If you saw our Superlative Showcase, you know that the Rosenbach brothers’ home at 2010 Delancey place is our largest collections object. But how much do you know about it? The 2000 block of Delancey was built in the early 1860s as a developers row, which explains the unified brick appearance of the street. It …
With Passover and Easter nigh upon us, here are a couple of holiday-related items from our collection. The two-volume Mahzor Minhag Roma, published by the Soncinos in 1485/1486, is the first printed Jewish prayerbook and includes the Passover haggadah. The haggadah section marks another first–it is illustrated with the earliest known printed illustration of a …
What book is big enough to fill this enormous book cradle? (constructed by Karen Schoenwaldt, in the foreground) What photograph is Patrick Rodgers planning to hang on the wall? What is that green thing in the back of this case, anyway? You can find the answers to all these questions, and more, in our Superlative …
March is Women’s History Month and this week I thought I’d highlight a letter from our Rush collection that deals with Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (Full text of Vindication can be found at Project Gutenberg) In this ca. 1793 letter, Annis Boudinot Stockton, herself a published poet …
We never need an excuse to talk about Irish authors–James Joyce and Bram Stoker are year-round staples of the Rosenbach diet– but with St. Patrick’s Day approaching I thought I’d highlight a few other famous Irishmen in our collection. Many thanks to our librarian Elizabeth Fuller for letting me crib from the script from her …
This past weekend we celebrated the Gratz family in style with a recognition of Joseph Gratz by the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry, of which he was a member, and a celebration of Rebecca Gratz’s 241st birthday (but who’s counting). For those of you who were unable to attend the festive event, I thought I’d …
One of the many jobs our collection staff handles is answering research questions from folks outside the institution. Sometimes the questions can be downright unusual–our librarian remembers fielding a call from someone asking if we had newly discovered photos of Area 51 (apparently a news site mixed up a couple of links). But oddities aside, …
Happy belated President’s Day! Today, February 22, marks Washington’s actual birthday so I thought we’d celebrate with a peek at Washington’s earliest surviving letter.(If you want to get precise, when he was born Washington would have thought of his birthday as February 11, since England and her colonies still used the Julian calendar, but it …
The collections department has been busy this week with our new exhibit, Titanic: The Rise of Rosenbach, which opened yesterday. One of the challenges in any exhibition is that there are all sorts of fascinating tidbits that just don’t fit into the story arc and therefore have to (sadly) get left off of the labels. …
The birthdays are coming fast and furious. Last week it was James Joyce; this week we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, who was born February 7, 1812. While many find Joyce daunting, almost everyone has read some Dickens–even if it was just A Tale of Two Cities in high school English class. What …