Enjoyed this sign while touring the Michigan State University Library backrooms. 🪄📚

Audited one of my favourite drawers today. As far as I can tell there was an entire generation of past mollusc curators who communicated entirely by means of passive-aggressive drawer notes to each other

Curious about the status of early gay organizing in national library associations? I've uploaded "Gays In Library Land" written in 1990 by library LEGEND Barbara Gittings about the early days (1970s) of ALA's Gay and Lesbian Task Force. It's a good read. archive.org/details/gays...

I got stitches in my finger for a clumsy kitchen injury and am debating whether to become the one-gloved rare book librarian, scorned by all, or simply not touch any books for 10-12 days

Who Digitized your Sources? Exploitative Prison Labour and the Hidden Costs of Online Archives activehistory.ca/blog/2026/04...

Okay, what were the practices around Thomas Merton signing books at the Abbey of Gethsemani and how many did Fr. M. Marion send out with inscriptions like this (and who were Jim and Tom)

Finder’s fee: seasonal fruit. Early modern provenance mark on the flyleaf in a 16th-century illuminated manuscript: ‘This book belongs to Catrina Leoners. Whoever finds it should return it to her for an apple or a pear…’ #rarebooks #earlymodern #bookhistory 💙📚📜

The fragment I was actually looking for yesterday and found today! We have two of them. Philip Duschnes, you old so and so...

This week in surprise fragments while looking for something else!

Normal Tuesday. Got a few meetings today but not too many. President's threatening to genocide millions of people and there are folks flying around the moon in the fucking sky. Gotta take out the garbage later

I need a Catholic friend to order one of these (you CAN order one of these, with the current pope on it! from the Vatican on the internet!) and tell me if it's on real parchment now, because the library's blessing from 1952 was not real parchment www.elemosineria.va/papal-blessi...

Oh no

That's what I'm trying to do, book

The 2026 RBMS Conference Program Planning Committee is issuing a second call for proposals for virtual and short-form content, due March 6. Find more info and submit a proposal on the conference website! buff.ly/3cuaLh0

Ok, here’s a proof of the 2nd layer, which adapts a broadside published in April of 1854 to warn Black residents of Boston about slave-catchers in the city, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act www.nps.gov/articles/000...

Initial 'L'(e) at the beginning of Bk 12 in which trees and their products are discussed. Bodleian Library Arch. G b.6; Historia naturale di Caio Plinio Secondo, tradocta di lingua latina per Christophoro Landino; 1476 CE; Venice; f.148v @bodleian.ox.ac.uk

I forget how bad the yellow lighting in this special collections storage area truly is until I photograph something in it 😬 cc @colleenlovesbks.bsky.social & @transbookhistory.bsky.social

My bible's pronouns are Great He/Great Him

I think a lot of us get hope wrong. Hope, I do not believe, is an emotion. In fact, hope makes space for lots of emotions to exist alongside it. You can DO hope scared, angry, sad etc... Hope doesn't find us. We make hope through action and struggle. It's a practice of living and is re-made daily.

I have talked about books upside down for an audience but not like this and not with volvelles 😬😬😬

I missed the Ides of December this year but I think Amerbach would agree December 23 has "dum pia virgo parit" vibes too

#MuppetBibliography (also what great examples of personal and historical value being messy and interconnected to financial value! and in such things as the $10k Muppet Christmas Carol Rizzo bucket with puppeteering hole)

The deadline for submitting workshop, panel, or poster proposals for #RBMS26 is December 12, 2025. 📜📚 Need another panelist? There is a spreadsheet for organizing panels here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I hate gay Halloween what do you mean you’re an uncataloged book someone tried to rebind with duct tape

This guy has the 1855 Whitman frontispiece of books about the Virgin Mary by Presbyterian-Episcopal-Catholic converts and priests (posthumous).

everything is terrible apart from the University of Texas Austin students who, protesting a committee set up to review the humanities curriculum, have produced this graphic arranging committee members by length of hair www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

You can't find time to become an expert? We'll have a lunch and learn!

If you can afford it, a *monetary* donation (it goes a lot farther!) to your local food bank would be a most excellent thing to do right now.

Jamet Mettayer, d. 1605, you would've loved Minecraft

The guy who tells cats to yell at 5 am

"PEN America identified 2,520 book ban cases... out of those, only 3% of the bans were triggered by a law requiring the removal of a book—the rest, 97%—came from bans caused by the fear that districts had of being out of compliance" #DontComplyInAdvance www.wordsandmoney.com/pen-america-...

Caught covid for the first time 5 years in, shortly before annual shot. and I gotta say naming variants after clouds is underwhelming at best and 100% offensive to clouds

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, September 19, 1984, Former U. S. President Gerald Ford was stuck in an elevator in the Van Pelt Library at UPenn. Was there a medieval manuscript stuck in the elevator with him? Probably not, but we can dream. #medievalsky

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... I don’t have words

Booklist for the 10th century library at Bobbio. Among the various categories: "Books We Have But Can't Find" (de libris quos non reperimus sed habemus)

Personal announcement: I've been appointed Assistant Director of the Marian Library and Special Collections here at UD (Dayton, not Delaware) which means among other things that I get to figure out things like this copy of Anatomy of Melancholy with a detached front board and uh, this bookplate?

It's always like this with archives, i have so many beefs with dead people

Tom Lehrer outlived Kissinger, and I think that is evidence that there are at least some good forces in the universe. “I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity. I’m for it.” -from the intro to “Smut”

Finally got around to doing a first draft of an infographic/drawing on the basics of handling rare books :)

This is #BookHistory too. Of a heartbreaking kind. Tho' I imagine they haven't succeeded in accessing ICE detention facilities, this seems a good time to remind people to support the Prison Book Program (prisonbookprogram.org), which does amazing work compensating for the cruelties Öztürk describes

Early (earliest extant?) mention of library collections at what became MPOW, 1876: "Useless books are to be removed from the Brothers' Library and put in an old box to be stored away somewhere."

Streaming It's Not You, It's a Trend: Managing Social Media in Archives and Special Collections since 2020 at #rbms25 and that title... oof, spot on.Grateful for survey work, panelists willing to share challenges in case studies and to @librarycolleen.bsky.social!

The pope posted this this morning and I’m thinking a lot about it

The story of LGBT rights is a story of advances followed by setbacks followed by media with no skin in the game saying, "It's because you were too loud/asked for too much/moved too fast/got too big for your britches/didn't make your case." That never changes--but happily it's never the last word.

I am ❤️

Honestly would use this with 9 am library visit tomorrow as a bridge between breakfast, hand washing, and old book touching. Books are like eggs! Think about it

I saw this sign in an antique shop yesterday and I can’t stop thinking about it. Books are like eggs

New (to me) library lore: the first out-of-scope donation in 1943, "the first in a long series of books which have been donated to the library by those who insist on judging a book by its cover" 🙃