Now on View: “Eminent Miniatures”

If you come by Special Collections this summer, you are in for a bibliographical and visual feast! Our new exhibition, “Eminent Miniatures: from the McGehee Miniature Book Collection” features tiny books and huge photographs. Collector Caroline Brandt has spent most … Continue reading

William Styron’s “Confessions of Nat Turner” at 50

On October 9, 1967, William Styron’s novel from history, The Confessions of Nat Turner, was published to acclaim and controversy. Styron was raised in Newport News, Virginia, about a hundred miles from the site of the rebellion in Southampton County, … Continue reading

On View Now: “Jorge Luis Borges: Author, Editor, Promulgator”

We are pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition in the First Floor Gallery, curated by Nora Benedict, a student assistant in Special Collections. Nora is a PhD Candidate in Spanish-American Literature and Analytical Bibilography, and has recently … Continue reading

This Just In: A Tolkien Black Swan

This week, we feature a very unusual recent acquisition in a guest post by Special Collections curatorial assistant Elizabeth Ott, doctoral candidate in the U.Va. Department of English. In the world of Special Collections it may be said that some … Continue reading

Patron’s Choice: Finding Buried Treasure in Edward Le Roy Rice’s “Monarchs of Minstrelsy”

This week we are pleased to feature a guest post by Jessica Showalter. Showalter was a Lillian Gary Taylor Fellow at the Harrison Institute in 2013. She is a doctoral candidate in the Literature & Criticism program at Indiana University … Continue reading

Class Notes: 250 Years of Fairy Tales in Print

Professor Mark Ilsemann recently brought his class, German 3590: Special Topics–Fairy Tales, to Special Collections to see materials related to the European fairy-tale tradition. He asked if we could “give my students an idea about early collections of tales and … Continue reading

This Just In: Scarlet Letters from the Backlog

Every Special Collections library has a number of mysterious boxes that for some reason or another have never been dealt with–gifts with mysterious provenances, duplicate copies, a collection that someone was working on but for some reason never finished, and … Continue reading

Curating Yoko Ono

Anyone who has ever curated or installed an exhibition of books and manuscripts knows that these materials are inherently impossible to exhibit effectively. While paintings and sculpture are created with the intention of exhibition, most of the artifacts we hold … Continue reading