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Category: Advancement and Development

Cooking up some fun with Adopt-a-Book

Erin Rushing
November 7, 2016
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On Wednesday, November 16th, the Smithsonian Libraries will once again hold its annual Adopt-a-Book Evening and you’re invited! Join us for food and merriment, all while supporting the Libraries’ collections. Visit the event page for additional details and to purchase your tickets.

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Can’t make it to DC next week or just want a preview of the evening’s menu of books? Enjoy this “appetizer”, a mere sample of the 80+ items that will be on display during the event. Each has a unique place in culinary history and all will be available for adoption on November 16th. Learn more about our Adopt-a-Book program here.

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“Color in a New Light” tote bags now available

Erin Rushing
September 14, 2016
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Back to school means back to books! And why not tote around your favorite tomes in a Color in a New Light tote bag? Through the Smithsonian Libraries exhibition Color in a New Light , visitors follow the theme of color through the collections and make a few unexpected connections and discoveries. Now, book lovers from near and far can bring home a piece of Color with this promotional tote bag, available through Tfund:

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Burpee Foundation: Cultivating America’s Gardens

Liz O'Brien
August 30, 2016
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burpee1For as long as he can remember, George Ball, Chairman and CEO of W. Atlee Burpee and Chairman of the Board of the Burpee Foundation, has been gardening. As a young boy, his grandmother would send him to the yard to weed, watching him from her rocking chair on the porch. As George recalls, at the beginning of one spring, tulips popped up and he was enraptured by their beauty – he’d never seen anything like them. Curious, he put his nose into a tulip; he was so small that the flower engulfed his entire face. George remembers feeling absorbed by the wonder of the tulip; it was like a little world, with the petals enveloping his cheeks and an ant crawling around inside. A fascination, love, and reverence for flowers was born, as the tulip encounter tickled his senses of sight, smell, and touch. George was hooked, and gardening eventually became his lifelong work and passion.

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Art Deco Unveiled at the Smithsonian Libraries

Liz O'Brien
August 8, 2016
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artdeco4For Chicago natives and Art Deco enthusiasts Jackie Vossler and Joe Loundy, supporting two new design internships at the Smithsonian Libraries was a no-brainer. Jackie, a self-described bibliophile and member of Chicago’s Caxton Club, has been acquainted with the Libraries for three years. Along with Joe, she was intrigued by Art Deco treasures found in our trade literature collection, most notably the Edward F. Caldwell & Co. collection, a visually stunning repository of more than 50,000 photographs and original design drawings of lighting fixtures that the company produced from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries (supplied to notable clients such as the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and the Roosevelts).

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Adopt “Travels into North America”

Erin Rushing
April 19, 2016
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Pehr Kalm (1716-1779), a Swedish-Finnish explorer and botanist, was a student of the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus. In fact, Kalm was one of the many “apostles” of Linnaeus sent out to explore the world, and one of the few who didn’t die in the process. To begin the research that later culminated in Travels into North America, Kalm arrived on the continent in 1748.  Based in Philadelphia, he worked and traveled with Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram, among others. In his explorations of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and two journeys north through New York to Montreal and Quebec, Kalm formed impressive specimen collections, which Linnaeus subsequently used in naming 90 species of plants, 60 of them new to science, in his Species plantarum (1753). Among those new species, Linnaeus named the mountain laurel genus Kalmia for his disciple.

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