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  • A Book Unique in Several Dimensions
    Blog 

    A Book Unique in Several Dimensions

    Madeline Kripke’s collection includes many rare books, some of them classically rare — old books of status for which collectors compete at auction — and some of the ephemera made…
    December 20th, 2023
  • Bawdy Songs and Sentimental Bookplates
    Blog 

    Bawdy Songs and Sentimental Bookplates

    We hoard our slang in dictionaries, but lexicographers, like the dragons of lore, steal their gems from others. In the nineteenth-century, people interested in such uncut words…
    December 13th, 2023
  • A person with a brown mustache and beard wears a black button-up shirt and black suit jacket. Two red devil characters are shown sitting on the shoulders.  Words below read Ricky Ja and his 52 assistants
    News

    The remarkable mind of magician Ricky Jay

    The Lilly Library invites ne’er-do-wells, magicians, historians, and all who are curious to explore the life, research, and remarkable mind of scholar, actor, and magician Ricky Jay (1946-2018).
    December 6th, 2023
  • Blog 

    Just Say the Word

    If you supply schools with dictionaries and hope that every home with children will have a children’s dictionary handy, you must convince the children in question to use those…
    October 19th, 2023
  • Blog 

    What Is Gavelkind?

    Few of us, not even lexicographers, recall William Somner (1606–1669), but he figures importantly in the history of English dictionaries...
    October 12th, 2023
  • Blog 

    A Map for the Body

    By Travis Whaley. This summer, the Lilly Library acquired a rare copy of Bernhard Schmid’s Einer neuen kunstlichen Tabulatur auff Orgel und Instrument, published in 1577 in…
    October 6th, 2023
  • Blog 

    Calling out censorship

    Madeline Kripke favored profanity and obscenity and collected many works published during the Great Censorship, when the Comstock Act of ... Calling out censorship
    October 5th, 2023
  • Blog 

    Processing Capra Press

    By Julia Parkinson Who creates a book? Is it the author, who writes the story that fills a book’s pages? ... Processing Capra Press
    September 11th, 2023
  • Blog 

    A Chinful of Slang

    You Chirped a Chinful! Including Private Bill’s Dictionary of Service Men’s Chin Chatter [1943] is a bit of World War ... A Chinful of Slang
    August 17th, 2023