Library Digital Magazine – Winter 2018 – Explore ~ Create ~ Share

In a room on the 6th floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library, groups of students clustered around tables laden with rare and special books, which were propped open on foam rests to protect their bindings. The books varied in size and age, and ranged in subject from botany to children’s literature, but all of them featured illustrations of plants.

This was the students’ second visit to the Special Collections Library, this time for a deeper dive into the great variety of styles and techniques artists and illustrators have used to represent flora over the centuries.

Their introductory session, focused on printing techniques, featured what is perhaps the Library’s greatest treasure, or at least a portion of it: two volumes of the double-elephant folio of John James Audubon’s The Birds of a America.

“That was so crazy!” said Kara Calvert, a junior in the Stamps School of Art & Design. “I had no idea I would ever be able to see that in real life.”

The gathering of books was in support of Cathy Barry’s Art & Design course, “Florilegium: Creating a Plant Compendium,” whose final project is to design and create a collection of drawings and painting in book form from field observations, study, and studio work.

The Hatcher Library’s Reference Reading Room was built for the studious. Its vaulted ceiling inspires thought, and the continuous rows of books that run the circumference of the room tug at the mind with the possibility of all there is to learn. And for U-M graduates Sara McMall and Matt McClain, the room also tugged at their heartstrings.

McClain felt the Reference Reading Room in the Hatcher Library was instrumental in the growth of his relationship with McMall; so he decided that the room itself absolutely had to be part of the marriage proposal.

When curator and outreach librarian Pablo Alvarez took on responsibility for the Library’s history of medicine collection back in 2014, he found among its thousands of rare texts a small box of gemstones and spells, made to cast off demons and cure ailments.

These ancient amulets, which come from places like Egypt and Syria during the Roman Empire, were used as both preventive and cure. People wore them as bracelets or necklaces, and healers used them on their patients, often in combination with more conventional medical practices.

The amulets address a gamut of physical complaints and conditions, and many intermingle physiology and sorcery, like the uterine amulets that symbolically depict the womb and its mechanics, along with engravings of Egyptian deities meant to offer divine protections for pregnancy and childbirth. Others are directed at healing the pains and diseases of the stomach, and bear carvings of the lion-headed serpent Chnoubis or the ibis, both of which were imbued with the power to remedy such ailments. And still others seek to protect the backs and hips of laborers, or to heal the eye.

William Sydnor Gilbreath Sr. wanted to be remembered for his work as the driving force pushing the creation of the Dixie Highway, a paved route connecting the U.S. midwest to the south which was inspired by the east-to-west Lincoln Highway. An avid scrapbooker, Gilbreath recorded his life for future generations with photographs, newspaper clippings, and correspondence, and those items that relate to the Dixie Highway are now viewable online in the Gilbreath Dixie Highway Scrapbooks collection.

As Juli McLoone and Sigrid Cordell prepared for The Life and Times of Lizzy Bennet (Nov. 20, 2017-March 30, 2018), a number of Jane Austen's novels were identified as being in need of conservation treatment. These included a two-volume, 1838 edition of The Novels of Jane Austen. These two volumes presented some condition concerns which, during my internship in the lab and under the supervision of Conservation Librarian/Conservator Marieka Kaye, were treated with the aim to prevent further damage and return these volumes to their original function.

The Political Posters collection consists of posters covering social protest movements such as Anarchism, Civil Liberties, Colonialism, Communism, Ecology, Labor, Pacifism, Sexual Freedom, Socialism, Women, and Youth/Student Protest. While some are from the first half of the 20th century, the majority are from the 1960s and later. The physical posters are held in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection, which documents the history of social protest movements and marginalized political communities from the 19th century to the present.