Rare Books and Haggis: Burns Night in Tallahassee

As previous posts have shown, the work of Special Collections & Archives staff is not confined to the walls of the library. We love being able to get out into the community, so Associate Dean of Special Collections Katie McCormick and I jumped at the chance to attend the Burns’ Supper hosted by the St. Andrew

A Book About All the Things

The Liber de proprietatibus rerum Bartholomei angelici (On the Properties of Things) is a medieval encyclopedia that was written by the 13th century Franciscan scholar Bartholomeus Anglicus, who sought to gather the rapidly expanding corpus of knowledge of the Late Middle Ages into a single volume. As Bartholomeus himself says in the epilogue to De proprietatibus rerum, he wrote

Out of the Stacks and Into the Classroom

This semester, the Special Collections & Archives Graduate Assistants are delving into the world of rare books! The Special Collections & Archives at Florida State University has an impressive collection of rare books–from Sumerian cuneiform tablets (created in approximately 2000 BCE) to the Grove Press Collection (published in the 20th century) and almost everything in between.  Some areas of particular

Gloria Jahoda

Gloria Jahoda, an author and Florida historian, was born on October 6, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois. She earned a B.A. in English in 1948 and an M.A. in Anthropology in 1950, both from Northwestern University. She retired in 1957 to write full time after teaching anthropology at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.  In 1963,

Zora and Marjorie: Literary Legends and Friends

Zora Neale Hurston moved to St. Augustine at the beginning of World War II for a quiet place to write. While in St. Augustine, she taught part-time at the local black college, Florida Normal. She did not get along well with the administrators of the college after she became involved in a dispute between serviceman

The Florida Highwaymen

I love the paintings of The Highwaymen artists.   They are colorful, show movement, and depict images of “Old Florida” with palms, water, birds, boats, and sunsets.  The paintings are mostly landscapes although I have seen a few with people in them. According to Gary Monroe in The Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American Landscape Painters, “The Highwaymen didn’t

Love is a wild wonder

“Love is a wild wonder And stars that sing, Rocks that burst asunder And mountains that take wing.” – – H A P P Y   B I R T H D A Y   L A N G S T O N   H U G H E S – –

Milne’s sixth hour

 Allen Alexander Milne’s When We Were Very Young, a book of poetry published in 1924 and dedicated to Mr. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin Milne, who, according to Mr. Milne, preferred to call himself Billy Moon, contains at its end two pages of evensong called “Vespers.” Whether to the hour of sunset, to the moon, or

Mary Oliver’s No Voyage and Other Poems

Mary Oliver’s first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when Ms. Oliver was 28. In a month from tomorrow, a new collection of poems will be released by her publisher under the title, A Thousand Mornings. In an almost fifty-year span of publishing Ms. Oliver’s work has remained true

Happy Birthday, Emily Bronte

On July 30, 1818 Emily Bronte was born in Thornton, Bradford, West Yorkshire, England.  Although best known for her novel, Wuthering Heights, Miss Bronte was also an artist.   Included in The Life and Eager Death of Emily Bronte: a Biography (1936), by Virginia Moore, which we have in our Shaw Collection, are three of her