebrity personalities (WWWC, 3:496). For Whitman, this monster was simply a fact of life. Not a day but hunter is on my trail-chases me, dogs me! . . . Their subterfuges, deceptions, hypocrisies, are curious, nasty, yes damnable, W hitman complained to Horace Traubel. No request was to be met naively; even a letter from a young girl could bear the grin of deceiver, old subterfuge poet often met with a laugh (WWWC, 2:82-83; 3:410-411).2 Monsters were everywhere.Whitman's life would become punctuated by encounters with these persistent collectors. have no mail today except Whitman tells Traubel in 1888: an mail, yes, and that I get every day. They all write me-hundreds write-strangers-they all beg autographs-tell funny tales about it, give funny reasons (some of them are pitiful-some of them are almost piteous)-I practically never answer them anymore. It takes about all strength I have nowadays to keep flies off (WWWC, 1:366). Though would never become as revered by contemporary collectors as those of signers of Declaration of Independence-signatures that inspired their own cult following-the poet's canny management of his signature would earn him a unique place among literary professionals. relationship with monster was markedly ambivalent, and, as I will argue, that ambivalence had a tremendous impact on design and marketing of his final books. Like so many brands before and after him, Whitman would place a signature-his signature, written by hand or reproduced mechanically-at center of his commercial identity. Spanning from 1868 British edition of Poems by Walt Whitman, first Whitman-book to include a facsimile of poet's autograph, to 1892 deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass, signature-produced in and on his books and requested every day through mail-became increasingly prominent marker of his personality and literary work.This essay traces W hitman's relationship to culture of collecting during nineteenth century. I begin by examining emergence of hunter in America, focusing especially on cultural significance of celebrity signature after Civil War and relationships collectors developed with well-known writers like Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Howells, and Holmes. Whitman was far more protective of his than his poetic peers; that guarded stance came to influence way Whitman circulated his signature within covers of Leaves of Grass, where he included it several times as part of a preconceived promotional scheme. signature would become a central emblem of his literary brand-it appears in and/or on nearly every volume poet published from 1881 until his death in 1892-the perfect symbol of what David Haven Blake identifies as Whitman's remarkable merger of poetry and publicity.3 efforts to join his with his poetry tapped into emergence of what Tamara Plakins Thornton calls romantics-autograph collectors and handwriting analysts-subcultures with a taste for tokens of celebrity that some believed could reveal character of their inscriber.4 For Whitman, was not only a new and foolproof way to drum up business; it was yet another strategy to emphasize author's place within Leaves of Grass through signature's transcendental form of presentness. …

From Part to Whole: Developing an Appreciation of Kuna Molas as Collectibles

In the Kuna language the word mola is polysemous, with meanings which include cloth, a rectangular panel of appliquéd cloth and a complete blouse. A pair of mola panels joined together with a yoke and sleeves form a mola blouse, thus the word mola means both part and whole of an item of clothing. Sewn and worn by Kuna women and girls, molas have become identified with Panama and mola panels have become the quintessential tourist souvenir. Parallels are made between the meaning and iconic role of the Kuna mola and art forms from other indigenous cultures. Individual mola panels are found in the collections of major ethnographic, art, and textile museums and there are many private collectors in the US, Europe, Japan and Australia. The role of the mola blouse as part of the dress ensemble of Kuna women is frequently not appreciated, since complete mola blouses form a small part of many collections. The display of mola panels as artworks in ethnographic and art museum exhibitions promotes their intrinsic aesthetic qualities and contributes to distancing them from their role as a component of dress. The meaning of molas may be considered to be polyvalent: Kuna women who sew and wear molas and Kuna communities may derive various meanings; there may be various meanings attributed to specific designs; and outsiders may derive different meanings. The attraction of molas to the Western eye is explored in terms of Kuna ethnoaesthetic principles and choice of iconography, as well as aesthetic appreciation. Molas may be interpreted as early examples of craftivism and contemporary collectors are attracted to their handmade qualities.

Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England:. A Critical Bibliography, ed. Angela McShane

John Selden remarked that ‘more solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as ballads and libels’. But as Angela McShane notes in her introduction, historians have been deterred from making extensive use of political broadside ballads in the seventeenth century because of doubts about provenance and publication details, reinforced perhaps by a disdain for the vernacular poetry in which they were couched. The appearance of this comprehensive bibliographic survey, which often corrects previous errors on dating and in its notes offers invaluable contextual information, will open up new research pathways. PBB, by which the work is abbreviated, lists 1,055 political titles published between 1639 and 1689, and over 1,400 ballad editions published between 1639 and 1720. McShane estimates that perhaps 3,000 ballad titles overall were published between 1640 and 1700, suggesting that, overall, a third of ballad titles dealt with political issues. But she is cautious about drawing the conclusion that political ballads were as popular as love songs, and warns, as she has done elsewhere, against assuming that we are dealing with an unproblematic popular voice. She distinguishes, as did many contemporary collectors, between black-letter ballads which followed a very traditional format and seem more ‘accessible’, and the white-letter ballads which were more varied in typography and format and often incorporated more learned frames of reference, but she also demonstrates the degree of cross-over between the two genres. And her painstaking listing of all known surviving copies, and the successive editions of each ballad, means that we can identify titles which circulated more widely. These include The Lamenting Ladies Last Farewell, a politically charged lamentation by the recently deceased daughter of Charles I, Princess Elizabeth, on the death of her father and calling for peace, registered in 1656 but probably originating in 1650 (no. 218X), A Turn-Coat of the Times, an attack on Presbyterian turncoats first published in 1663 (no. 401X), and The Honour of Bristol, celebrating a fight between privateers and Spanish ships (no. 414).

XVIII * Bibliography and Textual Criticism

In the absence of Studies in Bibliography, this year's review begins with The Book Collector, which once again contains fascinating informative contributions. Each issue begins with a detailed review article and there are the regular ‘News and Comment’, ‘Sales, Catalogues, and Exhibitions’, and ‘Book Review’ features in each of the quarterly issues. Of interest to readers of YWES, the spring BC (59:i[2010]) contains Colin Franklin's ‘Joseph Skelton, A Neglected Oxford Antiquary’ (BC 59:i[2010] 47–68), accompanied by black and white illustrations of Skelton's drawings and engravings. Ann Baer's brief ‘Painting for John Hayward’ (BC 59:i[2010] 69–70) throws light upon Hayward's accommodation during the mid-1930s. D.J. Butterfield's ‘A Classical Library in Cambridge: Contemporary Collectors’ (BC 59:i[2010] 71–96) is not only of interest to students of classics, but also throws light upon modern collecting, association copies, and also ‘Housmaniana’ (pp. 89–91). John Saumarez Smith's ‘A Knockout Novel...

Anne Vallayer-Coster: painter to the court of Marie-Antoinette

Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818) was one of the most talented still-life painters of the French school. Her exquisite paintings, today located in some of the world's finest museums, were admired and collected by many of her contemporaries, including Marie Antoinette, who became the artist's most important patron. This illustrated volume is devoted to Vallayer-Coster. It presents an array of the artist's still-life works, along with three royal portraits from the collection of Versailles and a pastel of Marie Antoinette. The authors draw on research to examine Vallayer-Coster's relationship with landscape painter Joseph Vernet; her response to her immediate predecessor, still-life painter Jean-Simeon Chardin; her role with contemporary collectors of her art; and her place in the larger context of the 18th-century art world. The work also includes archival and conservation findings and an illustrated index of extant paintings by Vallayer-Coster.

The effects of traditional gathering on populations of the marine gastropod Strombus luhuanus linne 1758, in southern Papua New Guinea.

