The local shelf — picture books, museum books, and the county's own keeping

THE DOCUMENTED LOCAL-PRESS RECORD, AT ITS SIZE

The Arcadia volume. South Bend's volume in Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series is South Bend, Indiana (2001, 128 pages), by Kay Marnon Danielson, a native of this city. The series' method is the caption-book: more than two hundred period photographs with their accounts attached, drawn from the collections of the South Bend–Mishawaka area — the city itself, the St. Joseph County Public Library, the Northern Indiana Center for History, and private holders. It is the modern city's most widely held picture history, and it prints here as what it is: a documented, authored volume of the local press, not a substitute for the county histories in Sources.

The museum's archivist. The Studebaker National Museum's archivist in South Bend, Andrew Beckman, is a working local author of the museum-book class: The Studebaker National Museum: Over a Century on Wheels (M.T. Publishing, 2008) and, with Frederic A. Sharf, Studebaker's Last Dance: The Avanti (2012), the book of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's exhibition of that year. The industrial literature at full size — Erskine's official company history of 1918, Longstreet's A Century on Wheels (1952), the marque bibliographies — stands as sources in Sources and in the Studebaker file; their authors were not South Bend men, and this entry does not claim them. Beckman, whose byline is on this city's museum, is the documented exception.

The keeping of the shelf. The state's own bibliography is where the early local shelf is kept as a class: Indiana Authors and Their Books, the state record the Fort Wayne authors file also stands on, indexes this county's nineteenth-century pamphlet literature — the sermons, addresses, school histories and occasional verse of the first generations — as entries rather than as a literature, and the St. Joseph County Public Library's local history room holds the pamphlet collection itself, the institution carried in Libraries. The self-published and pamphlet shelf of the modern era — church and neighborhood histories, school volumes, family genealogies printed at the author's expense — is real and large and stands here at the size the record supports: a class, catalogued by its keepers, not enumerated by this section, which does not inflate what it cannot count.

Sources:

1. Arcadia Publishing, catalog — South Bend, Indiana, Images of America (2001), by Kay Marnon Danielson; the volume's contents and its photographic sources, including the St. Joseph County Public Library and the Northern Indiana Center for History.
2. Studebaker National Museum, staff record — Andrew Beckman, archivist; The Studebaker National Museum: Over a Century on Wheels (M.T. Publishing, 2008); Studebaker's Last Dance: The Avanti (2012), with Frederic A. Sharf, for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
3. Libraries (this record) — the St. Joseph County Public Library's local history and genealogy collections; Authors & Books (Fort Wayne, this record) — the state bibliography as the Fort Wayne shelf's keeper, the same standing claimed here.