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Curatorial assistant Elizabeth Arterberry gives a captivating selection of materials from the Lilly Library’s Notable Medical Books Collection! During my time as a curatorial assistant at the Lilly Library, I have been afforded the incredible opportunity to become well acquainted with certain of the library’s collections and am grateful I’ve had the time and access […]

Charley and Bessie: An Aside Reference assistant Amber Bowes showcases the fascinating history of a Charles Dickens work– including a star-crossed love story– in this exciting second installation of a two-part blog post! In my first blog post about this book, which you can read here (Triple-deckers and Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England (Part 1) | […]

Cab Calloway (1907–1994) was the zootiest of mid-twentieth-century jazz masters, best remembered now for his decades of shows at the Cotton Club and touring when he wasn’t playing there. He wrote and performed his song “Minnie the Moocher” (1931) so much and to such acclaim that he became the Hi-de-ho Man, and he revived the […]

All dictionaries start in the imagination. One could sit at a screen and key in a list of words at random, defining them on impulse rather than in some principled way. Usually, however, one comes up with a plan or a specimen that reflects principles of selection and principles of entry-level treatment. Usually, the dictionary […]

Welcome to the first spotlight of the Lilly Library’s Mechanical Puzzle blog series, written by Andrew Rhoda, the Lilly Library’s Curator of Puzzles! In the first post in this series, I explained what mechanical puzzles are, and I introduced the categorization system that Jerry Slocum developed for his collection. In this post, I want to […]

Rare Books Cataloger Lindsay Weaver gives us a glimpse into the lives of everyday folk of the American frontier– through an 1830s letter from the collections of the Lilly Library! In the early days of 1839, a nineteen-year-old Joseph Palmer Smith in Conneaut, Ohio, wrote on behalf of his immediate family to his oldest sister, […]

Jeri Taylor, scriptwriter and producer of many popular television shows, including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager passed away on October 24, 2024 at the age of 86. Taylor was born in Bloomington, Indiana, graduated from IU with a Bachelor’s Degree in English in 1959, and donated her archive to the Lilly […]

Reference assistant Amber Bowes highlights a lesser-known work of Charles Dickens in this exciting first installation of a two-part blog post! Charles Dickens is remembered by most of the world as a great novelist and a key figure in Victorian England at its height and generally thought of as a nearly mythic representative of Englishness and […]

Having recently written posts about books of one sort or another, I had in mind writing about word games in the Kripke Collection, but they weren’t on the table where I’d first seen them. A colleague pointed out the boxes now holding the games, but as I took in the boxes stacked behind them, I […]

I pulled out what looked ugly but turned out to be a gem — what sort of gem, I admit I don’t know, but that element of surprise, even confusion, is what unpacking the Kripke Collection is all about. It’s a small book with a shabby paper cover, stained and rubbed. Was it forgotten or […]