We have been featuring resources from Rare Books and Special Collections that relate to the place names used in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre as room names. Sometimes we find it challenging to find a related resource; sometimes the challenge is in narrowing down our research!

Such is the case with Victoria. Victoria B.C., on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, is our province’s capital and hence the place of many events in the province’s history. Rare Books and Special Collections contains almost innumerable books, maps, documents, and photographs related to Victoria.  However, to rare books enthusiasts, there is one (or two) events from Victoria’s history that are of particular note: the publication of the first book (or books) to be printed in British Columbia.

What is largely accepted to be the first book printed in B.C. is Order in council constituting the Supreme Court of Civil Justice of Vancouver Island and rules of practice and forms to be used therein, which basically amounted to a “rule book” for the Supreme Court in Victoria. It was printed at the Victoria Gazette in November 1858.

The copy photographed above is particularly special: it was David Cameron‘s personal copy!  David Cameron was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia- in other words, not only did he own the book, he wrote the book too. This copy was given to us by Dr. Wallace Chung, on the occasion of the re-opening of the Chung Collection in Spring 2008. David Cameron’s signature can be seen on the cover, and on the Act to provide for the Administration of Justice in Vancouver’s Island, tipped in the front:

So, first book printed in B.C.- straightforward story, right? There was some debate over the years regarding which came first: Order in Council or Alfred Waddington’s Fraser Mines Vindicated, or, the History of Four Months.:

It may have had something to do with Waddington’s preface, describing itself as “the first book published on Vancouver Island.” However, even Waddington’s own fine print explains that, “When the above was written Judge Cameron’s Book of Practice had not yet appeared.”

Apparently the Order in Council leapfrogged ahead of Fraser Mines by mere days. In Lowther’s A Bibliography of British Columbia, she explains that Order in Council “has the distinction of being the first book printed in the colony of Vancouver Island, coming off the press ahead of Waddington’s Fraser mines vindicated.”

In the Barber Centre, the Victoria Learning Theatre is room 182. This is a large lecture theatre and is often used for special events.

 

Those who have used Rare Books and Special Collections comic book collections may be interested in trying out a new database that UBC Library is trialing: Underground and independent comics, comix and graphic novels is “the first ever scholarly, primary source database focusing on adult comic books and graphic novels. Beginning with the first underground comix from the 1960’s to the works of modern sequential artists, this collection will contain more than 75,000 pages of comics and graphic novels, along with 25,000 pages of interviews, criticism, and journal articles that document the continual growth and evolution of this artform.”

Rare Books and Special Collections collects comic books by several Vancouver-based comic book artists- you can access a list of these collections on our Ephemera Research Guide. If Vancouver comics are your thing, you can search the Underground and Independent Comics database for comics published in Vancouver, which will yield comics from two series: Fog City Comics and Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman.

After you check out the database, be sure to fill out the feedback form! The trial runs until March 16.

If you’re new to Rare Books and Special Collections, you may be surprised to find a spicy introduction through our Love! In the library? exhibition. The exhibition is located in the back of the Chung Collection exhibition room, within Rare Books and Special Collections, until February 19th (last day Feb. 18th).

The focus of most of our collections is British Columbia history. One case in the exhibition will tell you a love story related to an early B.C. printer of city directories.

Another focus of our collections is fine press printing. There are a couple of wonderful examples in this exhibition, including Barbarian Press‘s wonderful new The Play of Pericles and Aphrodite’s Cup illustrated with woodblocks by George Kuthan; we also have Kuthan’s woodblocks, as listed in the finding aid for his archives.

Another connection in the exhibition to our archival collections is a love (actually love-stricken) letter from Toni Onley to Yukiko Onley, as it appears in Love Toni, printed by Yukiko Onley and Robert Reid. We have Toni Onley‘s archival collection as well as Robert Reid‘s.

