Fairy tales are short, fantastical stories of folklore that were told orally for hundreds of years before being recorded. As works of folklore, fairy tales do not usually have a single author but rather are attributed to the groups of people from which the stories are believed to originate. A fairy tale typically begins with […]
Tag: Rare Books
Once Upon a Time: Fairy Tales from Around the World
May 16, 2019
German Myths & Fairy Tales
March 20, 2019
Written by Taylor Fisk Henning Myths and fairy tales are two different types of stories that share a tradition of being passed down orally through many generations. Because of this oral tradition and the diffusion of tales throughout time, there are countless variants of the same stories in many different lands and cultures. In most […]
The Menace Behind the Magick: A Halloween Pop-Up Exhibit at the RBML
October 25, 2018
25 October – 07 November 2018 Curated by Taylor Fisk Henning & Kellie Clinton Twenty years ago, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was first published in the United States. The book, followed by six more volumes in the Harry Potter series, soon became a cultural phenomenon which led to eight films, numerous […]
Peekaboo!
August 21, 2017
We’re so excited about the eclipse, here at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. This graphic comes from an announcement published in 1760 in Milan, alerting citizens of an upcoming eclipse to occur on June 13 of the same year. As the diagram shows, only seven-tenths of the sun would be covered. Spiegazione geografica dell’ecclisse […]
Opulent Almanacs
October 7, 2016
It’s been a wonderfully colorful week here at the Illinois RBML: after Joan Friedman’s illuminating lecture on Owen Jones and color printing on Wednesday, we came across these exquisite chromolithographed title pages from Goffredo di Crollalanza’s series of almanacs: the “Almanach Héraldique et Drôlatique”, from 1883-1885. […]
Benson Lossing: artist, historian, author
February 20, 2015
In nineteenth century America, the study and scholarship of history was often seen as an avocation; a subject reserved for the wealthy or members of the political and cultural elite. The United States was a young and growing nation, with not much history of its own. The great historians of the age studied the Greeks, […]
Revolutionary Revolutions
November 24, 2014
When I was in elementary school, I had a small “Wheel of Presidents”—a device consisting of two cardstock circles affixed to each other in the center, one smaller, with a wedge-shaped cutout, and one larger, with miniature portraits of the U.S. presidents dotting its circumference. I don’t remember how I acquired it, but I do […]