At the end of the fifteenth century, simplified versions of medical charts featuring an image of the "Zodiac Man" began to appear in Books of Hours. The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division contains many examples of these printed editions, one of which uses a skeleton in place of the Zodiac Man.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, classical languages were an important component of education in the North American colonies. Viewed through the lens of material and printing history, the books highlighted in this blog post provide a very human picture of classical studies in early America.
Andrew Holleran (pseud.) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer and a significant contributor to post-Stonewall literature. He was a member of the Violet Quill, a group of gay writers who assembled in the early 1980s to critique each other’s work and to develop strategies to overcome corporate publishers’ reluctance to publish gay-themed novels. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division collects the works of the Violet Quill writers, including Andrew Holleran, and holds the first editions of their works in the Gene Berry and Jeffrey Campbell Collection.
A conversation with Patrick Hastings: writer, educator, bibliophile, and the new Education Outreach Specialist in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
Born in Harlem on August 2nd, 1924, novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) is regarded as one of America’s greatest writers. At the time of his death on December 1st, 1987, Baldwin was working with sculptor and printmaker Leonard Baskin (1922–2000) of the Gehenna Press to publish a fine press edition of an unpublished work. Gypsy and Other Poems features six of Baldwin's poems that reveal an intimate, introspective side of the writer.
Learn about Sebastian Gryphius, one of the most celebrated printers of sixteenth century Lyon, and about the books printed by him which are held by the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Gryphius printed Latin textbooks and works by humanist authors and was instrumental in divulging the ideas of the renaissance to Lyon and France.
While the British military burned the federal properties of Washington during the War of 1812, some soldiers sought souvenirs to commemorate their conquest of the nascent U.S. capital. Seized by a British officer, one particular American bible in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division bears the marks of its dramatic removal, its captivity, and later its homecoming to the United States.
Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1932 and observed first-hand the rise of the Nazis and the damage and terror inflicted on the famously tolerant city and its inhabitants. He drew from his journals that he kept from those years to write "Mr. Norris Changes Trains" (1935) and "Goodbye to Berlin" (1939), which would later be combined into an omnibus volume entitled "The Berlin Stories" (1945). Playful and powerful, Isherwood's depiction of Berlin captured the imagination of later artists, whose work is also represented in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
