Category: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
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Fiddle Music, Fishing and Dreaming of Michigan
As a new project processing archivist at Penn Libraries, I had the distinct pleasure of beginning my term at Kislak by processing the H. Owen Reed papers (1920-2016), gifted to Penn by his grandson. Herbert Owen Reed (1910-2014) was an American composer, musician, music educator and author. Born in Odessa, Missouri to musical parents (his…
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Posters from the uprising
When this portfolio of Mexican student posters arrived at my desk for cataloging I was struck by the image on the cover, and questions started to form in my mind. What was the meaning of this man, padlocked chain in his mouth, with the ironic text below “Libertad de expresión” followed by what looked like…
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Ghostly hints of lives lived
Stephan Loewentheil and William H. Miller, III, recently gifted the Kislak Center one of the most amazing collections on which I have had the privilege to work … the Edward S. Curtis collection of interpositive glass plates and papers, 1899-1929. While the bulk of the gift consists of 168 interpositive glass plates used in the…
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Infinite Hope: The Wonderful World of Ashley Bryan
After nearly 19 months of work, through campus shut-downs and work-from-home orders due to the pandemic, it is my distinct pleasure to have completed processing the Ashley Bryan papers, a collection that is near and dear to my heart as a person and archivist. My awareness of this collection extends all the way back to…
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“A Book Is Best! Absolutely!”
Presented without comment, jacket copy from the first American edition of Australian writer Charlotte Jay‘s thriller The Voice of the Crab (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), held in the Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness at Penn’s Kislak Center (Schimmel Fiction 6057): A Book Is Best!Absolutely! It really is.…
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Postcard from Ramonaland
I recently cataloged an early twentieth-century postcard in the Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness of potential interest to both deltiologists and aficionados of the mythology of Southern California. The image on the card is a square sepia photograph of a Native American woman seated with her hands in her…
Unique at Penn 