The exhibition “Frances Perkins: The Woman Behind the New Deal,” currently on display here in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, has been extended through March 26, 2010. Please join the Frances Perkins Center at an event on Thursday, January 14, at the Harvard Club. Perkins biographer Kirstin Downey will be joined […]
Holiday wishes to All!
Against my own deeply held principles, I’ve monkied with an image of a medieval manuscript this morning, and it was fun, I do confess. New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Plimpton MS 050, f. 2v, detail (and changed). […]
Thomas Carlyle’s photograph album
Among the many rich sources of visual material in RBML are Thomas Carlyle’s photograph albums. The seven albums in RBML’s collection are typical of the 19th century and include primarily carte-de-visite, or photographic calling cards, that were popular at the time. These cards were used by individuals similarly to contemporary business cards, but cards with […]
Paleography of Spanish Manuscripts
Once upon a time there was a Spanish chaplain …Capellanus quidam hyspanus …Which seems a good place to remember a trip to Spain about a month ago. I spent a week at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, looking at thirteenth-century Spanish manuscripts, most of them dated, no less! Here I am, trying to apply to […]
Well, it’s not coffee . . .
OK, so the Parisian intellectuals drank coffee; what was a poor English couple in the 1500s to choose? Beer, obviously. Word problem here; the booklet consists entirely of word problems. It’s a wonderful little object, only measuring about four inches wide and not quite three inches tall. It turns out that the souse is the […]