Beyond the Reading Room

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.

In honor of Pi Day, we offer no less than five lemon pies from the Day Nursery Association's 1924 Cook Book, published in Richmond, Indiana. Read on and judge for yourself whether Mrs. Fred Pollitz, Mrs. Thomas Nicholson, Mrs. A.H. Wilson, Mrs. George Eggemeyer, or Mrs. George Fox would win the blue ribbon for lemon pie.

You are invited to see highlights from the library's extraordinary collection of manuscripts and early printed books describing the early history of astrology and astronomy. Mark your calendars for this Tuesday (3/12/19; 4:00-7:00 pm). The selection will range from ancient papyri to richly illustrated books that made possible the scientific revolution in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including first editions of the works of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler.

When cataloging this fifteenth-century Italian manuscript, I saw that some of the pages have been damaged by brushing a chemical reagent on some areas that were difficult to read. While in the short term this substance was designed to make traces of ink more legible, the long-term impact on the manuscript is disastrous as shown in the image below.

The Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit, Free Poems and Functional Art: 50 Years of The Alternative Press. This exhibit celebrates the 50th anniversary of the founding of The Alternative Press, an experimental small press publisher in Michigan.