When the Wright Brothers went to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina to successfully test their “Flyer,” the first successful airplane, they did not drag behind them a train of reporters, public relations flacks, or the other impedimenta we associate with technological breakthroughs. There was too much uncertainty; there had been too much failure before. As it happened, […]
Author: tmette
Who Saw the Wright Brothers’ First Successful Flight?
September 4, 2015
Reunited for the First Time Since 1879: Six Books and an Invoice
August 7, 2015
When private libraries like the Cavagna Collection–containing over 40,000 books and manuscripts–are purchased, one of the first questions that arises is how these owners and collectors acquired their books. A Pavia native, Cavagna purchased his books primarily from booksellers around northern Italy. The evidence we’ve encountered so far suggests that he turned and returned to […]
Charles Dickens: Journalist, Novelist, and – Actor?
July 29, 2015
Most know Charles Dickens as a great novelist, with a style so distinctive that it now bears his name. But Dickens fans might celebrate him for very different achievements, save for one bad cold. Drama and theater played an important role in Dickens’ life from an early age. As a small and somewhat sickly boy, […]
Suffragette City
July 20, 2015
Congress proposed the Nineteenth Amendment in June 1919. To commemorate this event, we are looking at a important book, Jailed for Freedom, by suffragist Doris Stevens. Born in 1892 in Nebraska, Doris Stevens attended Oberlin College and briefly worked as a social worker and teacher before joining the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). When the National […]
Rare Ulysses items at RBML for Bloomsday
June 16, 2015
Today is Bloomsday, the anniversary ofthe day that James Joyce met his future wife, Nora, as well as the date on which his novel Ulysses takes place. Ulysses recalls a single day in the lives of advertising man Leopold Bloom and brooding twenty-something Stephen Dedalus. Notorious for its length (over a quarter-million words) and narrative complexity (one […]
Putting the Hand back in Handpress
May 21, 2015
While cataloging this title from the Cavagna Collection – Per la facciata del Duomo di Milano (ca. 1657) – I came across something I’ve never seen before in a book from the handpress period: a handprint embedded in the paper fibers! Is it the vatman’s hand, who scoops the cotton rag pulp into the mould? […]
Help Solve a Tudor Mystery at RBML
May 20, 2015
King Henry VIII and his inner circle are once again in the public spotlight with the recent American premiere of the miniseries Wolf Hall, based on Hilary Mantel’s 2009 novel. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library proudly holds a piece of this fascinating Tudor history and we’re calling on our readers to help us find […]
April, “the cruellest month”, is also National Poetry Month!
April 29, 2015
“April is the cruellest month.” Thus begins one of the most important pieces of modern poetry ever written: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Characteristic of Eliot’s work, this poem invites readers to question their own knowledge by putting forth information in multiple languages. The Waste Land’s epigraph, written in Greek, details the fable of Apollo’s gift […]
The Pamphlet: America’s First Social Media
March 30, 2015
Today, social media is king. According to a Pew Research Center study, nearly one in three Americans get their news from social media.1 How, though, did colonial Americans get their information? While newspapers were the main source of news, their content was often limited to local happenings and news from London. Pamphlets filled the gap. Ranging […]