We also collect the archives of several major publishers in British Columbia, including Arsenal Pulp Press. In addition to finding their books in the library catalogue, you can explore their publishing archives through the finding aid.  Arsenal Pulp Press is well known for publishing gender studies, gay and lesbian literature, and as shown in the exhibition, erotica:

Finally, lovers of books love to express their love through a custom-designed bookplate. Rare Books and Special Collections has been building a  digital collection of bookplates for a number of years, which now includes over 800 bookplates.

We hope you enjoy the exhibition and use this opportunity to learn more about our collections! The exhibition is open during our regular opening hours, Monday to Friday 9 -5 pm and Saturday 12-5 pm.

 

In our ongoing series of blog posts featuring the B.C. places used in the Irving K. Barber Centre room names, this week we will take a look at Kitimat. Kitimat was established as a company town in the truest sense. It was established when the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan) built a hydroelectric dam and smelter in the area in the 1950’s.  Its entry in B.C. Geographical Names shows the name Kitimat was used for a village in the area in the early 20th century, but was rescinded mere years before Alcan established the new town.

Rare Books and Special Collections has an excellent source of primary materials related to the planning and establishment of Kitimat by Alcan in the Thomas McDonald fonds. McDonald was an urban planner who worked primarily in Greater Vancouver, but the fonds  also contains files that appear to be from the Alcan offices related to the establishment of Kitimat. As examples, the two images below show plans for the city:

 

The files also contain a wealth of textual records including agreements between Alcan and the Province of B.C., promotional material, and office documents regarding the plans for town development.

For help using our archival resources, check out our research guide for archival material.

In the Barber Centre, the Kitimat Lab is part of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, on the 4th floor.

As previously mentioned in our blog posts on British Columbia place names, many rooms in the Irving K Barber Learning Centre are named after rivers in British Columbia.

This week, we are exploring the history of the Nicola River, after which room 322, a group study room, is named after. According to BC Geographical Names , the Nicola River, one of the major tributaries of the Thompson River, was named after a Nlaka’pamux (Thompson River Salish) chief named Hwistesmexe’quen, or “walking grizzly bear.” According to the third edition of British Columbia Place Names, Hwistesmexe’quen (1785?-1865) was recognized by the fur traders as “the most powerful and influential chief in the Southern Interior of British Columbia” (pg. 190). The French-speaking fur traders nicknamed him “Nicolas” which Hwistesmexe’quen’s people pronounced “Nicolas” first as Nkwala, and eventually as Nicola.

Located in the South-Central Interior of British Columbia, the Nicola River was first mapped by Alexander Caulfield Anderson (1814-1884), on his manuscript map of 1849. On the map, the Nicola Lake and Nicola River are shown as “Lac de Nicolas” and “R.Nicolas.” The British Columbia (B.C.) Archives holds a copy of this map, in the archives of Anderson, a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader. Many unique items, such as Anderson’s manuscript map, are held by the B.C. Archives. The B.C. Archives is an important place to visit if you are planning on doing research into the history of British Columbia; since 1894, the archivists in the BC Archives have collected and provided access to the records of the Provincial government. In addition to visiting the Archives, you may wish to plan a visit to the Research Library, which holds over 70,000 rare and unique items documenting the exploration and development of British Columbia.

If you are interested in learning more about Anderson, and his mapping of the province, including the area that that the Nicola River runs through, you may wish to attend the next meeting of the Historical Map Society of British Columbia. On February 6, 2012, Nancy Maguerite Anderson, the great-grandaughter of A.C. Anderson, will be speaking about her book, The Pathfinder: A.C Anderson’s Journeys in the West (Heritage House Publishers, 2011). The Historical Map Society of British Columbia meets at 7:00 p.m. in the Chilcotin Board Room (room 256), in the Irving K Barber Learning Centre.

Nancy’s blog, Fur Trade Family History, is a rich resource of information relating to the history of British Columbia. For example, see her entry on the mapping of the Nicola River and Valley; in addition to providing an overview of Anderson’s mapping of the area, she provides many photographs of the Nicola Valley today.  

