Month: February 2013
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Among the Reels
This blog is all about showcasing Penn’s collections, these of course include a variety of media and different types of items so I thought I would feature something a bit different this week. Instead of a single item, I want to write about a class of items which, taken as a whole, are certainly “unique”…
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A Rocket Cat? Early Modern Explosives Treatises at Penn
I was puzzled when a friend asked me a few weeks ago if I’d seen the “rocket cat” illustrated in a Penn manuscript which had been featured on the book blog BibliOdyssey in November. The image, from what was described as a 1584 “Feuer Buech” manuscript, appeared to show a cat and a bird propelled…
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Smut!
Written by Ellen Williams Hensle “Are you still working on that smut?! You guys, Ellen’s reading the smut magazine again!” Such was my coworker’s joy at teasing me about my latest finding aid project. It’s hard to imagine that a monthly called The Adult: The Journal of Sex could be anything but “smut.” But open…