This week brought news of the first successful landing on a comet when the Philae probe landed on comet 67p, 310 million miles from earth. The comet even sings! The probe’s bad landing means that we may not get as much data as we’d hoped, but it’s still a pretty cool achievement. In honor of …
One of the things I love about working at the Rosenbach is that I’m always discovering new and fascinating things in the collection. I was flipping through the card catalog, in search of a completely different book, when I saw a card for an item with the wonderful title, The Strange and Unaccountable Life of …
This week marked what would have been the 100th birthday of Welsh writer Dylan Thomas, who was born October 27, 1914. Thomas was a gifted writer, but not so good at remembering where he put things (a problem tied in with his famous love of drink). The Rosenbach owns the manuscript of Under Milk Wood, …
If you haven’t been on our “Sleuths and Spies” hands-on-tour, you may not know that the Rosenbach owns Arthur Conan Doyle’s manuscript for the 1903 Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Empty House. Arthur Conan Doyle, The adventure of the empty house: autograph manuscript. 1903. EL4 .D754e 903. The Rosenbach of the Free Library …
Act III: All Apologies Opera [Works] of Apuleius. Rome: Petri de Maximo, 1469 (edition princeps). The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Incun469a. Within this fiasco-themed mini-series we’ve so far looked at collections that hint at theatrical and political debacles. This final act concerns a legal fiasco, and this one goes back to the …
Following on last week’s post about fiascos from our collections, we now bring you act II: Act II: Fire Ball Charles VI of France in an engraving from a later book on French kings. In The Rulers of France, MS f.233/22, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. A document written by Charles …
Kathy is away this week working on something Sherlockian (which I’m sure you’ll read about here soon). In the meantime, this week’s blog post is motivated by perhaps the most notorious episode of NPR’s This American Life, which was the topic of lunchtime conversation recently at the Rosenbach. The theme: fiascos. If you want to …
Last week I was pleased to attend an excellent conference on James Logan and the Networks of Atlantic Culture and Politics, 1699-1751, co-sponsored by The Library Company, UPenn’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Stenton, James Logan’s home, now owned by the Colonial Dames. Logan came to Pennsylvania as …
For those of you who have seen Peter Dobrin’s recent articles in the Philadelphia Inquirier (both Sunday‘s and Tuesday‘s), you already know that the Sendak Collection held here on deposit since 1968 will be leaving us shortly and returning to the Sendak Foundation in Connecticut. Our exhibition Sendak in the ‘60s will remain on view …
Okay, so we all know we’re not supposed to do this to our books (although I suspect we’re probably all guilty of it, spine-breaking be hanged). But what do you use to mark your place? I must confess to grabbing whatever piece of paper is readily at hand–grocery receipts and library checkout slips being frequent …