 Well, good evening everyone. I'm Keith Webster, the Helen and Henry Posner Junior Dean of University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon and it's my very great honour to welcome you to tonight's event, Fine and Rare 4, Inside CMU Libraries Special Collections. I'm glad to acknowledge amongst our audience, CMU faculty, staff, students and friends of the library, members of our Board of Trustees and members of my Dean's Advocacy Council. As Dean of Libraries, I'm often asked three questions. Firstly, do we still need libraries now that we've got Google? I could spend four hours debating the answer. Let me just say yes. The second most frequent question which has just been answered is why on earth do you let Sam handle precious works with his bare hands? And thirdly, when are we going to have the next Fine and Rare? There really is a huge amount of interest and demand for Sam's wonderful presentations and we're so pleased to have him with us again this evening. I'm conscious that we gather on Burns Night. Robert Burns was born 265 years ago today and for Scots, for those who enjoy Scottish culture and perhaps especially those who enjoy Scotch Whiskey, this is an important day. There are celebrations around the world I checked just before coming online and the Beijing Scottish Society had its Burns Night party last Saturday. I don't mention this out of sentiment or a desire to go and put on a kilt or anything like that, but because Andrew Carnegie was a lifelong admirer of Robert Burns. In fact, according to his autobiography, the first penny he ever earned was one from his schoolteacher, Mr. Martin, for reciting to his class the Burns poem, Man Was Made to Mourn. A claim can be found in various publications that Andrew Carnegie wanted a bust of Burns to be placed in each of the more than two and a half thousand libraries that he funded. It's a wonderful story, but I'm pretty sure it's a myth. Busts of Burns do not adorn the many libraries around the world, but we do know that he was keen to immortalise his favourite poet in his first American hometown, Pittsburgh, of course, and he asked for Burns' name to be carved on the façade of the main library in Oakland alongside those of Bach and Beethoven and Goethe and others. Alas, the building committee overruled his wish, seeing that Burns wasn't famous enough. He was disappointed, but instead he raised a monument to Burns in Shenley Park near Fitz Conservatory, which he unveiled in 1914 during his last visit to Pittsburgh. A bit of a cultural deviation, which I'm grateful for your indulgence. But here at Carnegie Mellon, our special collections is envisaged as an interdisciplinary workshop where humanistic modes of inquiry combine with innovative tools to allow us to study historical technologies, books and artefacts. Our diverse and valuable collections fuel transformative exhibitions, groundbreaking research and other programmes that bring students, scholars and members of the public into special collections and into our libraries. We've built a strong community of friends and scholars and I'm grateful to all who have supported our work by engaging with our collections, attending our events and funding our significant acquisitions. During tonight's event, many of the items that you will see wouldn't have been possible without the generous support of you, our community and we really are grateful to you. If this is your first time joining us, welcome to Fine and Rear. Many people in the university library have been working to bring this and our other collections focused events to you. I'm particularly grateful to Sonja Wellington, our events manager, who looked after all of the logistics for this evening's event and I also acknowledge our entire external relations team. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker this evening, our curator of special collections, Dr. Sam Lemley. Dr. Lemley oversees special collections and has responsible for their continued development as well as teaching with the collections and leading their use in research and scholarship. Sam gained his PhD in English literature at the University of Virginia and he also has a master's in library and information science with a certificate in rare book and special collections librarianship. He's held research fellowships at the Houghton Library at Harvard, at Princeton, the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology and the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Sam also is the editor of a forthcoming book featuring essays by leading scholars of Shakespeare and print. I'll use that to remind you that Sam's exhibition of our seven Shakespeare portfolios remains open for public visit at the Frick for another few weeks. If you enjoy this event, please consider supporting the libraries with a gift to our acquisitions fund, your donations fund acquisitions that make possible the many exhibitions, research programs and classroom sessions that bring the community into our special collections. Thank you again for joining us today. And without further ado, I'll turn things over to Dr. Sam Lemley. Good evening, everyone. I'm Sam Lemley, Curator of Special Collections in Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. Welcome to this next installment of Fine and Rare. Tonight, we're going to go back to what I did in one of the earlier installments, which is look at some of the recent acquisitions I've been bringing into the collection, either by purchase or by gift. And I really like doing this with as broad an audience as possible, because a lot of this happens sort of behind the scenes. But I think people really get excited when they get the chance to see how a collection like Special Collections grows and evolves with a few criteria about what we collect and why. So as I mentioned in that earlier