Posts tagged with acquisitions

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.

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.

The famous suitcase belonging to the anarchist Emma Goldman has found its final resting place in the Labadie Collection, 75 years after its last journey.

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.

Portable calculators are older than we think. For our History of Mathematics Collection, we have recently purchased an example of a small manual calculator, whereby anyone could quickly perform each of the four basic mathematical operations. It was designed by the Frenchman Louis-J. Troncet in 1889.

This recently acquired edition of two medical commentaries by the sixteenth-century Italian doctor, Leon Roganus Caietanus, is bound in limp vellum with bevelled boards, and the gilded edges of the text block have been expertly decorated, or gauffered, with a special tool.

We are excited to report about a recent acquisition for our fast growing collection of Children's Literature. It is the first edition of Le calcul amusant (Paris, ca. 1862), a truly entertaining book designed to teach French kids multiplication through colored illustrations and rhyming couplets.

We may sound playful by making a skeleton pop out from a book, but for centuries images like this one, as found in the printed page, were a serious warning of the imminence of death. For instance, these frightening illustrations were common in the published works of the seventeenth-century Jesuit preacher Jeremias Drexel.

All gifts to the library on Giving Blueday help fund our acquisition of John James Audubon's The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, a magnificent collection of 150 hand-colored lithographic plates.

A beautifully crafted, limited edition of essays and poems by Joseph Labadie was recently donated to us. Jo Labadie & His Little Books was created on a hand-operated printing press and bound by Michael Coughlin at his print shop in Cornucopia, Wisconsin.