By Stephanie Geller, UCLA MLIS student, and Clark Technical Services Intern Every library should audit its collections regularly, particularly areas that are not used as frequently as others. That was the impetus for a recent project to go through, reorganize, and bring to light some of the over-sized items hidden away in flat storage map…
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Seventeenth-Century Printmaking: Mezzotint
Published: November 14, 2018by Avianna Wooten, UCLA History major and Clark Library Public Services Assistant What is Mezzotint? The term itself hints at its meaning; in Italian mezza translates into “half’ and tinta into “tone”. Mezzotint is a form of printmaking that produces halftones or a subtle shading of darkness within prints. The Labor: Transforming Darkness into light…
Read MoreNOURISH, All Our Relations: A Recent Acquisition
Published: May 23, 2018by Avianna Wooten, UCLA History Major and Student Staff Member at the Clark The Clark has recently added Diane Jacobs’s NOURISH, All our Relations to its Fine Press Collection. Nourish is an unbound artist book comprising eight twice-folded folios, built-in sculptures, and a collapsible bamboo box for housing. The book was created through a meticulous…
Read MoreClark Library Coloring Book for #ColorOurCollections
Published: February 5, 2018It’s time for #ColorOurCollections again! For the third year in a row, the New York Academy of Medicine Library has hosted the “Color Our Collections” event, where special collections libraries create coloring books for patrons to enjoy. Here’s a brief description from NYAM’s website: “From February 5-9, 2018, libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions around…
Read MoreGifting Paradise Lost
Published: July 24, 2017For John Milton, “Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them” (Areopagitica, 1644). This “potencie” often manifests itself in the traces of a book’s social life: in marginalia, inscriptions, doodles, markings, and the like. These are signs of books’ use and abuse by readers and owners, the evidence…
Read MoreA New Fund of Amusement: Annotating 18th-Century Word Games
Published: March 25, 2015Books of jokes and riddles have a long history. But it’s not too common to find annotated riddle books, with answers added in manuscript by historical readers. The Clark owns one such item, an exceedingly rare copy of a late-eighteenth-century Canterbury riddle book filled with “aenigmas, aenigmatical entertainments,” “one hundred rebuses,” “one hundred and twenty…
Read MoreWoodcuts (and Engravings) Captioned by Early Readers
Published: October 15, 2014by Philip S. Palmer, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clark Library Some of you may be familiar with Twitter’s “Woodcut Wednesday,” when users share xylographic images from early modern European books, typically coupled with humorous captions and commentary. Woodcut-captioning, it turns out, has a long history. Illustrations in three books from the Clark’s early printed…
Read More"To make a Great deale of Ink Quickly and wth a Little Cost": Manuscript Recipes in a Portable Art Book
Published: August 19, 2014One of the Clark’s most fascinating annotated books is The excellency of the pen and pencil (1668), a portable drawing manual containing hundreds of manuscript recipes for inks, colors, medicines, and poisons, including the recipe for ink listed in the blog title. The text was “collected,” as the title page states, “from the writings of…
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