Welcome to the latest chapter in our series showcasing the work of our Spring 2025 Special Collections & University Archives interns. In this post, Lacey Bunn, an English major and music minor from the USF Class of 2026, shares her experience organizing, cataloging, and digitizing broadsides and posters in the Donohue Rare Book Room. Throughout the process, Lacey encountered moments of serendipity, discovering unexpected treasures along the way. We’re pleased to share her insights and the results of her work. Thank you, Lacey!
Large broadsides on thick white paper cover two tables and half of the cases of the Donohue Rare Book Room. Smaller, multicolored sheets are piled next to them. With a dry sort of sigh, I retrieve another folder full of additional copies of the same broadsides–randomly arranged–out of a box that was pulled from a drawer it shared with an old typewriter. One of my supervisors enters the room and starts slightly at the poetry hurricane that seems to have struck the usually pristine space. We both smile at the state of things. It is part of the fun of my project as an intern this semester: there is truly no telling what is going to come out of the collections of unsorted broadsides the Rare Book Room holds, or how many copies there will be.
In my process of creating descriptive entries and scanning the broadsides to be put into Digital Collections, where they will be discoverable and accessible in the Ignacio Library Catalog, I have encountered an impressive variety of different materials. It is not all poetry, though there is a rich assortment of broadsides from Bay Area poets, like Allen Ginsberg or Gary Snyder. There are posters for books from as early as the 1890s, ephemera from other universities, and oh so many prints from fine presses all over the U.S. and U.K.
Personally, my favorites are always the odd one-off writings from authors I don’t recognize. The Rare Book Room is an absolute treasure trove for discovering pieces of writing you would have never otherwise benefited from reading. Below are some of the prints I inventoried that I was lucky to encounter.
The first is a letter from the Italian architect Fra Giovanni, written in 1513. The broadside is unlabeled, so it is difficult to know where it came from or when, but it seemed pretty recent as I was handling it. The next is a poem by Jane Edwards, who printed it with the help of a professor at Lone Mountain College in 1976. I loved the contrast between the bitter tone and domestic language in this poem, and the connection to USF makes it a special piece in the collection. Finally, the printing on cool blue paper of “Icy Rose” (1972) by Anne Waldman does a good job of showing how a poem can benefit from the large space and textual freedom offered by being printed as a broadside. The visual design is pretty minimal, and it doesn’t use illustrations or fancy lettering either, but the way the poem scatters down the page and spreads out, seeming to leak across its own space, is a good example of why the broadside is a special medium.
If any of these sound interesting, or if you just want to explore such a varied and colorful collection of materials, the Rare Book Room is definitely the place to be.
You can get a closer look at Lacey’s work by viewing the digitized broadsides in Gleeson Library’s Digital Collections. To see any Special Collections & University Archives material in person, stop by the Donohue Rare Book Room on the 3rd floor of Gleeson Library or contact us to schedule an appointment.