We were putting together the presentation for a History 301 class due to visit the ASM Library in a few days. The instructor, Dr. Michael Brescia, wanted us to show his students a wide variety of resources and we wanted to display some of the best of the best; not just any old reference book or any old handwritten manuscript. We wanted to pull out really special, rare, beautiful, and evocative items.

Librarian Mary Graham knows the collection well from her over twenty years of service at ASM. Heading to the locked stacks, she loaded a cart with books she knew the students would pronounce “awesome!” She selected exceedingly rare examples of Southwest bibliography and milestones in book illustration.  In addition, she used one of the most important of all research skills – the ability to browse and make discoveries.  Pulling down a nondescript, worn little leather-bound volume, Mary opened it to discover that inside the cover were handwritten notes about how to measure small mammals for a museum collection. The book itself was a compilation of “how-to” writings by noted natural scientists from the 1890s to 1910.

My archival curiosity was immediately fired up. Whose handwriting was inside the cover of this strange volume? Was the writing by one of the authors or by one of the book’s owners? There were two signatures on the end leaf so it was possible that one of those individuals drew the cute sketches of little animal specimens. Could one of the book’s owners be Herbert Brown, ASM’s first curator and a passionate collector of natural history specimens? Or was it owned by the second author in the book, Leonhard Stejneger of the Smithsonian, who had collected snakes on several trips to Arizona?

The signature in the center of the page looked the oldest (judging from the style of handwriting and the type of pen used) but it was difficult to read. It might say “F. R. Walsin” but I couldn’t be certain of the spelling of the last name. It might be Wakin, Wulsin, or even less likely, Wabin. I charged forth into Internet research through Google-landia hoping to find a scientist, curator, or collector with that name. No luck. I searched through World Cat’s vast catalog of library holdings around the world. No luck. I scanned the various archival indexes and lists available at ASM, but still no luck.

The second signature, at the top of the page, is obviously a more recent inscription in blue ballpoint pen.  Who is/was Robert G. Baker, I asked myself, and why did he have this unique book?  The question was an easy one to answer for Baker it turns out was a curator at ASM in the 1970s. Before that he was the Museum’s preparator – the man who designed and built many of the exhibits and dioramas famously popular in the Museum’s south building for many years.

In the Museum’s administrative records I found Baker’s personnel files. There I learned that he was born in Big Sandy, Montana, on July 5, 1920. He attended the University of Arizona and earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s in art before beginning work at ASM. Baker taught a class on the origins of museums and built the Museum’s intricate dioramas depicting mammoth hunting and prehistoric agriculture.  In addition, he designed the lighting, signage, and display methods for the “most comprehensive Southwestern archaeological collection in the world,” as was pointed out in the catalog celebrating ASM’s fiftieth birthday.

In the 1950s, after studying museology at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in Mexico City, Baker traveled to many major museums across the United States studying exhibition techniques. He wrote to his boss, Dr. Emil Haury, about the deteriorating condition of Carl Akeley’s elephant diorama in Chicago, and sniffed over the “dust of decades” in the American Museum of Natural History displays. It may have been while tracking down bookstores in New York City looking for scarce issues of the Gila Pueblo Foundation’s “Medallion Papers” that Baker purchased “Directions for collecting and preserving specimens.” And so, through my attempt to follow the crumbs of evidence, our humble little volume has at least a partial biography.

Today’s blog was written by Arizona State Museum’s archivist Amy Rule. She can be found working alongside the rest of the Library and Archives staff in the beautiful second floor reading room at ASM providing preservation and access to over 1500 linear feet of archival and manuscript holdings.