Posts for the Topic books

Les oeuvres spirituelles de Monsieur de Bernieres Louvigni

Today's blog post features a rather interesting item that we've been including in displays for years.

Journal of a party of pleasure to Paris in the month of August, 1802

Sir John Dean Paul (1775-1852) was an English Neo-Classical artist, specializing in bucolic scenes and horses. He became the first Baronet of Rodborough in 1821.

Gas masks for military and civilian use

In 1854, William Brown, Ashley Hibbard and George Bourn met in Montreal to start Brown, Hubbard, Bourn & Co., the first manufacturer of Caoutchouc (Indian rubber) footwear in Canada. Several mergers and acquisitions later, they became the Dominion Rubber Company in 1910, and in 1912 built the Dominion Tire factory in Berlin (now Kitchener) to meet the new demand for automobile tires.

Kitchener-Waterloo Survey 1944

In 1943, with the Second World War raging, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce began (rather optimistically) to plan for the coming peace, and they invited the Waterloo and Kitchener Boards of Trade to participate in an experimental fact-finding survey of Waterloo County (now Waterloo Region), to determine "economic facts about the past and present and the expectations of the future in their district".1

Alexander McNeill

Special Collections & Archives is currently under way with a bold new plan to barcode all of our materials (as the main library did in 1977). This project will ultimately give us greater control over our holdings both in terms of space available for new collections and also in terms of allowing us to better track the use of our collections.

While this is exciting enough on its own, co-op student Eva Lau discovered some material in an archival box that had been uncatalogued.

The mandibles of Sinanthropus pekinensis (Peking Man)

In 1923, the first specimen (a molar) of a new human ancestor was found in Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, China. Many more fossils were found in the area, and Canadian paleontologist Davidson Black named this new ancestor Sinanthropus pekinensis, "Peking Man" (after the city of Beijing, spelled Peking before the Pinyin romanization system was adopted. The city was also known as Beiping or Peiping from 1928 to 1949). Today Sinanthropus is considered to be an example of Homo erectus.

Walter Crane

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was an English artist and book illustrator, one of the most influential and prolific children's book creators of his generation. He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement, and produced a wide variety of materials, including a number of iconic images for the  Socialist League.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

150 years ago this year Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Dodgson) published “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Having originally told the story to Alice Liddell and her sisters Lorina and Edith on a boat trip up the Isis, Carroll later wrote it down for Alice. Initially titled “Alice’s Adventures Underground,” the book has never been out of print since 1865 and is cherished as a beloved children’s story.

Welcome to the Special Collections & Archives blog!

Life's Garden, by Beatrice Post Candler

Astute readers will already know that Special Collections & Archives has been posting interesting images from the archives every week for #tbt (or sometimes #FlashbackFriday, if we forget) on the Library's Instagram page.

As we go about our work, we frequently come across interesting items that we would like to share with the community, but that are not so well suited to Instagram. And so we have created this blog!

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