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Welcome to the seventh spotlight of the Lilly Library’s Mechanical Puzzle blog series, written by Andrew Rhoda, the Lilly Library’s Curator of Puzzles! Puzzle vessels are objects where the solver drinks from, pours from, or pours into the vessel without spilling or otherwise losing the contents of the container. As Puzzles Old and New: How to Make and […]

This April 1, turn disbelief into discovery as the Lilly Library announces the acquisition of David Ben's very real collection of extraordinary materials.

Welcome to the second installment of a series of blogs revolving around the literature, religion, and history of captivity narratives, authored by religious collections assistant Colby Townsend! Trigger warning: Historical usage of the word “savage” in reference to Native American peoples, as well as generalized mentions of child murder. Table of Contents Indian Captivity Narratives, Cont.  In […]

Hieroglyphs, pillars with eyes, hearts on scales…Egyptian mythology is brimming with religious imagery. Curatorial assistant Jake Gentry gives a brief overview of some of these symbols, in this tomb-multuous blog! The polytheistic religion of ancient Egypt has long fascinated both professional Egyptologists and the history-loving hobbyist, even after the 2,000 years since ancient Egypt’s fall […]

Conservation assistant Aveyah Craver gives us some tips and tricks on traditional bookbinding in this exciting conservation-centric blog! I recently made an enclosure for a set of three, blank, Japanese accounting ledgers. The books were bound in a style that I had never seen before, and I took some time to inspect how it had been done. The construction […]

Welcome to the first installment of a series of blogs revolving around the literature, religion, and history of captivity narratives, authored by religious collections assistant Colby Townsend! Table of Contents Introduction Numerous books and articles have been written about captivity narratives over the last several decades because of the rich amount of information that can […]

Curatorial Assistant and Social Media Manager Jake Gentry spotlights personal archives with the multigenerational album of Harriet Thayer and her daughter Henrietta Malvina. Archival science may not seem like it on the surface at times, but it is incredibly personal. The papers, books, and realia preserved in archives represent or are extensions of people, and […]

Welcome to the sixth spotlight of the Lilly Library’s Mechanical Puzzle blog series, written by Andrew Rhoda, the Lilly Library’s Curator of Puzzles! Dexterity puzzles feature manual dexterity as the challenge, with the dexterity applied to moving the pieces of the puzzle using gravity, or something similar, to get to the solution. Most of the puzzles in this article will have you catch […]

Curatorial assistant Jake Gentry delves into the dark history of witch-hunting with some infamous books from the Lilly Library’s collections! Trigger Warning: Contains an image depicting execution(s) by hanging. Picture this: Salem, Massachusetts, a little over three hundred years ago. You, a young Puritan given a bizarre moniker like Humiliation or Abstinence, are trailing behind […]