In this installation of our blog series exploring B.C. places from the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre rooms, we will explore the village of McBride, or in this case, its namesake. McBride is located in the Cariboo, between Prince George and Valmount, very close to the Albertan border.  Settled during the construction of the Grand Pacific Trunk Railway in 1913, it is named for Sir Richard McBride, who was the premier of B.C. from 1903-1915. The railway was one of McBride’s major platforms, along with the establishment of a provincial university, which would become UBC.

Suppose you wanted to find pieces of correspondence to and from McBride in our collections here at Rare Books and Special Collections. This is a great example of how more than one method of searching is sometimes necessary.

Finding aids for our archival collections can be found on our website, and through a simple Google search for “McBride,” a number of results will appear, some of which are for the McBride in question, others not. One result is the Frederic Howay fonds, which lists letters from Richard McBride in Box 4 file 18:

There are six letters from McBride to Howay (a judge, author, and collector of British Columbiana whose book collection is one of the founding collections at Rare Books and Special Collections). Among them is this letter in which McBride invites Howay to send his manuscript about the Royal Engineers for publication by the government.  That manuscript presumably became this printed pamphlet.

Another method of searching will find items from our vertical file collection, which was featured in our post about Oliver. Vertical files are found in the library catalogue. By searching for items in Rare Books and Special Collections as the location and Richard McBride as your keywords, you will find a number of published items related to McBride such as speeches, and also this letter from Wilfred Laurier to McBride:

In it, Laurier refers to land transactions being made between First Nations groups and the government for the construction of the Grand Trunk Railroad.

Do these two search methods guarantee that you will find all archival documents related to Richard McBride? Unfortunately not. The nature of archival description is that it tends to describe groups of records, not individual items- if archivists catalogued every document individually, we would be hopelessly behind in our work! When using archives for your research, you sometimes have to think a little more creatively- who would have Richard McBride been corresponding with, and about what? This helps you choose appropriate keywords for your searches. For more resources on using archival material, check out our Archival Material research guide.

In the Barber Centre, the McBride Meeting room is room 265, which is one of the meeting rooms on the south side of the building, off of the Ike’s Cafe eating area.

The Bralorne Reading Room (room 490 in the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies, Irving K Barber Learning Centre) is named after the town of Bralorne, a gold mining community in the Bridge River District, 125 kilometers west of the town of Lillooet.

In 1897, three gold prospectors staked claims at what became the Bralorne Mining site: the Lorne, Marquis, and the Golden King claims. From 1897 to 1931, various people worked in the mines. Among those people was Arthur Noel, a prospector and his wife, Delina. Together, they owned and worked in the Lorne mine from 1916 to 1928, making $160,000 (Bralorne-Pioneer Museum)

In 1931, the mine was purchased by Bralco Development and Investment Company. Austin Cottrell Taylor, the owner of Bralco, renamed the mine Bralorne mine. From March 1932 to 1971, the mine, made up of the Bralorne, King and Pioneer mines, was “the largest historic gold producer in the Canadian Cordillera producing 4.1 million ounces of gold” (Bralorne Gold Mine Ltd.).

During the 39 years that the mine was in operation, a large town developed to support the hundreds of people who worked in the mine. There are a number of publications in the UBC Library collection on Bralorne (see, for example, Bridge River Gold), however, the Bralorne Pioneer Museum offers the best selection of resources. It was formed in 1977 with the mandate to preserve the history of the Bridge River Valley which consists of several small communities: Bralorne, Gold Bridge, Gun Creek, Gun Lake, Tyax Lake and Marshall Lake.

