The Chinese sage Confucius (551-478 B.C.E.) greatly esteemed the founders of the Zhou Dynasty, who lived five hundred years before. This is reflected in several of his sayings, including, “How weak I have become. For a long time I have not dreamed about the Duke of Zhou.”
Tag: Smithsonian Institution Libraries
The Libraries, in a continuing partnership with Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, has converted select publications from the Smithsonian Contributions and Studies Series to digital formats for use on Kindles, Nooks and other e-readers.
It’s the merry month of May, whose name is derived from the goddess Maia. Maia oversees all growth and increase in nature. The National Air and Space Museum Library has also seen an increase in its book holdings this month with some interesting new titles.
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.
As you may already know, the Libraries has been busy digitizing scientific legacy literature as part of the global partnership that makes up the Biodiversity Heritage Library for some time now — the BHL recently published its 90,500th volume! But as you may not have yet noticed, the Libraries has also begun scanning select titles from our History, Art, and Culture collections as well.
The National Museum of American History Library recently acquired a four volume set entitled Antonius Stradivarius edited by Jost Thone & Jan Rohrmann with text by Alessandra Barabaschi, et al. A few of the instruments depicted in this work can be found on display at the museum. This book provides background on these Stradivarius instruments.
The Libraries would like to highlight some new titles that have been added recently to the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum Library.