Recent Posts
Our Favorite Things #1: A Young Mathematician’s Notebook
The illustrations in this volume are amazing. One of my favorite things about history is seeing how similar humans have always been despite how much the world has changed, and who hasn’t doodled on their math homework before? Whether I’m poring over the depictions of various creatures or trying to figure out exactly what math is going on, every page of this manuscript piques my interest.
Junius Spencer Morgan, Virgil, and “The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton”
By Will Noel Junius Spencer Morgan gave a phenomenal collection of materials to the Princeton University Library, so last year I decided to create a small online exhibition on items from that collection that we have digitized already. With very many thanks to Steve Ferguson […]
A 15th-Century Alphabet
It’s a funny alphabet. In the first place, it doesn’t begin with an A, but with an illuminated cross: You clearly cross yourself before you begin the alphabet. So then you begin the alphabet, but with a stutter: you have two consecutive a’s.
1960s Homophile Culture and Politics in Drum: Sex in Perspective
The homophile magazines available within Mudd Library’s American Civil Liberties Union Records and Arthur C. Warner Papers are rich in their insight into the multiple methods of activism taken up by homophile organizations. One such approach, as described in the magazine Drum: Sex in Perspective in 1966, positioned “the homosexual’s chief problem…as an inability and reluctance to hold his head high as a homosexual.”
Max Beerbohm’s Caricature of Aubrey Beardsley
Born only three days apart in August 1872, Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm were introduced to one another by the artist William Rothenstein and soon formed a close friendship. Beardsley was of course the most brilliant, and also provocative, illustrator of the 1890s, famous for his illustrations to Oscar Wilde’s Salome, London’s Yellow Book quarterly, and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.