Special Collections
Posted on September 14, 2023
Hearth: Memorial to the Enslaved, the week of its dedication, May, 2022
Mar 2017
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March 22, 2017The 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. -
March 16, 2017Most 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.
Feb 2017
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February 15, 2017On February 11 the exhibition, Written in Confidence: The Unpublished Letters of James Monroe, opened to the public. -
February 8, 2017An 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.
Jan 2017
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January 25, 2017Imagine, 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? -
January 12, 2017Many 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. -
January 5, 2017The 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.
Dec 2016
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December 28, 2016“Buy 5 Get 1 Free” - that is how the publisher advertised the 1805 edition of Ferdinand Seidel’s Naturhistorisches Kupferwerk : mit erklärendem Texte nach Büffon, acquired this fall by Special Collections (Rare Book - Chapin-Horowitz QH45. B84 S45 1805). -
December 21, 2016Everyone 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? -
December 14, 2016In 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.