installment, the focus of the collection is really becoming the history of technology, and more specifically, the long history of computing, computational thought, cryptography, robotics, artificial intelligence, kind of reflecting the culture and curricular focus of CMU. What a lot of people don't realize is that there's a really, really deep past to each of those fields. And it sort of leads that past that history leads into really surprising and unexpected directions. So tonight, we're going to look at some of those. We'll hear some familiar names, some new ones, but we're going to cross cultures, cross centuries. And I just want to say thank you so much for joining us. And I hope you enjoy. So this first object is a book. It's an issue of an academic journal that was printed in 1720. And it contains the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz's study of binary arithmetic or binary code. So Leibniz is probably a fairly well known name to this audience. He's an incredibly important figure in the history of mathematics. He's known for independently discovering calculus, along with Isaac Newton, for instance. But he also devised early calculating devices, one that was capable of all four arithmetic operations. And another, which is more kind of topical given that what's in front of me, he also developed a machine that operated on binary principles of arithmetic. That one was less successful than the standards of decimal arithmetic arithmetic machine. But we know that he was working on a binary device in the 1670s. So but this is a really important moment in the history of mathematics, and really is the mathematical foundation of modern computer science, given that Leibniz's system of binary enumeration is the system that more or less we rely on in all of our computers today. So Leibniz wasn't the first to experiment with binary arithmetic or binary systems. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal had discussed it, English mathematician Thomas Harriet, and also Francis Bacon, who's a very well known name in the history of science. He had proposed a system of cryptography that used two letters A and B to disguise any, any message, right, that was that was encoded using an alphabet. So but I think what Leibniz did was recognize the real potential in binary systems. And that's what he does in this treatise in particular, he points out that yes, it can be used to replace a decimal system for calculation, can also be used as a cryptographic system. But more broadly, much more expansively, Leibniz suggested that binary code one and zero could function as a universal symbolic language. So you could take any kind of information and represent it as ones and zeros. And of course, we know that that's an incredibly important idea in the history of computation. So we'll look through this. It's kind of surprising how short it is. As I said, this copy of this edition was printed in 1720. This work actually first appeared in 1703. So it was reprinted 15 years later. But if you page through it's quite short. And on the first page, the Overleaf, you have this table that shows the binary values of, you know, decimal digits. So one being one, two, one, zero, three, one, one. And for those of you that have studied computer science or binary enumeration will know that that is the system that we still use today. But you don't need this to say Leibniz is, as I've said, incredibly important in the history of computational thought. And it's really exciting that we acquired this. I acquired it a month and a half ago. So really recently. But it's exciting that we have this because we also have in the Posner Memorial Collection, a copy of Leibniz's, first edition of Leibniz's Calculus, right, 1684. And we also, which I shared in an earlier installment of Fine and Rare, we have a replica of that calculating machine that I discussed earlier. So we really now have with the acquisition of this book, all of the major contributions by Leibniz to the history of computing. And that just goes to show, you know, the theme of tonight is how is the collection growing? How does it evolve? That goes to show like what, what I, what I look for when I'm looking for things to acquire, you know, what do we have? What gaps are there to fill? And how can we go about forming a collection that tells as full a story as possible of the history of computing? So that's a great place to start. Okay, so this next object is a portrait. And it might appear as though it's an engraving on paper, but it's actually woven in silk. And that's important given its subject. This is a portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard, who was the inventor of the programmable loom, and was the first to use punched cards actually to control a machine, a loom. And you can see here in the portrait, I'll just describe it briefly. He's sitting at a desk on an upholstered chair. And the upholstery on the chair was probably made using one of his looms. And then if you look closely on the desk, he actually has kind of a sheaf of punched cards, which would have been made out of a card stock kind of paper material. He's using a pair of calipers to actually check the position of the holes that are punched into the cards. And then just to the left of that, off the frame from his sort of right hand is the attachment, a model of the attachment that would have been put on the loom that would sort of feed the punched cards through. So Jacquard, we just talked about Leibniz and binary systems. Jacquard is incredibly important, like Leibniz in the history of computing, for his innovation of sort of punch card programming. And the way that it worked, it's really hard to explain without a video, actually seeing inner workings of the loom. But each punched card, when it would sort of enter the attachment, a hole would