Beyond the Reading Room

How did prominent east coast poets like Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman end up contributing their work to The Alternative Press, a small press based in Michigan? It all started with John Sinclair.

According to Giorgio Vasari’s biographies, The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors, Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519. As museums around the world are commemorating the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo with various exhibits, we would like to join the celebrations of Leonardo’s legacy by highlighting our copies of some early printed editions of his Trattato della Pittura (Treatise on Painting).

Join filmmaker Nancy Savoca at a symposium celebrating her career on Friday, May 10. The symposium will include several panels, an exhibit opening, and film screenings.

Earlier this month, Special Collections was pleased to host WEMU news reporter Jorge Avellan as he researched a story for their "Hidden in Plain Sight" program, featuring Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cook Book. This unpreposessing little 39-page booklet in faded paper wrappers is one of the greatest treasures of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. Published in Paw Paw, Michigan in 1866, A Domestic Cook Book is the only known copy of the oldest known cookbook published by an African American.

What would you do with 500 blank postcards? For contributors to The Alternative Press, the answers varied. Some hand-wrote poetry on their cards. Some made images--by painting, drawing, collaging, or pasting photographs onto paper. Some embraced the postcard format, while others challenged it--for example, Carol Steen made all of her postcards in brass, a playful take on the form you could never actually use them to mail a message to a friend.

On behalf of the University of Michigan Library we want to express our most sincere gratitude to Marty and Marilyn Lindenauer for their generous donation that allowed us to acquire a series of books and artifacts for our History of Medicine Collection.

We are delighted to share our latest annual report, containing highlights from July 2017 to June 2018. Curious where items in our collections traveled for exhibition? Want to learn about a few of our most exciting acquisitions? Interested in what kinds of instruction sessions we do? You can find all that and more in this report.

Tomorrow is our final Special Collections After Hours event of the year! This month's theme is "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been," where we'll be displaying material from the Joseph A. Labadie Collecton related to marijuana. This includes material on recreational and medical uses of marijuana, as well as manuals on its cultivation. Here's a preview of a couple of items we'll have out for the event.

Join us Thursday, 4 April for a public lecture with conservator and researcher Cheryl Porter! Refreshments will be served.

We are pleased to announce the launching of our most recent Omeka exhibit: Marks in Books. In this online exhibit, the term "marks" refers to physical elements that have been added to manuscripts and early printed books throughout time, that is, from the instance when they were being made until they arrived to our shelves. Mostly, these marks were not intended by the authors, scribes and printers as they originally envisioned their books, but were later included in the form of corrections, readers' marginalia, drawings, and traces of subsequent ownerships as shown in bookplates and bindings. These marks are extraordinary witnesses offering unique information on various aspects of book history such as production, textual transmission, reception, and provenance history.