Tag: Rare Books

Season of the Witch

With Halloween approaching, I went searching for the spookiest book I could find in the DeGolyer stacks.  We’ve got items on vampires, ghosts, and creatures that go bump in the night, and one work that claims to offer “full and plain evidence concerning witches.” Printed in 1681, Saducismus triumphatus, or, full and plain evidence concerning…Continue Reading Season of the Witch

Maximum Marginalia

One of my favorite parts of working in a Special Collections library is finding books featuring marginalia—the notes and drawings that readers leave in the margins of books they’re reading.  I’ve come across pristine handwriting and illegible scribbles, thoughtful commentary and brief notes, and drawings that ran the gamut from cute to comical to crude….Continue Reading Maximum Marginalia

Notes in the Margins

Do you write in your books?  You’re not alone–in our copy of Francis Bacon’s The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (1622), one reader went beyond underlining key points or scribbling notes in margins, and created an index where there was none. Francis Bacon wrote The Historie of the Raigne of King…Continue Reading Notes in the Margins