let through a little hook, which would then raise a thread in the pattern of the textile. Or if there was no hole, it wouldn't be raised and the thread would remain flat. So if you have the right pattern punched into each punched card, and you go through tens of thousands of them, usually in one design, you end up with very intricate patterns in the final woven product. But the important point is that it was a binary system, whether on or off, up or down, one or zero. And of course, that ended up being incredibly influential for early computation computers. But this image, this object is very rare. I acquired it about six months ago for the collection. And it's interesting, because there's a copy, if you can call it a copy, in the Library of Congress. But the Library of Congress's copy is significantly smaller. So their copy, I think, is 59 centimeters in height. Ours is almost 85 centimeters in height. So that to me suggests that the size of the image could be adjusted on the loom, depending on what the customer wanted. But it also means that our copy at CMU is incredibly important. And I like to brag about that fact, of course, as the curator, right? We have the bigger, the bigger copy of the two. But the image itself is really fascinating. I've done some work on it, some research on it. I think there's a lot of symbolism in it that I'm missing. But I'll just point out a couple things first. So the window, which is again, sort of off Jacquard's right hand in the portrait, you can sort of see hazy image of a city through the glass. But you also notice there's a small hole that's basically the size of a bullet. And the thinking is, and this is kind of historical speculation, but I do think there's some symbolism here. The thinking is that Jacquard, in automating fine weaving, put a lot of very skilled laborers out of work. And the laborers who were put out of work might have resorted to violence against, you know, the loom operators, loom owners, and even Jacquard himself as the inventor of this technology. So it just goes to show that the concerns around automation, automating work, go back centuries. I don't think I mentioned when this was made, but this was printed or woven in 1839. So five years after Jacquard had died in 1834. But these concerns, as I say, were very much alive even at the time. So as I mentioned, the punched card as a technology was, of course, immensely influential and important in the history of computing. So sort of at the same time as Jacquard, the English mathematician Charles Babbage was working on developing his analytic engine, which is an early mechanical calculator computer. And he recognized the potential in using punched cards to actually program mathematical operations into the analytic engine. But more famously, and more importantly, Ada Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage, recognize the potential in representing really high level mathematics, using binary systems and on punched cards. And there's this really wonderful quote from Lovelace, where she says on the Jacquard loom, punched cards were used to weave flowers and other decorative patterns, but placed inside a analytic engine or other computational device, punched cards could weave algebraic equations. And then, of course, going forward in time at the turn of the last century, you have people like Herman Hollerith, who used punched cards to run statistical analysis of census data. And that's important because he ended up forming a company. He was a tabulating machine company again around the turn of the century that would ultimately evolve to become IBM. So you can sort of trace this fascinating genealogy from Jacquard, from Loom's program with punched cards all the way to the explosion of business computing in the 1900s, 1950s. So it's just a beautiful image in its own right. I mean, the level of detail that you could accomplish with this technology is really stunning. I've read that this image would have taken something like 24,000 individually punched cards, so just a staggering number of cards that would have run through the machine sort of on a chain. And I think it's really amazing that the inscription, the title is also woven. So you can kind of think of this as another ancestor of writing machines, right, even even sort of large language models like ChatGBT, right? So a machine is actually producing text and textual language. And I also like to point out about this artifact that it's kind of fitting that we have it at CMU, because Andrew Carnegie, when he was young in Scotland, his father was actually a weaver and would have used a Jacquard Loom that was based on the designs of Jacquard. So there's again sort of homecoming, you know, all of it is sort of connected. And I think this object, having this in special collections, this allows us to tell all of those stories to students and researchers. So this next book is this little handheld volume. It's actually in two volumes. This is the second volume. It's a collection of letters written by Mary Wirtley Montague, who was an English noble woman. She spent a couple of years in Turkey in Constantinople at the Ottoman court when her husband was appointed as a sort of ambassador for England to the Ottoman court. And she was there sort of from 1716 to 1718. And during her time, she wrote a series of letters back to her family, friends and acquaintances, sort of with her observations of Turkish culture. They were incredibly popular. This is a second printing 1763, the year after she died. But the first edition actually appeared in that same year. So that gives you an idea of how well these sold, they sold out within a year and they were reprinted. So she was really an interesting character in her own right. She was sort of a radical and progressive at the time. She taught herself Latin, sort of going