Welcome to the first in a series of occasional posts in which Special Collections student employees discuss the cool items they get to work with! Gabriel Denis, the author of […]
Beyond the Bookplate: Small-timore, 19th-Century Style
It is 1850, and an unidentified chronicler sits amidst the Greek Revival architecture of the Mondawmin Estate, awaiting the start of the third auction to empty the 10-year-old mansion of its […]
American Drama
Many know of Walt Whitman as America’s first true poet and the liberator of American literature. What many might not know is that Whitman did not emerge on the literary […]
How NOT to treat our books
Don’t you love to sit down with a good book, or better yet, a book that’s crucial to your research, and find that someone before you has treated it like […]
What is the Bibliotheca Fictiva?
From antiquity to current times, there have always been writers devising literary forgeries of all kinds, either copying an existing book from the classical period or simply creating a fake […]
Why Aren’t All Journals Available Online?
We are always getting questions about why some journals are available online and some are not. Some of the comments from a recent library survey requested that we get “…..all […]
China in Ten Words
How is it possible to summarize a country as complex as China in ten words? Yu Hua, a renowned novelist in China, did just that. In his first work of […]
The End of the Book?
If someone said that recent technological advances made the printed book, as the conveyor of knowledge and information, obsolete, would you think this prediction a recent one? What about a […]
Adventures of the General Jewish Encyclopedia
Looking into MSEL’s collections can lead you to travel across continents and to share incredible adventures. Editing and publishing books can become quite an endeavor when it meets history’s turmoil. […]
The Art of Google Customization
Do you know about Google Custom? It’s a great feature that allows you to focus your Google searching across exactly the websites you want. Of course it’s really cool for personal use, […]