Exhibit: Flights of Fancy: Illustrated Children’s Books and the Sheila R. Bourke Collection

Runs to November 30, 2013. Accessible during opening hours. Monday – Friday, 10am – 6pm.

Location: Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Room Alcove, 4^th floor, McLennan Library Building

Curated by: Lindsey Skeen, McGill School of Information Studies (GLIS 689 – Selected Topics)

Supervised by: Professor P.F. McNally and Ms. Sharon Rankin

This exhibit explores the Children’s Illustrated Books featured in The Sheila R. Bourke Collection. Sheila R. Bourke is a Montreal area resident and life-long collector of children’s books.  The Sheila R. Bourke collection of twenty-two hundred books, the earliest of which is dated 1571 and progresses to the present date, is a definitive and important collection within McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections.  It documents some of the most important international illustrators and authors who have contributed to the world of children’s literature.  From the perspective of a researcher, this collection is important in its scope and content.  The collection addresses, quite extensively, research interests of individual artists and illustrators, and colour reproduction as documented through the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries.