By Prof. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Penn State, Video by Jacquelyn Sundberg, McGill Libraries What is a turn-up book? A brief history A turn-up book is an interactive booklet that has been engaged with by children and adults from the mid-17th century …
Blog Archives
A Few of Our Favourite Things
Lire la version française A happy cohort of undergraduate students were hired last term to devote their energies to systematically comb through a portion of the stacks in Rare Books and Special Collections in order to stabilize books most in …
Once Upon a Print: Cinderella’s Wood Block Magic
Cinderella is a tale of transformation and perception. We are delighted to have in the Sheila Bourke Children’s Collection not only the chapbook Cinderella and the Little Glass Slipper, but also the woodblocks used to print this small, vivid book! …
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The “Flying Wonder” of Victorian Paper Toys
By Dr. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Penn State College of Education & Jacquelyn Sundberg, Outreach Librarian, McGill Lire la version française The “Flying Wonder” lives up to its name; this is a vibrant set of Victorian-era paper toys, animated with moveable flaps …
Octavo, Quarto, and Folio! Oh my!
Lire la version française By Jacquelyn Sundberg, Outreach Librarian, and Ann Marie Holland, Curator, William Colgate History of Printing Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections. If you are new to the world of rare books, you might wonder what these …
A New (Old) Game of Solitaire
I would guess that most of us know how to play at least one form of solitaire. For owners of a Windows computer, the classic Free Solitaire game has been built into the operating system since 1990. It was included …
A Journey Through Time With “Caption This”
In the beginning of 2022, ROAAr’s newsletter inaugurated an engaging series: “Caption This” through which we put intriguing images from our archives to good use by inviting users to caption them. After a two-year successful run, the series concluded in …
Black History Month at McGill Libraries
Black History Month (BHM) at McGill “aims to celebrate and centre Blackness throughout the history, the present, and the future of McGill and beyond.” The 2024 installment is coordinated by the Equity Team within the Office of the Provost and …
Who were the first female detectives in Britain?
Tazreen Jahan Bari, one of the curators of the Library’s current Exhibition, Detecting the Anxious Gaze; The Victorian World in Flux Who came first? The fictional female detective or the real one? For detective story readers, it’s not unusual to …
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Conversation with the Curator; Charlotte Frank
Q and A with Charlotte Frank, one of the curators of the Library’s current Exhibition, Detecting the Anxious Gaze; The Victorian World in Flux Why did you choose to exhibit the film poster for and film stills from the 1934 …
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