More from the Special Collections

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • February 19, 2014

Since the Wing has been emptied and all the Special Collection books have been cleaned and moved to a climate-controlled space, I miss meeting “new” books each day. But, as I cleaned the books, I took images of ones that struck me as interesting or had ephemera inserted, or had lovely covers or plates. This was one such book. It actually was not very “exciting” but when I opened it, this is what I found inside. The book is Quaker Ways by A. Ruth Fry, a British Quaker born in the late nineteenth century. She was an active promoter of peace, a writer, and came from a well-known activist Quaker family, her father being instrumental in the negotiations at the Hague Tribunal in 1917. One of Ruth Fry’s books, probably the more well-known one, A Quaker Adventure , concerned her travels through war-torn Europe helping refugees and others affected by the Great War.


I am sure that many of her books were found on the shelves of Quakers and others in the early to mid-nineteenth century. This book in particular appeared to be on the shelf of Ethel Parish Fletcher, the great-granddaughter of Lucretia Coffin Mott! Inside the book an envelope was pasted that revealed a calling card belonging to Mrs. Fletcher with what you see written on the verso. At some point, the book came to us. Pretty interesting and, dare I say, cool!


JNLF

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