Library Blogs

Although largely forgotten today,The Water-Babies was once one of the most popular Victorian literary fairy tales. Charles Kingsley's imaginative tour de force leaps from realistic adventure, to fantastical exploration of aquatic biology, to an imaginary voyage in the tradition of Gulliver’s Travels.

This month’s recipe is a lemon cake from Culinary gems : a collection of choice recipes gathered with care from the treasures of culinary experts, published in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1884.
Lemon was an extremely common flavor for desserts and pastries in the 19th century -- almost the default neutral flavor, the way vanilla is now. Although vanilla was known in Europe as a flavoring by the 16th century (there’s an article on it in Diderot’s Encyclopédie of 1765) and a commercial extract was available in the US from at least 1847, it overtook lemon in cakes and pies only slowly

Celebrate Pride Month with a good book!

Here is our Top 10 list of popular games for this past month. A game beats FIFA in the ranking for the first time in ages, and Smash rises in the ranks (probably students celebrating the fact that we allow it every day during the Spring and Summer).

We'll probably see more classic games making the list as well, as students vow over the Summer to finish "that old game I always wanted to get through but never had time for."

HathiTrust started out with only content digitized by Google, but a goal from early on was to support digitized book material from a variety of sources. One early effort provided a toolkit to partners for preparing content, but which turned out to require more technical effort than was reasonable. We rethought our approach and simplified the requirements for partners while maintaining the same high quality standards for HathiTrust.

This short novel consists entirely of a monologue by a librarian in a small town in France. She speaks about the role of the library in society, her love life or lack thereof, her snobbish colleagues, her reflections on French history, and the deficiencies of the Dewey Decimal system.

Shortly after I completed a blog post arguing that the Special Collections Library holds a book formerly owned by Isaac Newton, another one has just resurfaced from the Le Roy Crummer Collection, part of our rich holdings in the history of medicine.

Our last Fairy Tale Friday recounted Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes - a story about a girl whose vanity led to the loss of her feet and, ultimately, her life. Footwear features prominently again in today’s fairy tale. However, unlike Karen’s cursed dancing shoes, Aschenputtel finds that her golden slippers are the vehicle of her own reward and of revenge against her cruel stepsisters.

The Special Collections Library Image Bank is a repository intended to capture the digitized images of Special Collections materials in the public domain created for incidental requests — such as those from patrons or from curatorial staff for outreach initiatives.

In culmination of this year’s Poetry at Literati series, Anne Waldman, whose papers are part of the U-M Special Collections Library, will be performing tonight with fellow poet Anne Carson at 7:30pm at Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore (124 E. Washington). Anne Waldman is renowned for her dynamic poetry performances, which are intended "to conjure states of mind and possibilities, and to wake people up to poetry as an active condition. As an experience in and of itself."