Born out of the counter-cultural renaissance of 1960s New Orleans, Loujon Press operated as a small but mighty avant-garde fine-press publisher of a short-lived little magazine The Outsider, and four editioned books by Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller. Merging the pioneering spirit of the underground with a vision for creating expertly crafted, handmade publications, Gypsy Lou Webb and John Edgar Webb stand out as true visionaries and champions of American literature.
Monty Python's Rabbit of Caerbannog is not the only killer bunny. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division has a fifteenth-century Birgittine manuscript from Mariënwater that contains a variation on this visual tradition.
In 1901, on a journey to reach the South Pole, the Discovery Expedition joined together to establish the first Antarctic journal. With illustrations, poetry, and field reports written by sailors and officers alike, the journal provided the crew with a creative outlet over the long polar winter. Six years later, members of that same crew embarked on a new expedition and set out to establish a floating print shop to create the first book ever published in Antarctica known as the Aurora Australis.
2025 was another great year for the Rare Book and Special Collections Division! Our team was hard at work helping researchers, adding new books to the collection, facilitating classes, and hosting workshops and symposia. We also added several new staff members to our team! As a way of reflecting on this past year and looking forward to the next, we have shared several programmatic highlights and collection resources that are now available.
