Blog Archives

The Gwillim Project Receives Major SSHRC Funding

The 2019 results are in! The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) has poured research funding into a new Partnership Development Grant based out of the McGill Library’s Blacker Wood Collection. The Gwillim Project centres around the …

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Karis Shearer awarded Raymond Klibansky Research Travel Grant

The McGill Library welcomes Dr. Karis Shearer to our Rare Books and Special Collections reading room! Dr. Shearer is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus) where she directs …

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Art Wins the Day: Roussil’s ‘Danse de la Paix’ at McGill

“Ceremony provides the climax to a controversy dating from 1949,” proclaimed the Friday, October 2nd, 1992 edition of The Montreal Gazette. That day, as part of Open House weekend at McGill, and in conjunction with Montreal’s 350th anniversary, La Danse …

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Not a bad “Impression”: a fine Rembrandt Print in McGill’s Collection

Etching by Rembrandt, The Descent from the Cross, 1633. 52.2 cm x 41 cm. McGill Print Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, European Folio section.

This is an excerpt from the article entitled “Not a bad “Impression”: a fine Rembrandt Print in McGill’s Collection” written by Maria L. Brendel. It was first published in Fontanus, Vol 10 (1998). In 1919 McGill received a seventeenth-century print …

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Montreal Mansions: Spaces in Time

In 1973 the Van Horne Mansion, a historic brownstone located on the corner of Sherbrooke and Stanley Streets here in Montreal, was controversially dozed. This event came on the heels of a spate of similar demolitions in the Golden Square …

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Loving in truth and fain in Riddle my love to show: Mother’s Day Acrostics with The Riddle Project

Acrostic poem

By Leehu Sigler “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality”[1]– James Joyce Timeless Riddles is back …

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Ils vivaient avec leurs 17 enfants dans un logement de 4 pièces…

  Un 4 pièces avec 6 ou 7 enfants! Certaines familles avaient 12 ou 17 enfants! […] Une chambre de garçons, une chambre de filles, une chambre de parents. Les enfants étaient élevés dehors. C’était la grande misère, raconte Marguerite. …

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Colour by Numbers: Contemporary Japanese prints in the Visual Arts Collection

Shinobazu no Ike

La version française suit By Isabelle Chartier, Collections Administrator, Visual Arts Collection Printmaking is, traditionally, a colourless medium: black ink transferred onto white paper. Adding colour to prints is a slow and laborious process, at odds with the very essence …

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Content Warning: This Library Contains Colourful Language

A scene from God’s love to wicked little Joseph (circa 1840). The title character, “indeed a very wicked boy”, develops a penchant for outbursts of colourful language. By page 16, the boy is dead, apparently smote for his wicked tongue. PN970 A4 G6 1832. Sheila R. Bourke Collection.

La version française suit By Elis Ing, Liaison Librarian, Rare Books and Special Collections “Pray, Goody, please to moderate the rancour of your tongue” (Pray Goody, ca. 1820). Colourful language makes many people uncomfortable. Profane, blasphemous or crude words are …

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The Colourful Journey of George Mercer Dawson

Kookany Pass, British Columbia. George Mercer Dawson. 1882? McGill University Archives. Dawson-Harrington families fonds.

La version française suit By Frédéric Giuliano, Archivist, McGill University Archives “The times were rife with great men making great strides, but in truth, I felt like one of those frogs in my adolescent poem, most certainly the younger, lifted …

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