Earlier this month, Special Collections was pleased to host WEMU news reporter Jorge Avellan as he researched a story for their "Hidden in Plain Sight" program, featuring Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cook Book. This unpreposessing little 39-page booklet in faded paper wrappers is one of the greatest treasures of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. Published in Paw Paw, Michigan in 1866, A Domestic Cook Book is the only known copy of the oldest known cookbook published...
What would you do with 500 blank postcards? For contributors to The Alternative Press, the answers varied. Some hand-wrote poetry on their cards. Some made images--by painting, drawing, collaging, or pasting photographs onto paper. Some embraced the postcard format, while others challenged it--for example, Carol Steen made all of her postcards in brass, a playful take on the form you could never actually use them to mail a message to a friend.
On behalf of the University of Michigan Library we want to express our most sincere gratitude to Marty and Marilyn Lindenauer for their generous donation that allowed us to acquire a series of books and artifacts for our History of Medicine Collection.
We are delighted to share our latest annual report, containing highlights from July 2017 to June 2018. Curious where items in our collections traveled for exhibition? Want to learn about a few of our most exciting acquisitions? Interested in what kinds of instruction sessions we do? You can find all that and more in this report.
Tomorrow is our final Special Collections After Hours event of the year! This month's theme is "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been," where we'll be displaying material from the Joseph A. Labadie Collecton related to marijuana. This includes material on recreational and medical uses of marijuana, as well as manuals on its cultivation. Here's a preview of a couple of items we'll have out for the event.