By Elissa B.G. Mullins Climb aboard the S.S. Cuba for a rare glimpse behind the iron curtain through the keen eyes and profusely detailed journals of a French physician, Dr. O. Ménard (Post-1650 MS 0896). In July 1932, the S.S. Cuba was privately chartered by a French medical society for a special tour of Scandinavia, […]
Category: Collection Highlights
Journal of a voyage to Russia during the Soviet famine
August 19, 2025
Isolarii at the RBML
August 6, 2025
By Molly Banwart Today we’re looking at two seminal printed isolarii, or island books, from the late 15th and mid-16th centuries. The isolarii genre can be thought of as an encyclopedia of islands containing maps along with text descriptions of significant history, maritime information, mythology, and an analysis of the physical geography of the land. […]
Livre de Prières : Tissé d’après les Enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVIe siècle
July 23, 2025
By Molly Banwart and Caroline Szylowicz Have you ever seen a book made entirely of silk? One item getting a lot of reading room attention recently is this French Livre de Prières: Tissé d’après les enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVIe siècle (242.802 H446l). This book was manufactured with the Jacquard process, which relied […]
Havana customs house account book for 1825
June 15, 2025
By Elissa B.G. Mullins A recently cataloged manuscript offers a grim window into the 19th-century slave trade. The account book of the Havana customs house for January-April 1825 (Post-1650 MS 0878) records daily details of Cuba’s imports and exports, including the import of enslaved persons. I did not immediately register that the abbreviation “escl.” that […]
Hymni heroici tres
February 19, 2025
By Elissa B.G. Mullins Open a vellum binding, blind-stamped and splayed with age, to discover a rare edition of Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola’s Hymni heroici tres, printed in Leipzig in 1514 by Melchior Lotter (who, three years later, printed the first edition of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses). The library’s copy (Call Number: Q. 875.1 […]
Eikōn basilikē of King Charles the First
June 13, 2024
By Elissa B.G. Mullins 56 copies in 26 editions of the Eikōn basilikē of King Charles I have recently been disambiguated, rescued from minimal catalogue records, and made fully accessible to researchers. Although its publication could not save Charles I from his beheading in 1649, the Eikōn basilikē (subtitled The pourtraicture of His sacred Majestie […]
A Marriage Contract … and a Book Cover?
March 8, 2024
By Elissa B.G. Mullins Don’t judge a book by its cover—especially when the cover warrants its own catalogue record! Little did yeoman William Butter and his wife-to-be Judeth Shaw imagine that their marriage contract would one day be recycled to cover an astronomical treatise printed a century before they met. A fragment of their contract […]
Adventures in Cataloging: Arabic Manuscripts at RBML Part 3
April 1, 2022
By Hanan Jaber Welcome to the final part of our Arabic Manuscripts at RBML series! Today, we are presenting the last four books for this collection. Hand-written Qur’an – 1845 Of course I was expecting to find Qur’ans within the manuscripts just because many older books tend to be law books and religious texts. I […]
Collection Highlights: The Story of Mable Schamp (1912-1951)
July 28, 2021
by Jonathan Puckett The Schamp-Levin Collection contains the papers of Mable Schamp and her second husband, Meyer Levin. Mable Hall Schamp (1912-1951) grew up in poverty but earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1936, served as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, worked on male contraceptives, battled mental illness, and […]