Beyond the Reading Room

Portable calculators are older than we think. For our History of Mathematics Collection, we have recently purchased an example of a small manual calculator, whereby anyone could quickly perform each of the four basic mathematical operations. It was designed by the Frenchman Louis-J. Troncet in 1889.

Arthur Miller, Marge Piercy, and...Grandma? They might all be shelved together amid these stately gray volumes.

This month's recipe is "the Golden Loaf of South Carolina" from Sarah Tyson Rorer's 1899 _Bread and Bread-making: How to Make Many Varieties Easily and with the Best Results_ Rorer was involved in the Cooking School Movement, which advocated for standard measures and exact directions in recipes. While the recipe below is not as explicit as what a 21st century cookbook reader is used to, it goes into considerable detail compared to the average late-19th c. bread “receipt”

American Culinary History materials are full of representations of children and childhood: sometimes realistic, sometimes wholly fantastical, with adults present or without them.

This superb engraving depicts what the seventeenth-century English scientist, Robert Hooke, observed when exposing the head of a grey drone-fly through the lens of a microscope. The greatest section of the head was nothing else but two large “protuberant bunches,” mostly covered by thousands of tiny hemispheres arranged in “triagonal order”.

This recently acquired edition of two medical commentaries by the sixteenth-century Italian doctor, Leon Roganus Caietanus, is bound in limp vellum with bevelled boards, and the gilded edges of the text block have been expertly decorated, or gauffered, with a special tool.

This Wednesday's watermark feature: Anchor motifs in watermarked papers from the Islamic Manuscripts Collection

"Now or Never": Collecting, Documenting and Photographing the Aftermath of World War I in the Middle East. This exhibit explores the role of the U-M archaeological expedition (1919-1920), led by Professor Francis Kelsey, as witnesses of the chaos and destruction in the Near East following Germany's surrender to the Entente forces on November 11, 1918.

We are excited to report about a recent acquisition for our fast growing collection of Children's Literature. It is the first edition of Le calcul amusant (Paris, ca. 1862), a truly entertaining book designed to teach French kids multiplication through colored illustrations and rhyming couplets.

Talk and reception to celebrate the upcoming online exhibit "Jell-O: America’s Most Famous Dessert At Home Everywhere." Dr. Nicole Tarulevicz of the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania speaks at 5:00 p.m. Using materials drawn from the culinary ephemera holdings of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at U-M Library, the exhibit explores how the Jell-O company’s early 20th century advertising used depictions of the exotic to sell the product to Americans.