Beyond the Reading Room

Anecdotes and other notes from the U-M Special Collections Research Center.
Detailed illustration from Audubon's Birds of North America of a nest in a tree with birds sitting around it.

Posts in Beyond the Reading Room

Showing 201 - 210 of 356 items
Student Demonstrators between Engineering Buildings, February 18, 1970
  • Elizabeth Nicole Settoducato
The University of Michgan has a long history of student activism on campus, particularly around antiwar movements. An especially significant event was the Feburary 1970 protest against General Electric recruiting engineers on campus. The Labadie Collection’s Subject Vertical Files has documentation of this event which helps us understand the contexts of student activism in the past and present.
Dyed and burnished papers in a range of colors
  • Evyn Kropf
Join us at 1 pm this Thursday (30th March) in the Hatcher Library Gallery for a lecture and demonstration with papermaker and artist Radha Pandey.
Title page of The new cyclopaedia of domestic economy and practical housekeeper :
  • Juli McLoone
For the past two years, the Special Collections Library has celebrated Pi Day (3/14) by sharing pie recipes from the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive (JBLCA). This year, we bring you a pair of pies from The new cyclopaedia of domestic economy and practical housekeeper...(1872), edited by Elizabeth Fries Ellet.
Exhibit Poster: The Art and Science of Healing: From Antiquity to the Renaissance
  • Pablo Alvarez
We are pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit from the Special Collections Library. It includes an extraordinary selection of magical, religious, and medical artifacts held at Special Collections, the Papyrology Collection, and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. These objects are an extraordinary evidence of how people coped with physical and mental ailments from antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Orson Welles on set of Citizen Kane with camera visible
  • Philip A Hallman
Join us next Monday (30th January) for a lecture with Harlan Lebo, author of Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker's Journey.
IWW flyer "Industrial democracy"
  • Julie Herrada
Preserving the history of labor movements has been core to the Labadie Collection’s mission since its very beginnings more than a century ago. In 2016, two important collections on 20th century labor organizing have been arranged to better facilitate research. The Joyce Kornbluh Collection (3.25 linear ft.) and the Don Stewart IWW Collection (3 linear ft.) conserve evidence of the regular confrontations between workers, corporations, and government throughout the past hundred years.
Letter by U of M Alum Capt. William Wirt Wheeler of the 6th Michigan Volunteers to his former professor of Greek, James Robinson Boise. New Orleans, September 29 1862
  • Pablo Alvarez
I am frequently asked by students and faculty: where do our rare book collections come from? While we have purchased many extraordinary books since the early years of the University of Michigan, many of our treasures were bequeathed by grateful alums and faculty. The reasons why they donated these artifacts are often fascinating, revealing little-known stories that shed light not only on the history of our institution but on our country at large. The book featured in this post is a rare seventeenth-century edition and Latin translation of the Homer's Iliad...
After the flood waters receded in the Biblioteca Nazional Centrale (National Library) in Florence.
  • Cathleen Ann Baker
A curator's overview of the exhibit “The Florence Flood, November 1966: The Conservation of Books at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and Beyond.”
View of the Islamic Manuscripts Michigan collection page in the Hathi Trust Digital Library
  • Evyn Kropf
An 8-year project to digitize our Islamic Manuscripts Collection is now finished!
Quintus Serenus (fl. 2nd c. AD). Liber medicinalis. Southeast Germany (Bavaria) or Austria; ca. 1500. Mich. Ms. 291.
  • Pablo Alvarez
The Liber medicinalis (Book of Medicine) is a medical treatise of around 1,200 dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed
to the second-century Roman author, Quintus Serenus Sammonicus (d. beginning of 3rd c. AD). It contains sixty-four therapeutic recipes,
divided into two sections: recipes for illnesses affecting individual organs listed from head to toe, and recipes for general ailments like injuries, fevers, fractures and dislocations, insomnia, toothache, and poisoning.