Collins Unbound

Do you ever wonder who it is that’s keeping you up at night, chirping to their little heart’s content outside your window? Could it be a pinewood finch? How about a barn swallow? Well, birds come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and we sure have our fair share of variety here at Puget Sound! It’s a little hard to swallow, so if curiosity gets the best of you, I wrencommend you come and check out the Archives & Special Collections’ over-sized book collection. The Birds of North America, published in 1888 (coincidence?), includes a nest-full of eggcellent information regarding just about any bird you’ll encounter in the Continental U.S. Additionally, “one hundred and nineteen artistic colored plates representing the different species and varieties” are contained within the gold-gilt pages, dovely for any aspiring ornithologist or talonted bird-watcher. So sparrow moment to come and see it! You won’t egret it!

By Monica Patterson

When Leonardo da Vinci is brought up, many think of his art: the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper just to name a few. However, I have discovered that da Vinci was more than just a man of art but also a man of thought, his paintings merely documentations of his findings.

Here is a quote from da Vinci I found in the book Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Drawings and Paintings by Frank Zöllner in the Archives & Special Collections.

Unable to resist my eager desire and wanting to see the great [wealth] of the various and strange shapes made by formative nature, and having wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern, in front of which I stood some time, astonished and unaware of such a thing. Bending my head back into an arch I rested my left hand on my knee and held my right hand over my down-cast and contracted eyebrows; often bending forth one way and then the other, to see whether I could discover anything inside, and this being forbidden by the deep darkness within, and after having remained there for some time, two contrary emotions arose in me – fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things within it…

In a very poetic way, Leonardo da Vinci paints a colorful image of the desire for knowledge and how it is both frightening and wonderful at the same time.

Stop by and take a look Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 1:00-3:00 p.m. in the Archives & Special Collections on the second floor of the Library.

By Sierra Scott

Last year I stumbled across Bibliodeath by Andrei Codrescu. The title is tantalizing–the death of books? Isn’t that a bit of a hot topic for libraries, especially with the rise of digitization (it is, but to me it’s the duty of libraries to unbiasedly collect information about all subjects, even the controversial ones)?

This particular book in our special collections falls into the classification of Z: books, writing, libraries, and bibliography. While it falls alongside publication such as the New Colophon (a book collector’s quarterly) and other codices, this book holds the status of an autobiography hiding within an archival exploration. It studies the boundaries and relationships between printed word and digital word through metaphor and anecdote.

An Amazon review touted that “it may at times make your brain hurt, like a math problem”, and I find this to be an accurate description. As an exploration of archives and Codrescu’s own life, the writing and ideas are simply too elaborate to simply paraphrase, and a mere skimming of the book reveals little to me of its true motivations.

Though at first glance most of the personal stories remain in the footnotes, you quickly discover that the footnotes can get quite lengthy. One footnote referencing A Chekhov Novella extends for 5-6 full pages of the book, expanding out from the margins and crowding out the general text.

You might be wondering why such a book would be hiding in the Archives & Special Collections, and the simple answer is because it’s special. The actual reason is because it’s a signed prepublication edition.

If you want to make your brain hurt but also want to come out the other end of this novel with a new perspective on books and archives, come check it out any time on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday from 1-3 p.m. on the second floor of the library!

By Morgan Ford