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The Calve’s Head and Early Printing in Jamaica
Penn has one of the world’s best collections of printed material relating to Jonathan Swift and his work [1]. Within this collection is an unassuming pamphlet bound into a volume with other tracts relating to political controversies of Swift’s day: The *Calves’s-Head Club; or, a modest apology for Parson Alberoni, governor to King Philip, a […]
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A Nineteenth Century Vision of Persia’s Past
Tucked away in the compact shelving on the 5th floor of Van Pelt Library is a real treasure – a 19th century Persian book entitled “Asar-i ajam”, or loosely, “Antiquities of the Persians” [ed. note: the book has now been moved to RBML]. The book was written by the well-known author Muhammad Nasir Fursat al-Dawlah […]
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Ann Perrin’s album is far from commonplace
[ed. note: Penn’s unique collections are used every year by countless scholars and students, beginning with today’s piece we will periodically feature posts from some of these researchers.] Watercolor paintings, pencil drawings, advice essays, and poems by both famous and obscure poets, as well as the signature of a different person on each page…they’re all […]
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Mussolini’s Downfall
Since this blog aims to not only showcase items from our special collections division but also unique materials from the library as a whole, I thought it would be fitting to follow up the series of posts on the Orphan’s Asylum with one on a completely different kind of text. I am especially interested in […]
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The Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part V)
In mid-January, in the midst of moving 13,000 linear feet of manuscripts during the renovation of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Penn, I received an e-mail from an agent at Pickering & Chatto, a London-based antiquarian bookseller. He was writing to offer me advance notice of two volumes of daily books and regulations […]
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Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part IV)
In this penultimate post in our series on the Orphan’s Asylum records I thought I would share more about two aspects of daily life for the girls of the Asylum. I was especially pleased in reading through the records to see all sorts of interesting tie-ins with Penn’s strong collections in culinary history. See, for […]
Unique at Penn 