Hello, it’s Candace Pine again, intern here in the Steward and Sustain department, and lover of old and beautiful books. I’m continuing to enjoy my time working here, and I wanted to share another fun experience with you.
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Recently, the department was hosting a small reception. The University Archivist put together a great display about Freedom Summer in the reading room, but one table in the corner was left open so that some of the most popular (and some of the most expensive) items from special collections could be displayed to visitors. It’s always nice to be able to showcase some of the treasures that are housed here, so our Library Associate, Justin, pulled some materials and then gave me the freedom to display them however I liked. I’ve been wanting to but together a little exhibit for a while now, so I was very excited about this, even though it was only going to be a very temporary display. At least it was a chance to get my feet wet, right? So I looked over the materials that Justin had brought out and, needless to say, I wanted to include pretty much everything. But setting books out on display takes up a fair amount of room. So a one-table display quickly became a two-tables display. And that actually gave us a little bit of extra room, so Justin and I went back and got some more things. I grabbed a couple of artist’s books, and he picked out some postcards from our extensive postcard collection, as well as a signed football and a Cradle of Coaches playbook. Then I laid everything out in a way that would allow people to easily be able to view at least one item, no matter where they were standing around the tables, and then the display was ready to go.
Shown below are some photos of the materials that I arranged on display. They include items such as: a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible, a Shakespeare first folio, a book of hours, a book with marbled endpages, a Bible with two different fore-edge paintings, letters written by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, postcards, artist’s books, and more. I hope you enjoy getting to see them. And if you want to see anything in-person, please feel free to stop by!
