Pre-modern artists used almost anything to create vibrant colors for art and fabrics: bug guts, squid bones, shredded wood, hardened tree sap, walnut rinds, lye, tannic acid, iron sulfate, wine and, um, urine. Today, the Library’s Preservation Research and Testing Division is now recreating those colors the old-fashioned way as part of a newly developing field of preservation science.
The Library of Congress recently acquired one of the most famous Black Ship scrolls -- "Kinkai kikan" ("Strange View off the Coast of Kanagawa") by Otsuki Bankei, a Japanese artist and scholar -- that depicts the arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet of steamships in Edo Bay in 1854. The gunboat diplomacy established American relations with Japan.
The LIbrary's Rare Persian Manuscript Collection is now online after a four-year digitization project, anchored by three gorgeous manuscript copies of The Shahnamah, or the Persian Book of Kings, a 1,000-year-old epic that is the foundation for the modern language.
Two hundred years after his birth, Walt Whitman remains a towering figure. The Library of Congress, with the world's largest collection of Whitman's writings, marks the bicentennial with a flurry of events.