Special Collections Roundup

34,000 New Digital Images of Medieval Items Go Online

Seven institutions, including the Berlin State Library, Leiden University Libraries, and the Bibliotheque National de France, contributed to a new Europeana project called “The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages”.

Year of Glass: Contemporary Native American Beadwork

As part of an ongoing series highlighting holdings during the UN’s International Year of Glass, the Cooper Hewitt Museum looks at a new acquisition that demonstrates the use of glass beads in contemporary Native American artwork.

Nick Biddle and the Commemorative Power of the Carte de Visite

The story behind this portrait of Nicholas Biddle, a 65-year-old Black soldier attacked by a pro-slavery mob in the first days of the Civil War

The Many Names of Laurence James

All these books have different authors, but they and nearly 200 more were all written by the same man–Laurence James, an editor at a major paperback publisher who grew tired of the vagaries of working with temperamental authors and decided to eliminate the middle man.

Animated Advertising: 200 Years of Premiums, Promos, and Pop-ups

A new online exhibition at the Grolier Club surveys two centuries of three-dimensional or moving advertising ephemera.