Library Blogs

A day like today, on April 22 , Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra died in Madrid four hundred years ago. To commemorate this date, I have revisited our collection of early editions of Cervantes's works, selecting for this post the eighteenth-century edition of Don Quixote that played a major role to canonize Cervantes as a global literary figure.

Cotton Malone, a former navy man and U.S. Justice Department agent, now a rare book dealer, searches for clues to the disappearance of his father in a submarine disaster off the coast of Antarctica, and finds evidence of a lost civilization, possibly thousands of years old.

The first of a trilogy, this Jane Smiley novel covers the life of an Iowa farm family from 1920-1953.

Everyone who works in the library, including some student workers, uses the intranet -- that’s over 450 people! In preparation for a major Drupal update and intranet redesign, the Intranet Upgrade Investigation Team (IUIT) has done a ton of thoughtful user research to guide our work including a survey, open card sort and closed cart sort. The findings are informing our progress and helping meet the goal of making the intranet a sustainable and user friendly tool that everyone wants to use.

Please join Rebecca Chung (UMSI), Fritz Swanson (Wolverine Press), and Justin Schell (Shapiro Design Lab), for conversation about the Wolverine Press's edition of a famous sheet of paper: the G gathering from the Q2 (second quarto) of Hamlet, which includes Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, his repudiation of Ophelia with “Get thee a Nunry,” and his speech to the players, “sute the action to the word.”

Here's a game design event happening on central campus that we wanted to make you aware of.

As part of the ongoing series of events commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death this term, join us on Thursday, April 7th for a lecture by Professor Joseph Loewenstein at 4:00pm in the Hatcher Gallery.

Raiders of the Nile is the second in Steven Saylor's new series featuring his ancient Roman detective, Gordianus the Finder, as a young man. After journeying to see the Seven Wonders of the World in the previous volume, Gordianus has settled in Alexandria. But when his slave and lover, Bethesda, is kidnapped, Gordianus faces many adventures as he tries to rescue her. He encounters a gang of bandits, gets falsely accused of murder, and learns of a plot to steal the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great.

The exhibit Shakespeare on Page and Stage: A Celebration (Audubon Room, January 11-April 27, 2016) showcases both the textual and performance history of Shakespeare’s plays. This post looks in greater detail at the work of costume and set designer Zelma Weisfeld, professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Michigan from 1960-1988. During those 28 years, Weisfeld contributed to more than 120 theatre and opera productions, including several Shakespeare plays.

Our featured book is a copy of the second edition of the famous sixteenth-century blood-letting treatise for barber-surgeons, Discourses of Pietro Paolo Magni of Piacenza on how to bleed, attach leeches and cups, perform massages and blistering to the human body (Discorsi di Pietro Paolo Magni piacentino sopra il mondo di sanguinare, attaccar le sanguisugue, & le ventose far le fregagione & vessicatorij a corpi humani). It was published in Rome in 1586.