Beyond the Reading Room

A quick peek at two cookbooks from the late 1960s, one for Summer of Love hippies and another for their more straight-laced counterparts at home.

One of the great pleasures of spending this summer in the archives as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow has been stumbling into and out of people’s lives, or the echoes of them left behind in correspondence, records, doodles, drafts, and other materials. There are a lot of recognizable names in the Special Collections Library stacks, but for every person I’ve read or heard about there are so many more who are new to me...

As I thumbed through letters between Danny Kaye and his sweetheart Holly Fine, I couldn’t help but imagine the ginger-haired actor twirling Vera-Ellen in his arms and singing “The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing.” We often think about film as a moving media––people and objects flickering across screens––but film archives, like those of the Special Collections Library, contain the material, tangible objects that accompany the making of films. These materials tell rich stories!

The Charles Ellet, Jr. Papers, part of our Transportation History Collection, document the career of a man who surveyed rivers, built innovative bridges, and served as Colonel of the U.S. Ram Fleet during the Civil War. Guest writer Lauren Lincoln-Chavez, who processed the collection, tells the story of an exceptional 19th century engineer.

The manuscript currently preserved in our library under the shelfmark Isl. Ms. 350 has a fascinating history that can be traced in internal owners’ marks and external documentary sources. Produced in Delhi, the manuscript was acquired by the library in 1924 along with several hundred other manuscripts from Istanbul that came to be known as the "Abdul Hamid Collection." How did these manuscripts reach Ann Arbor? Read the intriguing story in this second of two posts!

There's a moment of suspense every time I remove the lid of an archival box. What will I find inside? Folders of nineteenth-century correspondences in French? A civil war diary with a bullet hole in its leather cover? A pile of pamphlets about applying makeup for transwomen? A random letter signed by J.R.R. Tolkien? (Yes, I really did find one!) After five weeks in the archives unit of the Special Collections Library, I have come to realize that I never really know what I will find...

The manuscript currently preserved in our library under the shelfmark Isl. Ms. 350 has a fascinating history that can be traced in internal owners’ marks and external documentary sources. Produced in Delhi, the manuscript was acquired by the library in 1924 along with several hundred other manuscripts from Istanbul that came to be known as the "Abdul Hamid Collection." How did the manuscript end up in Istanbul? Read the intriguing story in this first of two posts!

Researcher Mark Bocek will join us this Thursday, June 8th at 4:00pm in the Hatcher Gallery for a lecture focusing on actress, puppeteer, and U-M alumna Ellen Van Volkenburg and her role in co-founding Cornish College of the Arts’ Theater Department at Cornish College of the Arts.

The Michigan Theater will be showing Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent next Tuesday, May 30 (4:15pm, 7:00pm, 9:15pm) and Wednesday, May 31 (4:15pm, 7:00pm, 9:15pm). Arrive early, and you may catch a peek at a slideshow of menus from Jeremiah Tower’s personal menu collection, housed here at the University of Michigan Special Collections Library in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive.

The Exhibit "The Art and Science of Healing: From Antiquity to the Renaissance" is now gone from the Kelsey Museum and the Audubon Room of the Hatcher Library, but we can still see it through the eyes of undergraduate Noah Waldman, who last semester wrote an exhibit critique for professor Aileen Das' class, "Ancient Medicine in Greece and Rome". Selected by Dr. Das, I am very pleased to post Noah's review in our Special Collections blog.