Posts by Pablo Alvarez

We are very excited to re-launch online our open houses in the Special Collections Research Center! As part of the After Hours series, we have arranged an extraordinary line-up of events for the Winter Semester. Before the pandemic, on the second Tuesday of each month during the academic year, we organized physical displays of themed selections from our collections. Now we are committed to continue this tradition of open houses in the virtual world. All are welcome to join us from the comfort of your home or office to chat with a curator and learn about our collections.

We are pleased to announce the launching of a new online exhibit: "Sacred Hands." This virtual display highlights an extraordinary selection of manuscripts containing the sacred texts of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It includes manuscripts that are highly treasured for their textual and artistic value, such as a tenth-century Torah, the earliest known papyrus of St. Paul's Epistles, early illuminated Byzantine manuscripts of the Four Gospels, and a wide selection of manuscripts containing the Qur'an.

We are very pleased to announce that the video of the Webinar on book history in the Philippines (1850-1950) that we hosted last October is now widely available.

We are very pleased to invite you all to the second session of a series of virtual encounters on various aspects of book history. On this occasion, our online meeting is devoted to several issues regarding book production, the press, and readership in the Philippines under different administrations between 1850 and 1950.

We are very pleased to announce that the video of the Bookbinding webinar that took place on July 6 is now available. It was the first session of a series of virtual encounters on book history organized by the University of Michigan Library and Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

We are very pleased to invite you all to the first session of a series of virtual encounters on various aspects of book history. Our first online meeting is devoted to bookbinding and is scheduled for July 6, 11:00 am (EDT). This session, and the series, are organized by Pablo Alvarez (UM) and Benito Rial Costas (UCM), and will be hosted by the University of Michigan Library and the Facultad de Ciencias de la Documentación of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid on Zoom. The session is free of charge and open to all, but registration is required.

We are pleased to announce the opening of a new online exhibit: Written Culture of Christian Egypt: Coptic Manuscripts from the University of Michigan Collection. This online display is a virtual record of an actual physical exhibit that took place at the Audubon Room of the University of Michigan Library between November 12, 2018 and February 17, 2019. Curated by Alin Suciu and Frank Feder (Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany), and with the collaboration of Pablo Alvarez (Special Collections Research Center), the display includes highlights from our collections of Coptic fragments and codices held at the Papyrology Collection and the Special Collections Research Center.

We are very pleased to announce the recent acquisition of the first comprehensive treatise ever published about the illustration technique of woodcut: Jean Michel Papillon. Traité historique et pratique de la Gravure en bois. 2 vols. (Pierre Guillaume Simon, 1766). Papillon’s manual is particularly remarkable for including a fully illustrated step-by-step depiction of the sixteenth-century technique of chiaroscuro.

When examining a selection of rare books that had been requested for a class presentation about the impact of censorship in early modern Spain, I noticed something truly remarkable in one of these books. Our copy of the eighteenth-century edition of Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas’ El Parnaso español y musas castellanas, published in Barcelona in 1703, had been manually, and massively, expurgated by a representative of the Spanish Inquisition, Joseph Pinell, as he himself stated on the title page: Expurgavi ex Commisione S(anc)ti Officii die 8 Aprilii/ Joseph Pinell, Supr(emus). Missionum (I, Joseph Pinell, the highest of delegates, have expurgated it by a mandate of the Holy Inquisition on April 8 1760).

We are pleased to report about our recent acquisition of the first edition of Alessandro Vellutello’s influential commentary on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which was published by Francesco Marcolini da Forlì in Venice in 1544. Undeniably, this edition marked a significant shift in the history of the iconography and reception of Dante’s poem, departing from the previous allegorical interpretations by Cristoforo Landino and Girolamo Benivieni, and challenging Antonio Manetti’s reconstruction of the topography of Hell as described by Dante.