Women Who Built BPL: Open House Spotlight

As we wrap up this year's Women's History Month, there are many more stories about the women who have shaped the Boston Public Library than can fit in one month's of blog posts. Below are a few other women who were honored in the Special Collections open house on Tuesday, March 25.

Lois Tarlow, Artist and Donor

Lois Tarlow, 1928-2021, American painter, was born in Brockton, MA. Tarlow was a Boston-based artist, teacher, and writer. She studied under Kokoschka and Hyman Bloom at Boston Museum of Fine Arts Summer School and under Karl Zerbe during the five-year Museum School course before graduating in 1956. She later became the first drawing instructor at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA. Throughout Tarlow’s career she advocated for more space and recognition for women in the Boston art scene. Tarlow’s paintings are part of the library’s collection of works by artists with ties to Boston.

“I have no doubt about my tenacity. It’s made up mostly of curiosity. I have to stick around to find out who I am and what I will paint.” -Lois Tarlow, January 23, 1986. From Lois Tarlow: A Retrospective, April 20-June 29, 1986, Brocton Art Museum/Fuller Memorial

Marianne Dwight Orvis, Artist, and Ellen Bellows Endicott, Donor

This album was created by Marianne Dwight Orvis, 1816–1901, American letter writer and painter. Born in Boston, she moved to the Brook Farm, the utopian community located in West Roxbury, MA in 1844 and lived there until the farm dissolved in 1847. Everyone who lived on the farm contributed to its economy, including Dwight Orvis. Her artwork was so popular in Boston that she spent hours in her studio painting lampshades, watercolors of flowers, and other “fancy things” in effort to keep up with the demand.

The album shown here is a small book that Dwight Orvis created and sold to support Brook Farm. It was donated to the Boston Public Library by Ellen Bellows Endicott in 1943. Bellows Endicott, 1880-1972, was a supporter of multiple cultural heritage institutions. In addition to donating materials to the BPL, she donated the Henry Bellows Papers to the Massachusetts Historical Society and helped found the Walpole Historical Society in Walpole, NH.

Mary (MP) Bogan, Conservator

Mary (MP) Bogan was the first woman book conservator in the conservation lab at the Boston Public Library, where she worked from 1985-1990. Among her conservation projects during her time at the BPL was treating the John Adams Library. This included a book from 1627, A Concordance to All of the Books of the Old Testament, which Adams once owned. Bogan recently reflected on treating this book when selecting it to be featured in the Special Collections open house:

A Concordance to All of the Books of the Old Testament was printed in 1627 — nearly 400 years ago! Its full leather binding was found to be in poor condition when assessed by conservators in 1990. Most of the spine leather was missing and conservators noted that pieces of parchment with manuscript writing were adhered to the spine of the text block. Bookbinders sometimes used fragments and leftovers of parchment manuscripts — referred to as waste — to line spines.

At the request of the Rare Book Librarian at the time, these lining pieces were lifted from the book. Although research did not reveal any significance regarding the provenance of the manuscript waste, it was a very interesting circumstance. The volume was rebacked and the linings were catalogued and stored separately with other items removed from volumes in the Adams Collection.

This book was selected to emphasize the importance of conservators, curators, and librarians working together in conservation and preservation. Ideally the best outcome for a volume and a collection comes from thoughtful collaboration.

With 40 years of experience in the field of book binding and book conservation, Mary was a former Director of Book Conservation at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), and has worked at the bindery of Gray Parrot, and in the conservation labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and NEDCC. Mary lists conserving John Adams’s atlas, journals taken on the Lewis & Clark expedition, travel scrapbooks of Isabella Stewart Gardner, notebooks belonging to Woody Guthrie, and books in Ernest Hemingway’s home in Cuba as some of the highlights of her career.