I am not a coffee drinker, but many of my colleagues at the Rosenbach definitely enjoy a good cup. So when I was paging through issues of the Oregon Statesman looking for possible references to the 1859 Pig War (more on that another time) and ran across a front-page tidbit entitled “Coffee,” it caught my …
Philadelphia is gearing up for next week’s arrival of the Democratic National Convention and museums across town have been highlighting their historical and political collections. We, of course, have our Freedom Train exhibition, looking at a project that both celebrated American history and raised questions (intentionally and unintentionally) about what freedom means. The Constitution Center …
While doing some shelf reading yesterday I ran across around little volume entitled The Art of Making Money Plenty in Every Man’s Pocket, printed by Samuel Wood around 1811. The get rich quick title caught my eye and when I opened it up I was fascinated to see that it was presented in the form …
As we gear up for July 4th weekend, we wanted to kick off the festivities with some fabulous founding father documents to put us in the spirit. This document regarding Washington’s role as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army is currently on display in our Freedom Train exhibition. Dr. Rosenbach lent it to the original Freedom …
Our newest exhibit, Freedom Train 1947-1949: Exhibiting America’s Past to Shape America’s Future, opens next Friday, July 1, and the collections staff has been hard at work on installation. The Freedom Train was a massive traveling exhibition of over 125 American historical documents, housed in a specially designed train, that crossed the country from September …
Today is the day after Bloomsday, but I wanted to squeeze in a Bloomsday blog post anyway. (Technically,since the day described in the book ends after midnight, maybe June 17 could be grandfathered in a little?) This year we extended our Bloomsday festival into the historic house: facsimiles of passages from the manuscript were spread …
As the world began to mourn the death of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali on Friday June 3, 2016, his spoken words were remembered as well as his punches. Modernist poet Marianne Moore is mentioned in The Slate article “’I Done Handcuffed Lightning’: The Exuberant Spoken-Word Poetry of Muhammad Ali” for writing the liner notes for …
We have just passed through college graduation season, with its new graduates roaming the streets in caps and gowns. The Rosenbach actually has a fair amount of academic dress represented in our collections owing to degrees accumulated by our founder A.S.W. Rosenbach, and even more by Marianne Moore, so I thought I’d post a few. …
As the lead story in history.com’s “Today in History” page points out, today is the anniversary of the publication of Dracula. Simone Berni’s Dracula By Bram Stoker: The Mystery of the Early Editions notes that “There are several sources (mainly letters and memoirs) that report contradictory information regarding the first day Stoker’s novel was available …
Dr. Rosenbach became famous for selling the best books at the highest prices, but how does one amass a great collection when one doesn’t have the money to play the game? The clever but unscrupulous protagonist of Dr. R’s first book,The Unpublishable Memoirs, has a simple solution: clever cons and sly stealing. The Unpublishable Memoirs …