against her father, who believed she didn't need to be educated, being a girl, being a woman. But she taught herself Latin and a number of other things, and she married sort of against the wishes of her family. And another way that she was fairly radical, actually when she was in Turkey, she had her children inoculated against smallpox, which is widely practiced in the east, but was viewed with sort of profound skepticism by the medical establishment in the West. And then when she returned to England, she really pushed for England to adopt inoculation to really combat smallpox, which was at the time an incredibly lethal and infectious disease. But that might raise the question, OK, so she's this fascinating person. She wrote all these letters. It's kind of an interesting ethnographic object in its own right. But what place does, you know, Montague have in a collection that tells the history of cryptography, mathematics and computation? Well, in one of her letters written from Constantinople, she describes to a friend a system of fluorography, which is a kind of cryptography that uses plants and flowers to communicate particular hidden messages. So I'll turn to that letter here. It appears at the very beginning of this volume and she provides first a table of all of the names of flowers and then their corresponding messages. So just for example, you know, the pear, a pear flower, maybe a branch with flowering pears on it would would mean give me some hope. Or a rose means may you be pleased and your sorrows mine. So all these sort of sentimental emotional communications that you could use in place of writing a letter, for example. But she writes to a friend. And she actually, this is an interpretation of a bouquet of flowers that she sent to a friend. And she ends up by saying, you see this letter is all in verse and I can assure you there is as much fancy shown in the choice of them as in the most studied expressions of our letters there being, I believe, a million of verses designed for this use. And this is the important part. She says there is no color, no flower, no weed, no fruit, herb, pebble or feather that has not a verse belonging to it. And you may quarrel, reproach or send letters of passion, friendship or civility or even of news without ever inking your fingers. So this really complex system of communication that uses only botanical specimens I think is fascinating in its own right. But I would argue that this is an example of a cryptographic system that really has a place in this collection, given that we have, you know, for instance, to enigma machines, right, really important cryptographic devices from the mid 20th century. So a bit of a departure, but nevertheless, part of these same histories, part of these same stories that I hope the collection will end up telling in a really compelling and full way. This next book I'm actually really excited about. It's the most recent acquisition I purchased at just last month for the collection from an antiquarian bookseller based in New York City, who specializes specifically in Asian books and Asian science, Japanese and Chinese science mainly. So it's in three volumes. This is very typical of the Japanese book from this period. This was printed in 1808. It's actually the title of it is Karakuri-Zui, which means a compendium or catalog or list of interesting machines. And what it describes actually are what we recognize as robots or early sort of mechanical puppetry that Japanese culture at this time in particular was really fascinated by and had made great strides in developing really complex systems for mechanical systems for. So I'm no by no means an expert. I don't read Japanese, but this period in Japanese history I think is utterly fascinating. So as I said, 1808, but throughout the Edo period, so sort of 16th century, 17th century, 18th century, access to Japan by European powers was limited and severely restricted. And so I think the Dutch mainly were the only kind of European culture that had regular mercantile access to the Edo court. And what happened is that there was some cultural exchange and that led to a sort of curiosity on the part of Japanese scientists, mathematicians in kind of Western innovations and Western science. And that led to this phenomenon or field of study that's known as Japanese as around gaku and run is transit shortened form of the transliteration for Holland. So oranda and gaku meaning studies. So literally it means Dutch studies, which is I think just totally fascinating as a cultural phenomenon, but more broadly it just it labels Japanese cultures interaction with an interest in Western technologies and Western science and culture. So this book is very much a product of that movement. You know, famously the Edo kind of restriction on Western books was lifted in 1720. So you get this, you know, more or less a flood and it wasn't really a flood, but you got more books coming into Japan from the West and therefore, you know, the brilliant scientists in Japan at the time read it closely and started thinking along the same lines and taking, you know, Western science in new directions. So as I said, this is this book is a product of that that phenomenon. And the author, whose name was Hosokawa Hanzo Yorinau, was a mathematician calendar expert. He died in 1796 when the first edition of this book appeared. This is the second edition, President 1808, so a little bit after he had died. But when you leaf through, I just want you to kind of look at the illustrations because this book is absolutely beautiful graphically. And you can see that each page describes a particular device. And Karakuri is still a word that's used in modern Japanese. It can mean a robot, but it can also mean like a trick or something that conceals its inner workings, its operations. So this is very much in