Beyond the Reading Room

Anecdotes and other notes from the U-M Special Collections Research Center.
Detailed illustration from Audubon's Birds of North America of a nest in a tree with birds sitting around it.

Posts in Beyond the Reading Room

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March Winds nursery rhyme illustrated by anthropomorphic flowers
  • Juli McLoone
Spring has sprung and it's time to celebrate the season of new growth with poetry!
Left: Philippe Sylvestre Dufour (1622-1687). Traitez nouveaux & curieux du cafe, du the et du chocolate. Lyon: Jean Baptiste Deville, 1688; Right:
  • Pablo Alvarez
The Special Collections Library will host a reception to celebrate a new exhibit, "Through the Magnifying Glass: A Short History of the Microscope." Please join the exhibit curators, Pablo Alvarez and Gregg Sobocinski, to chat about this exciting display. There will be coffee and other refreshments. Date: April 24 (Friday) 3:00 pm -5:00 pm. Place: Seventh floor of the Hatcher Library.
From left to right: Adam Wills Begley, Noah Horn, Austin Stewart, Glenn Miller, Matthew Abernathy, and Dr. Stefano Mengozzi.
  • Pablo Alvarez
On August 26 2014, led by Dr. Stefano Mengozzi, a group of six singers recorded a selection of Gregorian chant music at the St. Thomas Apostle Catholic Church in Ann Arbor. They sang from a fifteenth-century Antiphonary from the Special Collections Library, an extraordinary manuscript copied in Venice and richly illuminated by the Italian miniaturist, Benedetto Bordon.
Bow and arrow watermark in Isl. Ms. 78 p.38
  • Evyn Kropf
This Wednesday's watermark feature: watermarks in Isl. Ms. 78 (copied in 1401 or 2), one of the earliest manuscripts in our Islamic Manuscripts Collection copied on watermarked paper.
  • Julie Herrada
Take a peak at what a visiting Irish researcher is working on in the Labadie Collection!
Images based on the Copperplate engraving of a flea, Schem. XXXIV, from Robert Hooke's Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London: John Martin & James Allestry, 1665
  • Pablo Alvarez
We are pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit on the seventh floor of the Special Collections Library: Through the Magnifying Glass: A Short History of the Microscope.
Clamshell box storing a Culpeper-Style English Microscope (ca. 1760)
  • Pablo Alvarez
In 2013, an extraordinary collection on the history of medicine was transferred from the Taubman Library to the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan Library. Among the books, we came across three eighteenth-century microscopes stored in plain boxes and in need of conservation treatment. They have now been repaired and are in new homes. Here is a video explaining in detail the conservation work performed in one of these wonderful microscopes.
Detail of Audubon's painting of a Jackalope
  • Athena Jackson
The University of Michigan Library’s first acquisition was John James Audubon's The Birds of America . After a brief interval of 175 years, it has been joined by Audubon's final work. In August, we acquired the only known complete copy of his Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, which includes the long-rumored but never before seen 151st lithographic plate, depicting the Lepus antilooapra of North America. This image is lacking in all other known copies of the work.
Photograph: Portrait of Eleanor Burke Leacock sitting at a desk, with a book case visible behind her.
  • Juli McLoone
"Utterly stunned, I walked down Broadway with a frie[n]d, repeating over and over to him, “Do you realize there are some things I will not be able to do simply because I am a woman? Do you realize…” I could not stop recounting the incident." In these words, anthropologist Eleanor Leacock recalls the moment in 1943 when she was denied an Assistantship solely because of her gender and she realized the full extent of discrimination that she would face as a female academic.
The cover of an issue of the Boston Cooking School Magazine: the stylized figure of a woman in a red gown cooing over  achafing dish
  • Jacqueline L Jacobson
American Culinary History materials are full of representations of women and femininity These images are occasionally realistic, often absolute fantasy, and and sometimes somewhere in between.