By Nicole Connell RBML holds the papers of many writers, including Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, and H.G. Wells. Not only are these writers notable in their own right, but they boasted a social network that included other prominent writers. So let’s have some fun and explore these relationships in our collections! If you would like […]
Non Solus Blog
Literary Connections in Literary Collections
March 19, 2025
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 […]
Now Searchable: Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. Collection
October 25, 2024
by Dana Miller The Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. Collection is now searchable in our Manuscript Collections Database! Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. (born 1948) is an American letterpress printer, papermaker, educator, and social activist. He established the first iteration of his imprint, Idiot Press, in the 1980s, with several additional iterations in the years following: Kennedy […]
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 […]
Happy birthday, Gwendolyn Brooks!
June 7, 2024
by Dana Miller Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. She is often recognized for her time as Poet Laureate of Illinois (1968-2000) and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1985-1986), and for being the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category (1950). While many […]
Journal of a residence in St. Petersburg
March 31, 2024
Open this sturdy stationery-bound journal (Post-1650 MS 0806) and join Hugh Perkins as he embarks from London to St. Petersburg, traveling through the North and Baltic Seas in the autumn of 1834, writing and sketching along the way. His illustrations are skillful, executed in various media, including pencil, watercolor, and gouache, documenting ships, birds, landscapes, […]
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 […]
Stuart David and Sophia Belzer Engstrand Collection
January 30, 2024
By Nicole Connell The Stuart David and Sophia Belzer Engstrand Collection has been processed and cataloged, and is now open to researchers at RBML! Stuart David Engstrand (1904-1955) was a best-selling author, publishing primarily in the 1940s. His works include Beyond the Forest, A Husband in the House, The Invaders, More Deaths Than One, The […]
Musing on Miniatures: An Introspective
April 1, 2022
By Elissa B.G. Mullins The miniature format recommends itself to a wide variety of genres—from devotional materials to political pamphlets; from almanacs to advertisements; from volumes designed for the small hands and big imaginations of children, to delicately hand-crafted artists’ books. All boast portability, stealth, ease of storage, and economical use of paper and binding […]
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 […]