To you, my children, These lovely flowers I give. Prune ye my vines and fig trees, With care my flowers tend, But keep the pathway open Your home is at the end. from "God's Garden" -- Robert Frost The first Mesopotamian writings on clay tablets included information about plants. Ancient pharmacopoeias recorded...

“We prefer crude vigor to polished banality.” from Anvil, Jack Conroy, 1933 In recognition of Banned Books Week, Rare Books invites you to view its most recent virtual lecture, "Radical!" - an accompaniment to our latest digital exhibition. from Songs of the Workers; On the Road, In the Jungles, and...

from The Book and the Great Community, J. Willard Marriott Library, 1994 On May 17, 1968, Wallace Stegner delivered a dedicatory address to the new Marriott Library, in which he said: "To erect a great library in the year 1968 is an act of stubborn and sassy...

The covers of a book enclose worlds constructed of text and image. To open a book is to expose the intimate details of story, experience and idea. The Book Arts Program at the J. Willard Marriott Library champions wide-ranging explorations of the book. A fully...

The literature of politics is multifaceted, filled with various genres that range from poetry to pamphlets, and novels to newscasts. Today, new methods of disseminating literature allow voices from all walks of life to be heard on major digital platforms. However, a century ago, these...

Have the feeling that you are in a tunnel and can't see the end? We do, too. For a view of tunnels more expressive than ours, visit our most recent digital exhibition, Tunnel Vision. Based on our 2018 physical exhibition, Tunnel Vision was the result of a...

SHHHHHH! is a digital exhibition based on a physical exhibition in the Special Collections Gallery on display between September 9, 2015 and November 1, 2015. The exhibition marked Banned Books Week. Rare Books presented books, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines that were banned, forbidden, censored, redacted, expurgated,...

De Humani Corporis Fabrica of Andrea Vesalius (1514-1564) was an exquisite piece of creativity that blended observation; organization of information, format, typography; and illustration into an integrated whole to accurately describe the human body. The intense collaboration between scientist, artist, and printer was unprecedented. Prior...