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.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives / Unbound
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.
He begins by talking about Disney’s film Enchanted, for which he designed the opening and closing pop-up scenes, and ends the talk with something that never fails to delight his young audiences — Harry Potter.
It is more than possible to repeat such experiences and this is one way to expand services in the Dibner Library. In addition to our resident scholars, visiting college and graduate classes, we are glad to have younger audiences to come and view rare books.
What do you think of when you hear the words, Kentucky Derby? Hats, maybe? Because the Kentucky Derby is this weekend and since hats are associated with it, we decided to feature a trade catalog focusing on hats.