Author: Mitch Fraas
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A Busy Week
The work of a library carries on even when most of us are primarily working from home. Here at the Penn Libraries, my colleagues and I recently closed out a fantastic week of acquisitions work worth sharing from the comforts of home. During the final week of October curators and area studies librarians here at…
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July 5, 1776
While the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia 240 years ago to decide the future of the 13 colonies, ministers and officials in Lisbon several thousand miles away also met to discuss what to do about the rebellious colonists. Long allied with the British, worried about the example of a rebellious overseas colony, and hoping to…
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Alexander Hamilton’s working papers
On Monday, Penn hosts Lin-Manuel Miranda who will be giving this year’s commencement address. His acclaimed musical retelling of Alexander Hamilton’s life has sparked enormous interest in the first Secretary of the Treasury. A few months ago, in reading through scholarship on our collections, I came across a 1941 article describing a set of bound…
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What’s missing in magazines
What is it that you read when you read a print copy of a magazine in a library or as a digital photograph from an online source? Though plenty of strange things happen to monographs, bindings are removed, plates sometimes missing or not scanned, fold-outs mangled, periodicals are particularly fluid material texts, often intended to…
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David Rittenhouse’s teenage almanac?
The start of a new month (rainy and cold here in Philadelphia) has reminded me to write about a new almanac fragment here at Penn. In November of last year, the Penn Libraries purchased a unique and somewhat mysterious eighteenth century manuscript. Consisting of a single bifolium (a sheet folded to make four pages) it…
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An Occult and Alchemical Library
When acquiring early manuscripts these days libraries mostly get them one at a time. A 15th century medical compendium here, a cache of Mexican inquisition proceedings there. It was with excitement then that my colleagues and I read the catalog for the sale of some of the 12th Duke of Northumberland’s collection this past July.…
Unique at Penn 