Blog topic: Rare books

On Friday, October 25th, 2019, there will be an Open House featuring newly-acquired manuscripts and rare books in the Barchas Room of the Special Collections Department of Green Library from 11:00am-2:00pm.

In May, 2019, three colleagues launched an exhibit to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death by celebrating the books and ideas that shaped his world. Leonardo's Library: The World of a Renaissance Reader will be on display through mid-October in the Green Library Bing Wing. The three colleagues, Prof. Paula Findlen, John Mustain (Emeritus Curator of Rare Books), and Elizabeth Fischbach (exhibits designer and manager for Stanford Libraries Special Collections), brought a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and experience to a real blockbuster demonstration of what can be accomplished when Stanford faculty, libraries, and a team of exceptional students come together to tell a story with our collections. We're happy to announce a new online exhibit, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/leonardo, to parallel and augment the physical experience and preserve a memory of this event for posterity.

In 1975, Susan Lenkey (Senior Rare Book Librarian, 1960-1976) produced a catalog describing Stanford's collection of books from the earliest years of printing, entitled Stanford Incunabula 1975. As the title suggests, her work provides a snapshot of what she considered to be a dynamic and growing collection of rare books. The list of 131 titles (which included books held at the Lane Medical Library) in Dr. Lenkey's catalog has almost doubled in the last 44 years.