Beyond the Reading Room

Each June, the nonprofit waterway protection and restoration group American Rivers sponsors National Rivers Month to spotlight the more than 250,000 rivers and streams throughout the U.S. Approaching the celebration from a literary angle, today's post shares 18th and 19th century descriptions of river journeys. Read on to see America’s rivers through the eyes of John Bartram, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.

Although largely forgotten today,The Water-Babies was once one of the most popular Victorian literary fairy tales. Charles Kingsley's imaginative tour de force leaps from realistic adventure, to fantastical exploration of aquatic biology, to an imaginary voyage in the tradition of Gulliver’s Travels.

This month’s recipe is a lemon cake from Culinary gems : a collection of choice recipes gathered with care from the treasures of culinary experts, published in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1884.
Lemon was an extremely common flavor for desserts and pastries in the 19th century -- almost the default neutral flavor, the way vanilla is now. Although vanilla was known in Europe as a flavoring by the 16th century (there’s an article on it in Diderot’s Encyclopédie of 1765) and a commercial extract was available in the US from at least 1847, it overtook lemon in cakes and pies only slowly

Shortly after I completed a blog post arguing that the Special Collections Library holds a book formerly owned by Isaac Newton, another one has just resurfaced from the Le Roy Crummer Collection, part of our rich holdings in the history of medicine.

Our last Fairy Tale Friday recounted Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes - a story about a girl whose vanity led to the loss of her feet and, ultimately, her life. Footwear features prominently again in today’s fairy tale. However, unlike Karen’s cursed dancing shoes, Aschenputtel finds that her golden slippers are the vehicle of her own reward and of revenge against her cruel stepsisters.

The Special Collections Library Image Bank is a repository intended to capture the digitized images of Special Collections materials in the public domain created for incidental requests — such as those from patrons or from curatorial staff for outreach initiatives.

In culmination of this year’s Poetry at Literati series, Anne Waldman, whose papers are part of the U-M Special Collections Library, will be performing tonight with fellow poet Anne Carson at 7:30pm at Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore (124 E. Washington). Anne Waldman is renowned for her dynamic poetry performances, which are intended "to conjure states of mind and possibilities, and to wake people up to poetry as an active condition. As an experience in and of itself."

This Wednesday's watermark feature: stag motifs in watermarked papers from the Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

Here is a fascinating story of how we learned that the Special Collections Library holds a volume formerly owned by one of the most important figures in the history of science, Isaac Newton.

On April 16 my colleague Evyn Kropf and I prepared a show & tell presentation of manuscripts and early printed books for the attendees of the symposium, "Speaking the End Times: Prophecy and Messianism in Early Modern Eurasia". In brief, this two-day conference explored the topic of early modern apocalypticism from India to Iberia.