This is Mazon Monday post #74. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
-----------------------------------------------------
We recently ran across an interesting article in the July/August 1996 edition of the ESCONI newsletter that details the story of the donation of the original notebook manuscripts of the two original Langford books and the unpublished book three. George Langford Jr. donated the notebooks to ESCONI in 1995. Later, ESCONI donated these historical documents to the Illinois State Museum after some discussions at the 1995 Mazon Creek Open House at Northeastern Illinois University. Here is the article from the newsletter.
THE LANGFORD NOTEBOOKS
While working on Keys to Identify Pennsylvanian Fossil Plants of the Mazon Creek Area, Don Auler contacted George Langford, Jr. who provided him with a great deal of information about his fathers thoughts and feelings regarding the earlier books published by ESCONI Associates. Eventually, Mr. Langford sent Don the original notebook manuscripts of books one and two, and the unpublished book three, along with considerable correspondence between Mr. Langford, Sr., the Field Museum and various other individuals.
In the fall of 1995 at the Northeastern Illinois University Mazon Creek Open House, one of the featured speakers was Dr. Richard Leary, curator of Geology at the Illinois State Museum. Dr. Leary spoke about the many ways that the Langford collection is being used, even today, for study and research. He stated he was amassing a collection of correspondence, articles etc., by and about George Langford, Sr.
I passed this information to Don Auler and he arranged for the donation of the Langford notebooks and correspondence to the Illinois State Museum.
In May of 1996 Dr. Leary returned copies of the notebooks with a letter of appreciation. These notebooks are now part of our library collection, and should be of interest to Mazon Creek collectors.
It occurred to me that some of our more senior members may have correspondence or other remembrances of George Langford, Sr., and that they might be willing to donate them to the Illinois State Museum. In this way we can perpetuate the memory of George Langford, Sr. and his contributions to the science of paleontology, and to amateur collectors everywhere.
Send contributions to:
Dr. Richard Leary, Curator of Geology
Illinois State Museum
Research & Collections Center
1011 East Ash Street
Springfield, IL 62703Don Brazda, Librarian
(708) 832-6629
Around 1997, Jack Wittry and Peter Christofferson edited George Langford's third book "Additions to the Mazon Creek Flora and Fauna". A bunch of copies were printed and distributed by ESCONI in the late 1990's. The cover features an illustration of Strepocyclus langfordi by Don Auler.
In the book's acknowledgements, Wittry mentions that the content of the book was kept as it was written in the early 1960's even though there are a few errors due to differences in what was known then compared to now. Due to the unfortunate circumstances around this book when it was written, we can be fairly certain that George would have approved of the effort to get this book published.
This book was assembled from the handwritten notes and orig- inal pictures by the late George Langford, Sr. Every effort was made to keep the book as he intended, and no attempt was made to validate his text. This book is meant to be used more as an historical reference then one for taxonomy. Errors will surely be found since it was written more than 40 years ago. However, this should not diminish the importance of his work. We hope Mr. Langford would have approved our efforts.
We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the members of the Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois (ESCONI) for their permission to use portions of previously published works of George Langford, Sr.
-- Jack Wittry
The content of the book is interesting. In it are
- Discussions of George's localities
- Species missing from the first two books
- Correspondence between George Langford Sr. and Eugene Richardson and others
- Excellent new photos of specimens
Recently, there has been some discussion of reprinting copies of this book. Nothing to announce yet, but if it happens, we will announce it on our website, so stay tuned!