play when you look at these illustrations. But I love that just the graphic simplicity of these illustrations, they're so clear. And I think the reason for that, and you can see that each component is very carefully labeled, the reason for that is that Hosokawa, the author, wanted these illustrations to function as a kind of graphic instruction manual for building these kinds of machines. And as I leave through, you can see like each illustration there's sort of an isometric clarity to them. They're three dimensional. You can see how the various components of each device interact. And a lot of these devices, you know, they're anthropomorphic. So they have figures. I mean, here there's a sort of tumbler acrobat figure who sort of leaps from platform to platform powered by springs. But they run the gamut in complexity. So he describes things like clocks that are designed to tell time according to the Japanese system of timekeeping, which is different from our owner, which was different from our own, all the way to kind of anthropomorphic figures that would write, for examples, there would be a small figure that could dip a brush into ink and then write Japanese characters. But the theme, I think, throughout is really this fascination and almost this reveling in the aesthetics of machinery. And I think you get that sense of joy and fascination and interest in finding a way to explain these devices in as clear a way as possible. I mean, all three volumes are copiously illustrated. I'll leaf through another one here. There's another device that shows a fish that can swim up a stream. My guess is that that actually was a functioning fountain. There was water in it. That device shows some sort of pulley system of cog wheels and some of the more, you know, graphic representations like this one here is just a spiral. I think that shows sort of the mechanical properties that were at work in some of these devices. There's a musician. So just just a stunning book in every way and so different from what we have in the collection. I mean, I think in a previous installation, I had shared a early book on Chinese mathematics and computation, which was one of the first to describe the operation of the abacus. And that's really something that I'm invested in and interested in because so for so long institutions that are collecting the history of science in particular have focused almost exclusively on the history of Western science and mathematics and computation. But of course, as we know, those histories are cross cultural. And I think this shows us how that fascination in machinery, that fascination in devices and technology really is a human impulse. It's not unique to the West or to European culture, surely. So this is just, you know, one step in that direction. I will say to that this is a major acquisition for CMU because no other copy that I've been able to find of this book is held in the United States. So we are the only institution, the only library to have this particular edition in our collection. So that's, you know, it's exciting for me. And again, it just shows, you know, how we're really taking strides in the libraries to build a special collections that's unique and speaks to all these stories. This last thing I'll share, actually, isn't an individual book or object. It's a collection of books. And they were all owned at one time by Alan Newell, who was a professor at CMU, won the Turing Award with Herb Simon and famously with Herb Simon and Cliff Shaw, programmed the logic theorist, which is recognized as the first artificial intelligence computer program. And that was in 1956. So when Alan Newell died in 1992, he and his widow, Noel Newell, gave his library to the university and the books in that library were basically put into circulation so they could be checked out and consulted by students, which is a fantastic benefaction and legacy for Alan Newell to leave as a teacher and as a researcher and as such an important part of CMU. But one project that I've been working on is actually reconstituting his library and transferring it to special collections because as you might imagine, you know, Alan Newell, I think it's just starting to assume a place of real importance in the history of artificial intelligence. It's always been important. But I think as people start to recognize that artificial intelligence has a history of its own, it's important to retain Alan Newell's library for posterity and for future researchers who might be interested in thinking through Alan Newell's thought. What was he reading? What influences can we see in his his own work that are coming out of his reading out of his library? So the collection, it's several hundred volumes. He was a voracious reader and he gave the entirety of his collection kind of in two parts to the university. Unfortunately, this is a question that people always ask, you know, did he write in his books? Are there annotations? Are there sort of observations that he made? Unfortunately, he was a very meticulous reader and part of that meticulousness extended to his choice never apparently to annotate his books. So we really don't have records of his thought in these books. But nevertheless, I would I would make the case that just having the books together on a shelf is a representation of his thought because it shows us what he was buying, what kinds of thinkers he was engaging with, et cetera, et cetera. So I have some examples here from his collection. You know, his is a draft so prepublication draft of Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Intelligent Machines, which was an exhibition actually that Kurzweil curated. And this is a book that he compiled and wrote for that exhibition, but kind of an important moment in the 20th century realizing that the computer was indeed going to be very important for