Little is known of the response of mollusc populations to predation by humans, particularly for tropical species. In this paper, we examine the effects of human predation on populations of the gastropod Strombus luhuanus in Bootless Inlet, Papua New Guinea, by documenting both the population biology of the shellfish and the shell-gathering practices of traditional and contemporary human groups. Strombus luhuanus occurs in local colonies and individuals of each sex from different colonies differed significantly in size. Sexual maturity is reached within two years after settlement, at which time the shell length stabilises at about 35-60 mm, and the shell lip thickens. There was also significant between-colony variation in density (8.35-23.39 individuals/m2), and colonies differed in the depth range of their distributions and the frequency of human collection visits. Traditional gatherers rarely collected individuals which were buried or subtidal. Contemporary collectors used different collecting methods, and gathered subtidal populations to a depth of 2.5 m. Both traditional and contemporary collectors gathered only individuals greater than 30 mm shell length, and in the contemporary sample the probability of being gathered increased significantly with shell length. This was due to size-dependent burying, which was greatest among young juveniles and least among adults. The traditional sample contained fewer shells in the largest size category (>45 mm) and more in the smallest (<40 mm), but this difference largely represents the pooling of shells from different collecting locations rather than widespread juvenisation of colonies due to exploitation. Stromb population densities at collected sites in PNG far exceeded those in comparable uncollected sites in northeastern Australia. We conclude that S. luhuanus displays high resilience to all gathering practices used to date, as a consequence of both its size-dependent burying and partly subtidal distribution, which provide refugia from human predation.

'Notitie der Teekeningen van Sybrand Feitama', III*: de verzameling van Sybrand I Feitama (1620-1701) en van Isaac Feitama (1666-1709)

AbstractSince the earliest sale catalogue of drawings known in which mention is made of artists and titles is that of Philips de Flines of 1701 (Notes I,2), the 'Notes' (see Appendix I) on the drawings of Sybrand I Feitama (1620-1701) can be regarded as unique. This manuscript, compiled in its definitive from by Sybrand II Feitama (1694-1755) between 1746 and 1758, enables us to reconstruct the nucleus of the collection. The earliest notes date from 1685 and 1690 and will have been made by Sybrand I Feitama (Note 3). They in fact constitute a precise and businesslike price list, reminding us that Feitama was a druggist by profession. His collection of 320 drawings was amassed in the 17th century in the house called 'The Golden Spectacles' on Damrak in Amsterdam. As the collection of a connoisseur who was not himself an artist, it was a relatively new phenomenon and it is also striking for its lack of Italian and French drawings (Note 4), especially as non-Dutch art formed the principal component of the holdings of known contemporary collectors like Dirk van Beeresteyn, Philips de Flines, Abraham van Lennep and Jan Six (Note 5). The Feitamas did not even follow the model of collections they knew at first hand, e.g. those of Jan Pietersz. Zomer, who supplied them with drawings for over thirty years (Note 6), and Lambert ten Kate, both of which showed a strong emphasis on art from the south. Sybrand II did not share this predilection, only coming into possession of a Jan Weenix from Ten Kate' estate in 1742 by a roundabout route. Nor do the Feitamas appear to have shared the preference, common among artist collectors, for the art of the past (Notes 8, 9), or that current around 1700 for curiosities such as first states and proofs (Notes 11, 12). Their taste was, then, rather unique. However, in connectio n with a portrait of Sybrand I Feitama the poet Jan Norel did praise his interest in 'Prints after Art' and 'wondrous Rarities' (Note 13). If this is taken literally, it can only be concluded that after that date Feitama abandoned prints and curiosities in favour of a fanatical concentration on mainly contemporary Dutch drawings. He collected almost encyclopedically, artists from A-Z, mostly reasonably priced works that were good value for the money, i.e. watercolours by Adriaen van Ostade rather than scribbles by Rembrandt. All three, generations of Feitamas had a special affection for Ludolf Bakhuizen, Nicolaes Berchem, Allaert van Everdingen, Jacob van Ruisdael and Adriaen van de Velde.