This is the first part of a (surely long and rambling) series on findings from Universalist records at Harvard Divinity School’s library archives. My thanks to Fran O’Donnell and Jessica Suarez of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library for making my visit possible. I love combing through these Hollinger boxes. Evidence of Yankee thrift abounds. Serious business — which today would be shipped by courier or with tracking numbers, or protected with encryption — went by typed postcard. But one of their habits — one I share — revealed some glorious relics. Make old print jobs into scrap paper; the other side has a use you know. So mundane memos preserve scraps of design choices. Here are a couple I caught.
Thanks for showing these to us and I hope you will continue. An undergraduate major in history was a reflection of my interest in this kind of thing; I came THIS CLOSE to pursuing the Ph.D in church history/New Testament canon formation. Other roads, however, were taken. I remember John Dominic Crossan remarking, when he spoke at Bangor Theological Seminary (R. I. P.) Convocation years ago that he found the close reading of primary sources to be tremendously exciting, as if looking over the shoulder of the original writers. (Earl Holt said he felt that way when perusing the dairies of William Greenleaf Eliot for his biography of that sainted founder of Unitarianism in St. Louis.) These things are more than just pieces of paper.