the future of humanity. This was published or prepared in 1988. I think it could appeared in full in 1990. But this is a copy of the draft that was in Alan Newell's library. We also have a copy of the first edition, first official printing of this book in Alan Newell's library that's inscribed to Newell by Kurzweil. But I think that's just an interesting example of how Newell, even as late as 1988, he died in 1992, how he was really engaged in ongoing debates about the place of artificial intelligence and its future. But, you know, just in point of contrast, Alan Newell, he came to CMU to study under Herb Simon. He was a graduate student of Simon, unfortunately, predeceased him. But one of the first things that he did that really brought him to Simon's attention was to describe a computer program that was capable of playing chess. And that that's really an ongoing or sustaining current in Newell's thought in the 1950s and 60s. He was fascinated by games and game theory. So, you know, again, for example, you have these two books, you have puzzles in crypt arithmetic and 150 ways to play solitaire. So, you know, these weren't just academic sort of drive publications that Newell was using in his own work. He has all kinds of material in this collection that, again, shows the breadth and depth of his learning and reading at the time. And I love this book on solitaire because actually page 42, you have a torn piece of a punched card that would have been used in computation. It's a blank, so it wasn't punched. And then you have in Alan Newell's handwriting the name of a particular game you can play with a deck of cards and with a page reference number, page 41. So I love that as an artifact, sort of of Alan Newell's thinking and artifact of his interest in game play. So, like I said, it's a huge collection. I have just started to scratch the surface of it. And I really hope that, you know, maybe a graduate student would take this collection on as even a dissertation project because there's a lot there to examine. But I wanted to share this other thing that has to do with Alan Newell. This is a book that wasn't in his personal collection. It was actually in the circulating collection of Hunt Library. And I was looking at it for another reason and I'll share what it is for. So it's the preparation of programs for an electronic digital computer. It's by a British mathematician, computer scientist named Marius Wilkes. And this book, it's important because it's recognized as the first kind of textbook on the subject of computer programming. So important. A lot of early students who studied computer science in the 50s probably would have been assigned to this book as sort of an introductory text. But so I transferred to the special collections because it is quite rare in its own right and important. But when I brought it to special collections, I looked at the back and a lot of you will recognize this. This is just, you know, a loan record of when the book was borrowed, when it was due. These are more recent stamps, but in this envelope here, there's another slip recording loans. And if you look, you see about halfway down a Newell, Alan Newell and the due date is November 27th, 1956. And that blew me away. I mean, that's, that's, in my opinion, phenomenally cool because we know that Alan Newell about this time was working on the logic theorist with Herb Simon and Cliff Shaw and both Newell and Simon freely admitted that they were not computer scientists. They leaned pretty heavily on Cliff Shaw, who was really the computer scientists of the three. So I think it's really interesting that, you know, maybe Alan Newell felt that he needed to brush up on his, you know, computer programming skills as he was working alongside Cliff Shaw. So he maybe would have borrowed this to do just that. Again, you know, this is a point that I often make that. Books contain kind of a record of our thought, a record of thinking. And that's certainly the case with Alan Newell. I'll say too that in special collections, we have Herb Simon's library. It's not as extensive. It's not as large, but both of those collections, as I say, really show how early, early artificial intelligence sort of just stated in both of these men's reading and in their libraries. And I think there's a lot of fascinating work to be done. So again, that kind of work can happen in special collections. That's really the objective of a robust acquisitions policy. That's why we're growing the collection. And that's why I try to make all the things in the collection as accessible and available as possible. Thank you for joining us tonight for this inside look into what I do as curator of special collections. I also want to say thank you as well to the entire community because so many of you have given to special collections and that kind of support philanthropy, but also smaller generations really allows us to pursue an ambitious and robust acquisitions program, which allows us to grow the collection, which in turn allows us to invite an increasing number of students and researchers and members of the public into the collection. So thank you so much for that. And I look forward to your questions just in a minute. Well, thank you, Sam. That was another wonderful episode of Fine and Rare. Guests, please do submit your questions using the chat function. We will collate those. We'll try to get through a few in the remaining time. And if there are particular points of follow up, we will be in touch. One immediate question I will knock off was where can people see earlier episodes of Fine and Rare? Those are all part of the Carnegie Mellon University Library's YouTube channel, and we will provide a link to you through the chat. I was really struck by your point about the checkout date of the book that Alan Newell had borrowed because