If you are unable to visit the museum in person, check out the Bralorne-Pioneer: Their Past Lives Here, a virtual exhibit that is part of the Virtual Museum of Canada website. Using photographs and stories, this virtual exhibit explores the history of Bralorne from the first discovery of gold in the Bridge River valley in the 1860s to the closing of the mine in the 1970s. The Virtualmuseum.ca website, a collaboration between Canadian museums and the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), includes 500 virtual exhibits promoting the content of Canadian museums and a gallery of 680,000 images drawn from Canadian museum collections.

Today, only a small number of people live in Bralorne. However, this may change, as the Bralorne Gold Mine was re-opened on May 27, 2011. Bralorne Gold Mines Ltd. is exploring and developing the between the historic Bralorne, King and Pioneer gold mines.

If you have been to Google today, it may have come to your attention that today is the 224th anniversary of the birth of Louis Daguerre, inventor of the first permanent photographic process, called a daguerreotype.  Daguerreotypes were used from around 1839 to 1860, and differ in many ways from later photographic types: the process created a direct positive on a silvered copper plate. The result is a somewhat mirrored image, that because of its fragility, would have often been stored in a decorative case, behind a piece of glass. Because the image was transferred directly as a positive (meaning, there is no negative) it was not possible to make copies of the same image- every daguerreotype in existence is completely unique.

A search in our B.C. Historical Photograph Collection yields one lone example of a daguerreotype, a portrait of an unidentified man:

You can see that his rosy cheeks have been hand-painted on. Like many daguerreotypes, this one is in a decorative case:

For more daguerreotypes:

Library of Congress daguerreotype collection

Daguerreotypes at Harvard University

Search for daguerreotypes at Library and Archives Canada

See the process at the Getty Museum

and just for fun:

CBC wants you to send in your daguerreotype-style photos

My Daguerreotype Boyfriend (full disclosure- they aren’t all daguerreotypes)

For information on searching photograph collections at UBC, check out our Historical Photographs research guide.

A reminder that except for UBC Okanagan Library, all other UBC Library branches, including Rare Books and Special Collections, University Archives and the Chung Collection will be closed for Remembrance Day on Friday November 11.

The photograph above, from the Chung Collection, shows the C.P.R. steamship the R.M.S. Empress of Russia leaving Vancouver when she was requisitioned by the British Admiralty. She, and many other C.P.R. ships, also participated in the First World War. Below is a photo of her ca. 1915 painted in “dazzle” camouflage, designed to confuse observers as to the type of ship, speed and direction.

The C.P.R. lost many employees, and ships, during both World Wars, which was written about recently on the Chung Collection News blog.

Details for UBC’s Remembrance Day ceremony can be found here.

We are pleased to announce that additional material is now available in the John Keenlyside Legal Research Collection. This collection is consists of primary documents related to the legal history in British Columbia, and is particularly strong in colonial documents. The most recent addition to this collection contains three different series of documents:

Bankruptcy cases: Documents from the provincial bankruptcy court, dating from 1863-1883, reflecting the post-Gold Rush economic strain felt in this province. The documents are organized into files according to the person or company in question, and are primarily legal documents such as affidavits, deeds, wills and summons. Also included in some of the files are supporting documents, such as the manuscript map below of Graham Island, which is part of a file dating from 1865 regarding the Queen Charlotte Mining Company:

Colonial documents of British Columbia: This series contains mostly correspondence, but also legal documents related to interactions in the court system. These documents reflect not only legal matters in B.C., but also the social and economic aspects of colonial life. For example, the document below is from a set of correspondence describing the courtship of a B.C. missionary’s daughter and steamship builder from Portland:

Supreme Court of Civil Justice claims: This series contains three files related to claims made at the Supreme Court of Civil Justice, which was originally established as the Inferior Court of Civil Justice in 1857 to deal with petty claims in Victoria. All three files contain summons documents, and pertain to debts owed to people or businesses, such as the summons document below:

To see the finding aid for this collection, please consult the catalogue record. For help using archival collections (including links to tutorials to help you learn to read old handwriting!) please see our Archival Material Research Guide.