Macdonald-Kelce Library Blog

Garfield, Guiteau, & MKL's Special Collections & Archives

Don’t know your streaming habits, but perhaps you’ve heard about or recently stumbled upon Netflix’s Death by Lightning. The series depicts the election and short presidency of James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States. It focuses primarily on how his path intersects with the path of Charles J. Guiteau, a troubled and quixotic admirer, who (spoiler alert) eventually assassinates the president.

Did you know that Special Collections & Archives at the Macdonald-Kelce Library (MKL) has in its possession an old newspaper “extra” detailing the sentencing of Charles Guiteau?

Published outside a newspaper's regular schedule, an extra broke news in between a morning or afternoon edition. Apparently, news that Guiteau’s appeal had been denied came either too late or too early for the regular edition.   

Though the extra lists no city, the paper may be from Toledo, Ohio, as the Toledo Blade has been the city’s newspaper since the 1830s. The extra itself is from the Feller Family Broadsides Collection which is part of the much larger Tampa Book Arts Collection at the MKL.

This fall, the archives worked with Utampa’s ART281 – History of Graphic Design class taught by Lesley Wolff, Ph.D. Student teams of two each studied two broadsides and created metadata for the pieces. The metadata will be used this spring when Special Collections & Archives digitizes the broadsides and adds them to their digital collections page. One of those pieces was the “extra” you see here.

For more information on the Feller Family Broadsides Collection, or if you would like to see some the pieces in person, email special collections & archive librarian, Gino Pasi, at gpasi@ut.edu.