I'm conscious. Now I was just checking that, indeed, the Dartmouth conference, which was the first event on artificial intelligence, took place in the summer of 1956. Eleven leading thinkers attended that workshop, one of whom was Alan Newell. And I almost wonder whether he came away from the workshop and thought, yeah, I need to brush up a bit on my coding. So Sam, we've had a number of questions coming in already. I'm going to work backwards. Oh, there was another question there. I'll just answer that, which is will we make this recording available? Yes, that will join the others on our YouTube channel. So on the Japanese book, two questions. Do you have any insights into what technology was used to print the book? Was it movable type? Was it brushwork? Was it something else? And it's yeah, it's a great question. Sorry, Keith, I didn't mean to cut you off. Go for it. Yeah, it's entirely in woodcut, which, you know, it's different from Western printing in that Western print shops from Gutenberg on used individual metal pieces of type, each of which carried a raised letter that would be inked and then leave an impression on paper, which isn't to say that that technology didn't exist in Asia. In fact, we now know that the earliest movable type printing was done in Korea, I think in the 14th century. So about a century before Gutenberg. But most Japanese books, yeah, were were printed using woodcut. So you they would cut a full block of wood with the Japanese characters and the illustration all on one piece of wood and then press the paper onto that inked surface to take the image. And I mentioned this in the video. I'm not I'm not an expert in Eastern printing technologies. I'm learning more every day, but there's something I would probably make the case that just the style and complexity of Japanese characters and writing systems kind of lend themselves more to woodcut printing. That said, there's there is one thing that I've noticed in that book, having looked at it more closely in the last few days, like on the title page, and I wish I had it here to hold it up to the camera. But on the title page, there's a woodcut frame kind of decorative frame, which is kind of embodied or inhabited or inhabited with little Western devices. And the frame itself looks very Western in style. So there's all there's obviously this dialogue going on between Japanese bookmakers and Western European publishers. So I think you start to see that influence and how the books were actually being printed in Japan at the time. And vice versa, right? Obviously, there was a huge fascination in the Netherlands and in Northern Europe and Southern Europe and Japanese culture and art. Yeah, woodcuts to keep it short. Another question about that same printing, do you have or can we obtain and make available a translation of the text, obviously, into English? Yes, I'll admit that I did some experimenting with Google Translate's camera function. So I was just pointing in at some of the pages to see how accurate or the translation would be. And I was pretty surprised. I was pretty impressed. But there's actually a Japanese scholar that has issued a full front cover to back cover translation and study of this book in particular. That's unusual. You know, a lot of the a lot of these early scientific books from the East in particular have not been translated into Western languages. But I think that's that just reflects the importance of this particular title. It really was the very first book to treat robotics in Japanese. And so I think because of that, it's gotten a lot of attention from Western scholars. But yeah, I can I can find if you Amazon or Google, you know, translation of Karakuri Tzui, it should come up. I'm forgetting the name of the scholar right now, but it's out there. OK, thanks. Another question, very, very different one, one that I know you will be very pleased to talk about your process of working with antiquarian booksellers. And how does that unfold? And how has that evolved in recent times? Yeah, it's a great question. It's in many ways. My favorite part of my job, you know, it's a lot of fun in part because before I recover, I came to see me before I started the PhD at University of Virginia, I actually worked for an antiquarian bookseller. It was based in London. So I made a lot of connections while I worked in the trade. I know which sellers are reputable, which sellers specialize in, you know, areas of focus for us at CMU. So it's a lot of fun to cultivate those connections and share, you know, what we're collecting so that they bring things to my attention that I might want to buy. Of course, you know, they they have a motive behind that, but it's definitely a collaboration. And I've found that booksellers are incredibly knowledgeable. They're scholars in their own right. So I've really enjoyed leaning on that expertise and keeping, you know, one foot in that world. Yeah, but we, you know, we I mentioned the bookseller who sold us that Japanese book, but we also occasionally purchase things at auction. There's a phenomenal sale of books going on right now at Christie's in New York. I think it closes on the 2nd of February. But so I just keep track of those things. I spend a certain part of most of my days looking at glancing through booksellers catalogs and seeing if there's anything out there that we might want to acquire and target. Right, a couple of quick questions. One for you, one for me. And then one final question before we close things down. The one I'll take quickly. I mentioned the Burns statue and I was asked where exactly is it? If you were facing the front door of Phipps conservatory and turned left and walked around to the left hand side of the complex on Panther Hollow Road, you will see a large imposing statue sculpted by Massey Rinder, a famous Scottish