In an article in Sunday’s New York Times about David Rockwell’s designs for this year’s Oscar awards ceremony at the Kodak Theater (“The Little Gold Man In a New Blue World,” February 15, 2009), Patricia Leigh Brown writes: “This year the dominant color scheme will shift from red to a rich, deep blue, a shade […]
Timecapsules
For an archivist, everyday is a potential journey to the center of the earth. Open a box—any box—and you are instantly transported to another place and time. In most cases the creator of those records did not intend for this to be the case. But every now and then you stumble across a voice from […]
A discussion of early dust wrappers on books on the SHARP discussion list took a side turn when wrappers on playing cards came up as a possibly parallel phenomenon. The recently-publicized Field collection of playing cards — over 6,000 decks and a good bit of related material — has a number of these wrappers. In […]
Eggs and “Art”
Today, in to look at medieval manuscripts, I had a great group of 7th graders from a local school: enthusiastic kids, smart, engaging, who made the leap from the early materials they were looking at to their own education in a flash. They looked at a 13th century sale receipt for a slave and a […]
A “New” Medieval Manuscript
Great news: we were the successful bidders at the November auction of medieval manuscripts at Christie’s, London! The wonderful new addition to our collection, soon to be known officially as Western MS 88, is a canon law compilation, copied in France, ca. 1240. It’s a superb example of the way medieval books usually circulated, with […]