New in the UW Digital Collections
Several works from Special Collections have recently been digitized as part of the Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture within the UW Digital Collections. William and John Halfpenny's Rural Architecture in the Gothick Taste (1752) and The Country Gentleman’s Pocket Companion (1756) were bound together in a single volume in the Thordarson Collection. Both William Hogarth's The Analysis of Beauty: Written With a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (1753) and a German edition of 1754 can also be consulted in Special Collections. The digitized versions are
- Rural Architecture: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/DLDecArts.HalfpennyRural
- Country Gentleman's Pocket Companion: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/DLDecArts.CountryGent
- Analysis of Beauty: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/DLDecArts.Hogarth
In Recent Exhibits
Sample cartonera books on loan from Special Collections were on display in Kohler Art Library through September 30, 2009; others appeared in the Silver Buckle Press exhibit cases on the 2nd floor of Memorial Library and in a larger exhibit in the 1st floor lobby of Memorial Library.
Cartonera books are hand-made from recycled cardboard collected off the streets by cartoneros (garbage pickers), who sell the cardboard they collect to the cartonera publishers and in some cases participate in the production process of the actual books themselves, which feature hand-painted cardboard covers. The books often contain new literary contributions.
UW-Madison hosted the conference “Cartonera Publishers: Recycling Latin American Bookscapes,” October 8-9, 2009. For more information, see http://www.library.wisc.edu/cartoneras/.
Images from rare books in Special Collections appear in the installation Loca Miraculi: Rooms of Wonder by artist Martha Glowacki in the American Collections at the Milwaukee Art Museum. More ».
One volume from our four-volume set of Audubon's Birds of America (the double-elephant folio edition in the Thordarson Collection) was on exhibit December 18, 2008 – March 22, 2009, at the Milwaukee Art Museum, as part of their exhibition entitled “Catesby, Audubon, and the Discovery of a New World: Prints of the Flora and Fauna of America.” More »
Several works of natural philosophy from Special Collections, including
- George Adams, An essay on vision: Briefly explaining the fabric of the eye, and the nature of vision (1789)
- Claude Dariot, Dariotus redivivus, or, A brief introduction conducing to the judgment of the stars (1653)
- Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, Exposition anatomique de la structure du corps humain (1749)
were on display in Kohler Art Library from mid-January through mid-February 2008 as part of The Scientist's Eye: Dialogues between Art and Science, an exhibition of artist and rare books from the Kohler Art Library and Special Collections. Amy Noell and Beth Zinsli (Ph.D. Students, Art History) co-curated this exhibit in conjunction with "Visualizing Science," February 7-8, 2008, one in the series New Directions in Visual Culture.
In conjunction with the conference "Legacies of Al Andalus:
Islam, Judaism & the West," an exhibit in the first floor lobby of
Memorial Library through early December 2007 featured works from Special Collections and Memorial Library. Shown here is a detail from the title page of a 16th-century edition of the Primera Crónica General (First General Chronicle), a text commissioned by Alfonso X, king of Castile and Leon (1221-1284).
The Wisconsin Papyri collection has been digitized as part of the international project APIS, the Advanced Papyrological Information System. From the APIS search screen, Limit by Collection to Wisconsin, then click search
The Special Collections copy of Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der Messung (1538) was on display through November 5, 2007, as part of the exhibition Window | Interface at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis.
On Wings of Art, the inaugural exhibition in the Art Court at the newly renovated Dane County Regional Airport, featured works from the Department of Special Collections, one of seven individual shows that highlighted many aspects of aviation, mapping and flight through historical photographs, maps, globes, sculptures, films, posters, rare books and contemporary prints. In "Birds in Books," Special Collections curator Robin Rider and then intern Ann Myers presented historically important ornithology titles by Alexander Wilson, John James Audubon and more. Through October 30, 2006.
In Recent Publications
Images from rare books in Special Collections also appear in such recent publications as
- Matthew H. Edney, “Mapping parts of the world,” in Maps: Finding our place in the world, ed. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) — featuring the title page of Aaron Rathborne, The surveyor (1616) from the Thordarson Collection.
- Tara E. Nummedal, Alchemy and authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) — with an illustration from Stephan Michelspacher, Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst und Natur, in Alchymia (1615) on the dustjacket. Special Collections holds three editions of Michelspacher's work, two in the Duveen Alchemy and Chemistry Collection.