Beyond the Reading Room

On August 26 2014, led by Dr. Stefano Mengozzi, a group of six singers recorded a selection of Gregorian chant music at the St. Thomas Apostle Catholic Church in Ann Arbor. They sang from a fifteenth-century Antiphonary from the Special Collections Library, an extraordinary manuscript copied in Venice and richly illuminated by the Italian miniaturist, Benedetto Bordon.

This Wednesday's watermark feature: watermarks in Isl. Ms. 78 (copied in 1401 or 2), one of the earliest manuscripts in our Islamic Manuscripts Collection copied on watermarked paper.

Take a peak at what a visiting Irish researcher is working on in the Labadie Collection!

We are pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit on the seventh floor of the Special Collections Library: Through the Magnifying Glass: A Short History of the Microscope.

In 2013, an extraordinary collection on the history of medicine was transferred from the Taubman Library to the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan Library. Among the books, we came across three eighteenth-century microscopes stored in plain boxes and in need of conservation treatment. They have now been repaired and are in new homes. Here is a video explaining in detail the conservation work performed in one of these wonderful microscopes.

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.

"Utterly stunned, I walked down Broadway with a frie[n]d, repeating over and over to him, “Do you realize there are some things I will not be able to do simply because I am a woman? Do you realize…” I could not stop recounting the incident." In these words, anthropologist Eleanor Leacock recalls the moment in 1943 when she was denied an Assistantship solely because of her gender and she realized the full extent of discrimination that she would face as a female academic.

American Culinary History materials are full of representations of women and femininity These images are occasionally realistic, often absolute fantasy, and and sometimes somewhere in between.

We are always delighted to support learning and engagement with our materials, especially as they inspire new scholarship and research. Read this guest blog post from local high school student, Dale (Trip) Apley III, who visited our library to analyze the Galileo Manuscript for a scientific experiment he recently conducted.

Hans Christian Andersen's “The Red Shoes” tells the story of an orphan girl whose uncontrolled desire for material pleasures and social status leads to her downfall.