Gabriel Mckee

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Grolier Club, November 16, 2017-January 13, 2018, this catalog explores the relationships between Ameriacn authors, editors, and publishers in the 19th century. Drawing on books, manuscripts, and ephemera from the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane, the catalog illustrates key moments in the careers of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frances Sargent Osgood, and others.

A complete catalogue of Tane's Edgar Allan Poe collection, considered to be the finest in private hands. The collection - encompassing over 400 rare original items, plus important secondary material - offers an in-depth look at Poe's life, his world, and his influence into the present day, through original manuscripts and letters by Poe, daguerreotypes, artifacts, first edition books, and unique material related to Poe's family and friends, some of which are recent discoveries. Highlights of the collection include the only known manuscript copy of "The Conqueror Worm," generally regarded as one of Poe's best and bleakest poems; an autograph letter written by Poe to James Russell Lowell, editor of the Boston periodical The Pioneer, offering him his short story "The Tell-Tale Heart;" one of only two privately-held copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems; two daguerreotypes of Poe; and a fragment of his coffin. The collection also contains a number of items that show Poe's influence on American and world culture after his death, including artwork, comic books, movie posters, sound recordings, and toys. Includes an index. Published in connection with the exhibition held at the Grolier Club September 17 - November 14, 2014.

In this thorough and engaging book, Gabriel McKee explores the inherent theological nature of science fiction, using illustrations from television shows, literature, and films. Science fiction, he believes, helps us understand not only who we are but who we will become. McKee organizes his chapters around theological themes, using illustrations from authors such as Isaac Asimov and H. G. Wells, television shows such as Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, and films such as The Matrix and Star Wars. With its extensive bibliography and index, this is a book that all serious science fiction fans--not just those with a theological interest--will appreciate.

Games about the ancient past serve as a sort of simulation, formalizing real-world events into a system of rules which are then enacted by players who take on the role of an agent inside a narrative system. Requiring active engagement with the subject matter through world building and decision-making, games—both analog (or tabletop) games and digital (or video) games—can provide a tool for modeling and experiencing events in fantastic, modern, or historical settings. This introductory essay describes the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the “Re-Rolling the Past” conference, arguing that games can serve as important avenues for communicating information about the ancient world while also advocating for an informed, critical, and deliberative approach to games based on real-world places, times, and people.
Co-authored by Gabriel Mckee and Daniela Wolin.

Current cataloging guidelines for creating name authority records (NARs) for royalty and nobility assume that an individual’s claim to a royal title is clear and unambiguous. In the case of historical rebels, usurpers, and eccentrics who claim royal titles for themselves, however, the guidelines are not so clear. When we attempt to describe people and places from a disputed past, we actively enter into their struggles for power, but rules documents like Resource Description and Access (RDA) do not address the question of the legitimacy of a claimed title. Fortunately, recent scholarship on self-determination in NARs for living creators and subject terminology for contested political jurisdictions can help us to develop more ethical practices for historical names of ambiguous legitimacy. This paper uses the Nidintu-Bēl/Nebuchadnezzar III, a rebel against the Achaemenid emperor Darius I named in the Behistun Inscription (6th century BCE), as a case study to establish best practices for the identity management of historical representatives of dissenting royalty.

https://godsandmonsters-ojs-txstate.tdl.org/godsandmonsters/index.php/godsandmonsters/article/view/1

This paper discusses the works of author Richard S. Shaver, who rose to prominence in the science fiction world in the 1940s with stories describing a vast underworld of caverns under the surface of the earth. These caverns were inhabited by evil beings called “dero” that used high-tech devices to torment the inhabitants of the surface world. Shaver, who had spent several years in mental institutions prior to his writing career, claimed his stories were true, and editorRaymond A. Palmer aggressively promoted the “Shaver Mystery”in his magazines, in particular Amazing Stories.This prompted a backlash from science fiction fandom against both Shaver and Palmer. This paper gives an overview of Shaver’s career and explores his theory of the world as a form of theodicy, drawing in particular on his novel Mandark, a retelling of portions of the Bible narrative. Shaver’s monsters and their devices are examples of an “influencing machine,” a commonly-occurring delusional phenomenon first described by psychologist Victor Tausk in 1919, an externalized force that a patient believes is the source of thoughts and sensations. This paper argues that, for Shaver, the dero provided a psychological framework for processing tragic and traumatic events, externalizing tormenting forces into monsters. His fiction then became a force for combatting those torments within a narrative context. Like other conspiracy theories, the Shaver Mystery seeks to impose order on a chaotic world.

Edgar Allan Poe's tale “The Tell-Tale Heart” was first published in the premiere issue of the Pioneer, an ambitious and short-lived literary journal edited by James Russell Lowell and Robert Carter. In 2013, a previously unpublished letter from Poe to Lowell, dated November 24, 1842, was auctioned at Christie's and is now in private hands. This letter contains Poe's offer of the tale to Lowell and his first mention of its title to the editor that went on to publish it. This article, based on direct examination of the letter, provides its full text, along with a contextual discussion of the Pioneer's brief existence and an exploration of the relationship between Poe and Lowell from their first correspondence in 1842 to their falling out and mutual criticism in the late 1840s. The newly discovered letter gives us a more complete picture of the publication of one of Poe's best-known tales and of the relationship between two major figures of nineteenth-century American literature.

