Home Cookbook (Chicago, 1877). Image courtesy of MSU Special Collections. We are continuing our quest to chronicle historic campus cuisine, so I hope you are starving for more information. I have recently been exploring cookbooks from the latter half of the nineteenth century to get a feel for the kinds of recipes and dishes that …
Our Comic Art Collection is home to many items that aren’t in the traditional book format. This item – a plastic egg containing an action figure and tiny comic – is a great example. In order to be shelved, it needed a box. Linsey, our newest employee, made this awesome box. We decided to have …
Cups, cups, and more cups to wash! Deionized water and a soft sponge was all that was needed for most items. In a few cases, a diluted dish detergent was used. Although kind of gross, dried soda from the early 1970′s is pretty easy to clean. By ensuring that all of the old soda …
Posted by Nicole Raslich on March 1, 2016 under CAPBlog | Be the First to Comment Vernor’s Bottle Found in Peoples Park In light of the Venor’s sesquicentennial (150th anniversary), we here at CAP decided to highlight one of our finds from the People’s Park excavations in February of 2011. We found an intact Vernor’s …
Vellum is a hygroscopic material, which means that it has the ability to attract and hold water molecules from the surrounding environment. Vellum will expand in humid conditions, and contract in dry conditions. Even normal fluctuations in temperature a humidity can cause vellum bindings to warp. Over time, this book became badly warped. At it’s …
Last week I had the privilege of teaching an upper-level French class here at MSU all about special collections, rare books, and rare book provenance. It was a blast! The students got a chance to work with some very old books (the earliest was printed in 1551 and the latest in 1845), transcribing and translating …
“In a good book the best is between the lines.” – Swedish proverb Remember this quote we left you with last time? Ostensibly the saying is a Swedish proverb (I’m skeptical), but whatever the origin, it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately. While I’m sure the intent behind the proverb is to extol …