Hooke's Micrographia makes multiple appearances

The copy in Special Collections of Robert Hooke's influential Micrographia: Or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses [that is, microscopes] (1665) has made multiple appearances of late.

This copy is part of the Daniel and Eleanor Albert Collection on optics and ophthalmology.

A view through the microscope in Micrographia of a cross-section of cork figures, for example, in the case on cells in our new exhibit “Parts and wholes,” alongside a volume of Ledermüller's Amusement microscopique of a century later. Look for more on that exhibit in a subsequent post.

Illustrations from the Albert copy appear as well in Meghan Doherty's prize-winning study, “Discovering the “true form:” Hooke’s Micrographia and the visual vocabulary of engraved portraits,” in Notes and records of the Royal Society, 66:3 (September 2012), 211-234. Shown here: the fly eye, as viewed through Hooke's microscope,

and the “stinging points of Nettles.”

We add our congratulations to Doherty on her Notes and records prize. She also served as guest exhibit curator for “Under the Medicean stars: Medici patronage of science and natural history, 1537-1737” in Special Collections in 2007.

Special Collections is also fortunate to hold, as part of the Thordarson Collection, a copy of the Micrographia with a title page that reads “Printed for John Martyn...” with a publication date of 1667.

This is probably the same edition as the Allestry printing but for the new title page. The page facing the title page in the Thordarson copy reads “Ordered, That the Book ... Be Printed by John Martyn, and James Allestry, Printers to the said [Royal] Society. Novem. 23. 1664.”

The University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center has produced a digital version of the Thordarson copy.

Holiday cookery from the Peter Pauper Press

One of the mainstays of the Peter Pauper Press was the slim cookbook, attractively designed, and usually running to 60-some pages. From the extensive Special Collections holdings of the Peter Pauper Press, we feature here examples of holiday cookbooks from the 1950s: Holiday party casseroles (1956), Holiday cookies (1954), and Holiday party desserts (1956). Titles in this collection are gifts to the Library from steadfast friends James and Nancy Dast.

The volume entitled Holiday cookies, compiled by Edna Beilenson and drawn by Vee Guthrie (1954), featured cheery “Greetings!”:

     Mix your batter gaily,
     Choose a colored bowl;
     Make a cheerful clatter,
     Whistle as you roll!

     The cookies will be better,
     The afternoon less long,
     If you do your baking
     To a tuneful song!

These volumes are but three in our collection of some 400 works published by the Peter Pauper Press. In 1928 the Peter Pauper Press began issuing works of prose and poetry — often in small format and always carefully designed — at “prices even a pauper could afford.” We exhibited many of them in 2011, in an exhibit entitled “Peter Pauper Press: Highlighting the gifts of James and Nancy Dast.” For more information about the collection, see “Peter Pauper Press Collection: Gift of James and Nancy Dast,” page 27, and  Beth Kubly's article, “The Peter Pauper Press,” pages 21-25, both in The Friends of the Libraries Magazine (2011).

Edna Beilenson, wife of  Press founder Peter Beilenson, was responsible for compiling and/or producing numerous cookbooks issued by the Press. Our collection includes such seasonal favorites as The holiday cook book (1950), Holiday goodies (1952), Holiday punches, party bowls, and soft drinks (1953), Holiday candies (1954), The Merrie Christmas cook book (1955), and Merrie Christmas drink book (1955).

Holiday greetings from all of us in the Department of Special Collections!

Geographies

For this year’s annual meeting of the History of Science Society, Meridith Beck Sayre and Nicolas Jacobson, graduate students in history of science here at UW-Madison, organized a session entitled "Spiritual Geographies." In it they presented a joint paper, “A Place Where No Men Dwell, Nor Souls Pass Away: Defining Spiritual Landscapes in Giambattista Riccioli’s Selenography." They made use of our copy of Riccioli's Astronomia reformata (Bologna, 1665), 

paying particular attention to Riccioli's moon map, both in its full extent, occupying two facing pages, 

and in such details as the position of the names of Riccioli and his Jesuit colleague Grimaldi (near the left edge of this image) 

Riccioli's book figured in the exhibit "Jesuits and the Construction of Knowledge, 1540-1773," which Beck Sayre co-curated in 2011 along with Florence Hsia, James Lattis, and Robin Rider. Beck Sayre has also selected titles for a larger digital humanities project on early modern Jesuit iconography pertaining to scholarship and travel. A prototype of that image database is available through the UW Digital Collections.

For his part, while a student in Rider's history of science course in 2009, Jacobson attended to another sort of geography. His exhibit case for the class-curated exhibit “Science Circa 1859: On the Eve of Darwin's Origin of Species,” focused on the relationship of taxonomy and classification to philology, including geographical considerations in Josiah Clark Nott's Types of mankind (Philadelphia, 1854) and Friedrich Max Mueller's The languages of the seat of war in the East, 2nd ed. (London, 1855).  More about that course and exhibit: http://www.news.wisc.edu/17388.