Gray Barker (1925-1984) was a prominent figure in flying saucer and New Age publishing for over three decades, beginning in 1953 with the first issue of his flying saucer fanzine The Saucerian. By the end of the 1950s, he had launched a publishing imprint that brought out some of the strangest UFO-related books of the era, with a particular emphasis on flying saucer contactees. Barker also played a key role in nurturing fringe ideas that grew up around the saucer mystery, including the Mothman, the Philadelphia Experiment, and the Men in Black. Barker’s publishing imprint—first known as Saucerian Publications and later renamed New Age Books—became a platform for those whose stories were too unusual, implausible, or crudely written for more mainstream publishers. Cheaply produced and published in small editions, Saucerian’s books were marketed to the small core of true believers in the saucer mystery. This chapter explores Barker’s career as a publisher, emphasizing his role in bringing to light contactee narratives and other outré works as well as his central role in the development of 20th-century myths and the permeation of paranormal ideas into popular culture.

This article describes a bibliographic mapping project recently undertaken at the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). The MARC Advisory Committeerecently approved an update to MARC that enables the use of dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in MARC subfield $0. The ISAW Library has taken advantage of MARC’s new openness to URIs, using identifiers from the linked data gazetteer Pleiades in MARC records and using this metadata to create maps representing our library’s holdings. By populating our MARC records with URIs from Pleiades, an online, linked open data (LOD) gazetteer of the ancient world, we are able to create maps of the geographic metadata in our library’s catalog. This article describes the background, procedures, and potential future directions for this collection-mapping project.

This poster presentation describes an online digital library containing electronic versions of Soviet-era archaeological publications on sites in Central Asia. Many of the materials available in this digital library were originally published in editions as small as a few dozen copies, and received limited distribution outside the Soviet Union. These publications, most of which come from an archaeological institute in Uzbekistan, were originally digitized by an international consortium with the intention of creating a digital library, but the project stalled due to lack of funds. Following this the digital materials, which have low commercial value but high academic value, have circulated privately among scholars for the last decade. Our institution has undertaken a project to bring this shadow library into the light, both by obtaining explicit publication permissions and by identifying public domain materials and copyright orphans publishable under the doctrine of fair use. We have hosted these works in our institutional repository and published them online via the Omeka platform, with a long-term preservation commitment, quality metadata, and stable URLs.

The full iPoster is available online here:
https://acrl2019-acrl.ipostersessions.com/default.aspx?s=1E-07-B3-4F-D2-AF-98-70-54-14-B0-AB-7B-C9-92-50

Author and artist Richard Sharpe Shaver rose to prominence in the science fiction world in the 1940s with stories describing a vast underworld of caverns under the surface of the earth, inhabited by evil beings called “dero” that used high-tech devices to torment the inhabitants of the surface world. Shaver, who had spent several years in mental institutions prior to his writing career, claimed his stories were true, prompting a backlash from science fiction fandom against both Shaver and his editor, Raymond A. Palmer. This paper will discuss Shaver’s world-system as a form of theodicy, drawing in particular on his novel Mandark, a retelling of portions of the Bible narrative. The paper will also discuss Shaver’s work in the context of mental illness, and the marginalization of the mentally ill inherent in the backlash against him.

An overview of the bibliography of the Clarksburg, West Virginia-based UFO book publisher Saucerian Publications and the biography of its proprietor, Gray Barker. Paper presented at the conference "Sacred Literature, Secular Religion," hosted by the LeMoyne College Religion and Literature Forum, Oct. 1-3, 2015.

Priscillian of Avila (d. ca. 385) is often described as the first Christian to be executed for heresy. In the latter half of the fourth century, he led a popular ascetic movement in Spain, but his rivals accused him of heresy. He was ultimately convicted by sorcery by the usurper Magnus Maximus and, with several of his followers, sentenced to death.

The true nature of Priscillian’s heresy is ambiguous, and his defenders maintained his beliefs were generally orthodox. The nature and history of Priscillian’s movement has been discussed in depth (e.g., Babut 1909, Chadwick 1976, Burrus 1995), but less attention has been given to Priscillian’s defenders, and, just as notably, the ambivalence of many of his critics the nature of his condemnation. Many prominent bishops believed that Priscillian’s accusers were tainted by his death, and the objection to his persecution briefly led to a schism in Gaul: some prominent bishops refused to hold communion with his chief accuser, Ithacius of Ossonuba, as well as any bishops ordained by him.

Priscillian’s case holds a complex position in the history of capital punishment and religious persecution. In this paper, I examine the ambivalent aftermath of Priscillian’s execution, looking both at his supporters and his critics who attacked accused and accuser alike. In particular, I will draw on the Chronicle and Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus, with additional reference to the acts of the synods and councils relevant to the Priscillianist movement, Ambrose’s letters, and Jerome’s assorted references to Priscillian.

Paper presented at the Second Conference of the International Society for Heresy Studies, New York, June 1-3, 2016.

Last month, The Islamic State of Syria and the Levant issued a video depicting the detonation of heavy explosives in the ancient Assyrian city of Kalhu, better known as Nimrud. Fortunately, Nimrud/Kalhu is one of the better-explored Assyrian sites, largely due to the publications issued following the site’s initial excavation by Austen Henry Layard. The ISAW Library holds all of Layard's major works on his Nimrud excavations, including two richly-illustrated folio volumes and one of the first publications to use a cuneiform typeface.

The ISAW library recently received a copy of Nebukadnezar III/IV by Jürgen Lorenz, which assembles the primary sources for two little-known political upstarts in the Achaemenid Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE). The two rebel Nebuchadnezzars—and all the other would-be contenders in ancient history—pose a problem for libraries and researchers: how do we catalog and search for history's losers?