#libraries

Butter won’t churn? It’s a witch!

Witches tended to be the scapegoat for just about any problem in a person’s life. One common complaint attributed to a witch’s curse was being unable to churn your milk into butter. You could churn and churn, but the milk would never thicken. To fix this predicament, you first had to expel the witch from the churn by taking an old horseshoe and heating it to glowing hot in the fire. It was best if that horseshoe “had been worn on the left hind foot of a baldfaced horse.” You would then take the glowing hot horseshoe, drop it into your churn, and sure enough the butter would come forth.

“Witches in the Cream.” The Weekly Standard (Raleigh, NC). May 4, 1870. p 1.

“Witchcraft: The Intense Belief in it in Switzerland County Sixty Years Ago.” Fayetteville Weekly Observer (Fayetteville, NC). October 27, 1887. p 1.

Unos lectores continúan buscando libros entre las estanterías de una biblioteca londinense bombardeada en la Segunda Guerra Mundial (1940).

Main reading room of the Detroit Public Library (Michigan, 1921).

…but remember, it’s the snowflakes who are oversensitive and overreact to everything.

**(If any librarians/teachers/bookstore peeps etc want a free printed version of this poster please email Adrienne Kress at adriennekress @ gmail.com)**

Check out a poster I created for the fantastic Explorers series by @adriennekress! I’ve always wanted to create a library poster like this, and it was even more fun to do it featuring the characters I drew for the Explorers books. Thanks so much Adrienne for the wonderful opportunity!

Ever wondered just how much money your Library card saves you each year? We did the math and it just can’t be beat. Enjoy over a million streaming titles in multiple formats offered 24/7, and all of it FREE with your Library card!

scientificphilosopher:

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Hey it’s National Library Week!

Friday plans include a cold beverage? Meet the beer fridge of 1899.

It’s from a catalog of by L. H. Mace & Co. of New York, now in our @smithsonianlibraries. Early refrigerators used insulation (with an inch between two sets of walls) and circulation to move cool air from the ice chamber throughout the space.

Inside this refrigerator, there were places for kegs to rest and shelves in the lower part of the refrigerator could be removed, making it possible to chill two more kegs.

“It had the power of a thousand scorpions…” 

- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Sometimes books can kill.

Take this book, for example. Shadows from the Walls of Death is a 19th century collection of arsenic-laced wallpaper samples. Each of the striking specimens was colored with an arsenic-based pigment, and touching the pages with your bare hands could make you seriously ill, or worse.

Hopefully by now you’ve read our 2015 Tumblr post onShadowsor Atlas Obscura’s recent article on the poison book, but here’s some background in case you haven’t:

Copper arsenite was not an uncommon ingredient in paints and pigments throughout the 19th century, most often used to produce the vibrant greens known as Paris Green or Scheele’s Green. While people of the time knew that arsenic was dangerous if ingested, they saw little risk in using the poisonous element to color wallpaper – after all, who’s going around licking their walls?

But then in the 1870s, Robert Kedzie – a doctor, MSU chemistry professor, and public health advocate – showed that fine particles of this arsenical wallpaper could shed when touched, or worse: they could “dust off” into the air, causing people to fall ill and die by just existing in a house coated with the stuff.

Kedzie put together 100 books of the deadly wallpaper samples and sent them to libraries throughout Michigan, to educate the public about the potential dangers of this common household item. 

Only a handful of copies of this toxic book remain  – most were destroyed long ago due to their poison pages. Of the surviving volumes, MSU’s copy is believed to be the most extensive, or most complete – containing over 130 individual wallpaper samples.

Most of the wallpaper specimens feature the color green, but not all – the same arsenical dye that went into the infamous Paris Green or Scheele’s Green was often mixed to form other colors, and many of our samples boast beautiful deep blues and golden yellows.

Most of the images here have never been seen before. Some day it’s possible that we will digitize our copy of Shadows, as the National Library of Medicine has done with theirs, but that poses some significant challenges. 

In the meantime, every page in our copy has been painstakingly encapsulated in archival sleeves – meaning that patrons can safely view the book up close without fear of succumbing to arsenic poisoning. But if you can’t make it out to see the volume in person, I hope you will enjoy these new photos of this intriguingly beautiful book.

Beautiful, but deadly.

~Andrew

Peritextual collage: scratched-out bar code, printing and digitization statements, directions for use, author’s name.

From the back matter of Williams’s Letters: Letters Written in France in the Summer 1790 by Helen Maria Williams (1794). Original from the University of Michigan. Digitized November 15, 2005.

Tape repair.

From p.32-33 of The Tale of Old Mr. Crow by Arthur Scott Bailey (1917). Original from the University of Michigan. Digitized January 10, 2013.

Distorted map.

From the front matter of An Enquiry Into the Life and Writings of Homer by Thomas Blackwell (1757)  Original from the New York Public Library. Digitized September 26, 2007.