sculptor. So I will leave that with you and encourage you to go and have a look at the statue. It really is quite striking. Equivalent one for you, Sam, what is the piece of art or etching behind you as you talk to us this evening? Yeah, it's a fact similarly. It's not the original but and it's fairly massive. It's about six feet across. It's the it's a map of Rome that was published, I think, in 1748. I might have to glance at that. But yeah, the the name of the designer, the cartographer is Noly N-O-L-L-I. And so it's Rome as it as it looked in the 1740s. It's a really spectacular image. It's fun, fun as a backdrop for Zoom. So a final question. Many people that I talk to in the profession and members of our community at large are surprised by just how rich special collections at Carnegie Mellon are. And I wonder if you could just say a few words about why that is. Yeah, it's a it's a wonderful question. You know, I think the the story of special collections at CMU is in large measure the story of Pittsburgh because, you know, so that the excellence of the collection really is a result of philanthropy. And that just goes back to how many how much wealth there was in the city and how many collectors and how many people, you know, really in the 20th century were invested in returning the wealth that they had generated in the city of Pittsburgh to cultural organizations in the city and the region. So, you know, I usually just list a few names that go along with that story. So I'm in Hunt Library right now and it's named for Rachel McMaster's Miller Hunt who was married to Roy Hunt, who's chairman of Alcoa, you know, Mellon Company. She was a major collector of botanical books. And I think someone in the chat mentioned the Hunt Institute and actually someone mentioned Charlotte Tansen. And yes, she's still upstairs. She's amazing, Chuck Tansen. So that's upstairs. When Rachel Hunt, when she was nearing the end of her life, she had this, she had formed this really phenomenal kind of first in its class, collection of rare botanical literature. And she was looking for an institutional home for it. And eventually it came to CMU. They funded the construction of Hunt Library. And really unfortunately, she passed away right when the Hunt Institute kind of got up off, it's got up onto its feet and got going. And there was a lot of books that remained in her collection. And so those books, which were rare and important, but not necessarily botanical, came to form kind of the nucleus of special collections at CMU and that was like 1963, 1964. So from there, that really, I think, gave other potential donors the opportunity to give to that collection to grow it. And so, another major name, Charles Rosenbloom, who's another Pittsburgh philanthropist worked in finance. He was a trustee of the university. He gave a large part of his collection to CMU. If you saw the previous installment of Fine and Rare, I've shared all of the, or no, two, two installments ago, I shared all of the Shakespeare portfolios. So famously, Charles Rosenbloom, the Charles Rosenbloom gift included the copy of Shakespeare's first folio that we have in the collection. Really just phenomenal works of literature, mainly. Lots of first editions by Dickens, Darwin, Whitman, major names kind of in the Western canon. And then shortly after that, he passed away in 1973, I believe shortly after that, the Posner Memorial Collection came to the university. And Henry Posner Sr., you start to see rhymes and repetitions in these stories, but another really successful Pittsburgh kind of entrepreneur. And in the last decades of his career and life, he collected pretty widely books and he ended up focusing in the history of technology. So his collection, it's kind of similarly second to none, first editions of all the major figures, Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, et cetera. But that came again in 1976, I believe. So I'm kind of rambling on, but you see what I'm getting at. It's really the excellence of the collection reflects that generosity and that really large scale philanthropy. But of course, I should end by saying that we also receive smaller donations and a lot of the things that I shared tonight, recent acquisitions were purchased with that kind of support too. It all counts and I just feel so fortunate that I'm able to carry that legacy and carry that trust into building a collection at CMU. Well, Sam, thank you for a wonderful evening, a wonderful presentation and for your time in the Q&A session. Thanks to our audience for joining us. Again, your support of special collections is invaluable and we would not be able to maintain such a diverse and meaningful program without your engagement. If you enjoyed this event, please consider supporting Sam's work with a gift to the special collections acquisition fund. Your donations, as Sam just mentioned, make possible transformative exhibitions, research and other programs that bring students, scholars and members of the public into special collections and into CMU's libraries. Let me close by mentioning the next event coming up at the University Libraries, our annual three-minute thesis competition. If you're curious about what groundbreaking research and discoveries happening at Carnegie Mellon this year, 3MT is your chance to hear doctoral students explain the key points of their work. They're limited to a maximum time of three minutes and they must present to a non-specialist general audience. This year, all seven colleges are participating in the Center Disciplinary Event and our finals will be on Thursday, March the 14th at 6 p.m. We'll be streaming that online. We will be on the University campus, I believe in the auditorium in the Tepper School of Business Building. We hope to see you there. With that, thank you again and have a wonderful evening.