W&M Libraries Blog

Have you heard about textbook prices? National surveys indicate that students are now spending about $1200 each year if they purchase all of the textbooks required for their classes. This may be surprising to those of us who graduated from college some time ago, but the increase in textbook prices has far outpaced the increase in inflation, nearly doubling from 1998-2008 alone, and going up over 1,000% since 1977.

In early 1792, Thomas Dobson, a prominent Philadelphia printer in the middle of printing the first American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, took a much smaller commission: William Currie’s An Historical Account of the Climates and Diseases of the United States of America.

A daguerreotype of a young Baltimore merchant, the first victim of a bitter, homicidal political era, resides in the Special Collections Research Center in Swem Library—a ghostly message from the past.

On a whiteboard in the lobby we asked, "Which book best captures your identity or culture?" Students gave us over 50 fantastic responses that highlighted the wonderful diversity in our community!