Beyond the Reading Room

If you go trick-or-treating this weekend, watch out for witches in candy-filled houses! As Hansel and Gretel learn in this fairy tale, you may get more tricks than treats.

On November 5th, 1916, the town of Everett, WA, witnessed a violent confrontation between a citizens’ militia hostile to labor unions and a group of Industrial Workers of the World members sailing into the town’s port to support local workers on strike. The Labadie Collection has secured a new set of archival documents about the Everett Massacre to be available to researchers.

We just hosted our annual donors' reception in the newly renovated space of the Taubman Library last Thursday! As always, it was a great opportunity to express our gratitude to all our friends for having supported the University of Michigan Library throughout the years.

Four years after the retirement of the paper callslip, the Special Collections Library's Reading Room experience has changed quite a bit...

The Special Collections Library recently opened a new exhibit in the Clark Library (2nd floor Hatcher), entitled Dining Out: Menus, Chefs, Restaurants, Hotels, & Guidebooks. Curated by Jan Longone, adjunct curator and donor of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archives (JBLCA), this exhibit celebrates the history of the eating out experience.

Based on her experiences as pastry chef for the Appeldore House resort, "Miss Parloa," as she came to be known to her students and readers, published her first work, The Appeldore Cook Book, in 1872. Over the course of her lifetime, Maria Parloa would go on to found a two cooking schools, publish nine more books, and endorse a variety of culinary products. Miss Parloa stood out from her contemporaries both because of her savvy business acumen and her emphasis on home economics.

In a previous post, I argued that we must judge a book by its cover because the design of an early binding can tell us much about the social status of its former owner. Now, I would like to argue that we can learn a lot about early printing history by examining the preliminary pages of a book.

Don't miss this exhibit opening in Hatcher Library's Audubon Room until December 17th. Read more to learn about associated events.
Audubon Room Hours: Monday-Friday 8:30 am to 7 pm, Saturday 10 am to 6 pm, Sunday 1 pm to 7 pm

Join us to celebrate 150 years of artistic exploration of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland on Monday, September 21, 4:00-5:30 p.m in Hatcher Gallery. Learn more about the artistic, textual, and cultural history of Alice illustration from Arnold Hirshon, avid Carroll collector and Associate Provost and University Librarian at Case Western Reserve University.

A recent addition to our holdings on the history of medicine is a fascinating collection of twenty-five university dissertations, treatises, prize-winning essays, books, and reports, on the subject of milk. Ranging from 1659 to 1822, and published across Europe, these works are extraordinary witnesses of how milk was thoroughly studied from a chemical, medicinal, nutritional, and even a social perspective.