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One particularly valuable item within the Rare Book Collection is a copy of the original 1816 libretto Le Comte Ory that recounts the escapades of a lascivious French aristocrat, Count Ory, who seeks to seduce the widowed Countess Aloise through a series of disguises and tricks, and the efforts of…
Moods is Louisa May Alcott’s lesser known first novel, originally published in 1864. The novel and context surrounding its publishing present an interesting glimpse into the life and mind of Alcott. A romance that takes its cues from transcendentalist styles, Moods follows the story of Sylvia, a young woman caught…
Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene is likely not be the first work of literature to come to mind when asking the question: where can we find authors who subvert gender expectations in historical literature? However, one of its central characters creates ripples of gendered confusion in her wake from the…
Detail of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis from an engraving showing the stories in Book IV Ovid’s collection of re-mythologized Greek and Roman stories within the pages of Metamorphoses is intensely rich with stories of transformations of all kinds. It should hardly come as a surprise then, that the collection includes stories…
Archibald Clavering Gunter’s 1891 novel A Florida Enchantment presents the story of New York socialite Lillian Travers, who transforms into a man after consuming a magical seed from a box found in a St. Augustine store of peculiar Florida treasures. This mysterious box, Lillian discovers, belonged to her great-grandfather Captain…
Like its early modern collector, this thirteen volume work tried to gather and order the natural world.
This limited-run portfolio calls attention to the economic, and human costs of incarceration on local communities and families, and channels the book and graphic arts towards social change. The People’s Paper Co-Op, directed by artists Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist, blends art and advocacy as tools to change the…
Andreas Vesalius, Anatomia viri in hoc genere princip. Andreae Vesalii Bruxellensis Andreas Vesalius’ diagrams of the human body are some of the most iconic and significant works in the history of early modern medicine, and the foundation of the modern study of anatomy. Born in Brussels, Vesalius taught anatomy at…
The foundational account of Caribbean piracy. Alexandre Esquemelin was a Flemish sailor and surgeon who traveled to the West Indies in the 1660s. Indentured on various mercantile and privateering vessels, his descriptions of the activities of British and Jamaican privateers formed the basis for generations of writing about the Golden…
