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Tag: rare books

Discover and Connect but Don’t Steal this Book!

Erin Rushing
December 5, 2014
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This post was written by Julia Blakely, Special Collections cataloger. It first appeared on the Smithsonian Collections blog here.

Discovering an interesting mark of a former owner in a volume is one of the many great things about working with rare books. A signature of a famous person, a fun drawing, a gift presentation, marginal annotations revealing a reader’s thoughts, a memento laid-in, are not uncommon to come upon. Such additions after a work has been printed can provide the researcher with a connection to the past that provides important information. Or, can give a specific warning, if not a curse:

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Rare Books and Journals on Aviation Now Digitized

Chris Cottrill
January 2, 2013
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Rare Books and Journals on Aviation Now Digitized
Fantastic Plan Presented by Citizen Monge, of England, in 1798
1798 plan for an airship, featured in 1910 issue of Aircraft

In the early 20th century, few things excited the public more than the development of mechanized flying machines.  Whether aircraft or dirigible, these machines were documented in the specialized and popular literature of the day.  The Smithsonian Libraries is committed to digitizing its special collection of rare books and journals on the invention and growth of aviation. Many of the tiles we’ve scanned and digitized to date are accessible through the Internet Archive.

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Conducting a Condition Survey of Special Collections

Elizabeth Broman
July 27, 2012
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Le Document du décorateur, troisième série : fleurs stylisées. fNK3449.D62 CHMSC
Le Document du décorateur, troisième série : fleurs stylisées. (18–?) fNK3449.D62 CHMSC

In 2011, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum National Design Library was awarded a $96,000 grant from the CCPF (Collections Care and Preservation Fund, an internal grant awarding source) of the Smithsonian Institution to conduct a condition assessment survey of approximately 4,000 items of its Special Collections. We’ve done many preservation and book housing projects over the years, with repairs and custom enclosures made when the occasion demanded, but we’ve never had the opportunity or plan in place to look at the condition of our Rare Book  collection as a whole before.

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Two-Tailed Mermaids and Dog-Headed Men: Looking at a 15th Century Herbal

Kirsten van der Veen
May 16, 2011
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The most interesting thing about the text, at least to me, is its variety of bizarre illustrative woodcuts. The first half of the text, “De Herbis,” contains many woodcuts of various plants. Three more sections follow, including the next section, “Tractatus de Animalibus,” which focuses on animals both real and imagined. Prüss immediately catches the reader’s attention with a detailed, labeled woodcut of a human skeleton, then continues with hundreds of odd woodcuts, some of which depict animals that the artist had clearly never seen.

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