Museum Curiosities

I hope you enjoyed last week’s entry from my range of “stuff on the web that inspires me.”  This is another one of those.

Back when I was a wee graduate student, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the many libraries scattered about Columbia University.  Inordinate. I might possibly have almost lived in stacks of the main library, Butler, and one semester I spent about 20 hours a week in the library at the Union Theological Seminary library because I was studying a manuscript.  I miss those libraries.  I particularly miss the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  My office these days is nowhere near as interesting, even on its best day.

So you can understand why I find the Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities blog so delightful. The entries are “new acquisitions, unique documents, and visual and textual curiosities from the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.”This is something ALL manuscript and rare book libraries should do.  It’s a library exhibition in the form of a blog, and this one never fails to deliver delightful and random pieces.

I am have been delighted to see manuscript pages from artists’ notebooks – I find handwritten notes and the handwriting itself to be fascinating, so I love seeing the pages of Walt Whitman, J. M. Barrie, Gertrude Stein and others.  I have no idea how Ezra Pound ever read his own writing, but James Weldon Johnson’s National Hymn writing is beautiful.

So far I’ve seen sketches, photographs, notebooks, print examples, marketing materials, lottery tickets and more, and I’m thrilled with each selection.  I also think it’s a brilliant way to broaden the reach of a library, particularly in the case of a collection of rare materials to which access is usually restricted.

I was particularly thrilled to see the printing examples that you see here in this post, re-posted from their blog.  Illustrations and borders from older printing presses make me slightly giddy with joy and rapture.  These are from Chicago’s P. C. Darrow Printing Company around the turn of the 20th century, approximately 1902, and I love that era of design.  Love!

Featured here:  print advertisement for the P.C. Darrow Printing Company, (c) 1902, Chicago, Illinois.  From the Beinecke Library General Modern Collection.  Posted under Fine Printing and Resolutions, January 4, 2009.