Born in 1861 in Paris, Georges Méliès started his artistic endeavors as a child. By the age of ten, he was building his own stage sets for marionette shows and drawing caricatures of his teachers. Méliès continued his artistic and theatrical pursuits, including studying magic, despite his father wanting him to work solely in the family shoe business. In time, the family business was successful enough that Méliès was able to buy his own Paris theater: Théâtre Robert-Houdin.
We are always finding great materials in our Art and Artists Files at the American Art and Portrait Gallery Library and we’re excited it to share it with the public. In our mission to provide greater access to our ephemera files, we are working on adding our corporate files to the Art and Artist Files database. The corporate files contain ephemera (catalogues, pamphlets, exhibition invitations. etc.) produced for group exhibitions by galleries, museums, and other institutions. This of course is a long process, requiring a lot of review of materials in the folders, but it has been a great way to rediscover items that we didn’t know we had!
In anticipation of Smithsonian Libraries’ participation in this year’s Museum Day Live events on Saturday March 12th, we wanted to highlight Library Preservation work at the Book Conservation Lab here at Smithsonian Libraries, and draw attention to the varied interests and skills that are inherent to Preservation work and are important and driving forces in preserving library collections for the future.
Mark your calendars! The Smithsonian Libraries invites you join us for two free events in March related to our current exhibitions: Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination Georges Méliès more »
After recently experiencing two feet of snow and really cold temperatures, I found myself wishing for the much warmer temperatures of summer. Because there are so many subjects represented in the Trade Literature Collection, it didn’t take long before I found catalogs advertising sports equipment. And that made me think of much warmer weather to come in just a few, short months.
This post was written by Maggie Dittemore, librarian in the John Wesley Powell Library of Anthropology.
You can’t go far in the stacks of the Anthropology Library without finding a book that has at least two stories to tell — that of its published contents and that of the book itself. Many volumes were once part of researchers’ personal libraries or otherwise “had another life” before reaching us. Because we have such rich collections, we don’t always know what is there.