Archive

The island of Taiwan, once commonly known in the West by the Portuguese name of Formosa, has recently resurfaced in the news in connection with the One China policy. In the past it was also a subject of interest, although information coming from Taiwan itself was often scarce.

The arrival of Europeans in the Americas was an event of global importance, and its effect on the people already living here was devastating. That is why in 1552 the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas wrote a book that he called Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, or A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

Most of us, if we recognize the name Maurice Sendak, probably think of him as the man who wrote and illustrated the beloved children's book "Where the Wild Things Are," published in 1963. Yet what some may not know is that Sendak wrote (and illustrated) much more than that one popular book.

In December 2016, David B. Wolf, a New York attorney and collector interested in John Marshall and his biography of George Washington, donated three letters that join an existing collection of John Marshall Papers.

An interesting old map, recently cataloged and made accessible in the Earl Gregg Swem Library Rare Books Collection at SCRC, bears witness to the transformation of West Virginia from a region of "breathtaking scenery and lavish virgin forests" to a land where "mountain farming culture was defeated by the ever widening grasp of speculators and absentees" (Barbara Rasmussen).

Imagine, if you will, a creature with a lower body made of the skin and scales of a carp, a human-like upper body with prominent ribs, "thin and scraggy" arms, "skeleton-like" fingers, the head of a small monkey, and the teeth of a catfish. Sound familiar?

Many of the books in Swem Library's Special Collections have been gifted by individual donors who have themselves built up their own private collections. This practice of endowing educational institutions with the tools of study has long antecedents, but in the seventeenth century a librarian actually laid out a plan for building a library and advocated wider access for scholars.

The University of Leiden in the Netherlands, founded in 1575, is the country's oldest; it is also now one of the study abroad opportunities offered to William & Mary students. In the first three quarters of a century annual enrollments showed a four-fold rise, with the result being that the Elsevier family in Leiden, who already operated a printing press, decided to get into the early modern equivalent of the text-book industry.

"Buy 5 Get 1 Free" - that is how the publisher advertised the 1805 edition of Ferdinand Seidel's Naturhistorisches Kupferwerk : mit erklarendem Texte nach Buffon, acquired this fall by Special Collections.

Everyone knows these famous lines even if the rest of the poems escapes them. "A Visit from St. Nicholas," more popularly known as The Night before Christmas, was written in 1823 by Clement C. Moore (1779-1863) and is a staple in many families' holiday traditions. But what accounts for the poem's enduring popularity?

In the basement of Swem Library is a room used mostly for storage. Along two walls are machines and wooden cases full of drawers. The machines are printing presses and the cases are filled with type – individual letters cast in metal, designed to be set by hand and printed on the machines.

If you're a senior at the College, you may know the Colonial Echo through their emails reminding you to get your portrait taken.

SCRC has an active instruction schedule during the academic year, as professors from all departments bring their students in to see the amazing materials housed in Special Collections. However, many may be surprised to learn that SCRC houses objects, texts, and ephemera related to virtually every discipline.This week included a reminder of how rich a collection we have related to the arts.

This year Kelvin W. Ramsey (Class of 1979), recently donated an additional 159 items to his collection of stereographs and magic lantern slides housed at the Special Collections Research Center.

The recent acquisition of seven letters written by Sir Peyton Skipwith and one by Sir Gray Skipwith reveal what Sir Peyton thought of his wife Lady Jean's library. The library is featured in an exhibit, Exceptional in Any Age, at Swem Library that will run through October 2016.

Tucked among countless other books in the Special Collections stacks of rare books lies a rather unassuming looking text. It is green, with a lone tree pictured in the center of the cover and a grapevine frame going around, with the title, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, spelled out in gold lettering.

 

While his family was busy with operating the Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Norfolk-born Alexander Galt, Jr. (1827-1863) possessed artistic aspirations.

On October 11, 1918, an 7.5 magnitude earthquake shook the homes of residents in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. Within minutes, the town was inundated by a large Tsunami. Destruction of buildings and homes in Mayaguez and surrounding towns was widespread.

If you like old books, look carefully at any inscription you find within – you may have a valuable treasure as well as an unexpected mystery to solve.