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Mortimer Rare Book Room Exhibitions
Exhibitions in the Library
Exhibitions of manuscripts, rare books, and contemporary book arts are shown in three places in Neilson Library: in the Morgan Gallery on the main floor, in the Book Arts Gallery on the third floor, and in the Mortimer Rare Book Room vestibule.
Spring 2013
| 'Cultivating the nobler part of her nature': Books for Women and Girls in Early America | |
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Mortimer Rare Book Room Foyer Four seniors in the Book Studies Concentration (the first students who will graduate with this distinction on their transcripts) have curated and installed a delightful exhibition outside of the rare book room. 'Cultivating the nobler part of her nature': Books for Women and Girls in Early America is the result of their Book Studies Capstone Seminar in fall 2012. The exhibition showcases the sorts of books read by the fairer sex: cookbooks, books on bicycling (proper for women? what to wear?), biographies of women, health and beauty tips, travel accounts, and more. All of these items are from the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. |
 Cover of My Lady Laughter by Dwight Tilton (Boston, 1904) |
| A Place of Reading: Three Centuries of Reading in America | |
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Book Arts Gallery, Neilson Level 3 This exhibition illuminates the rich history of reading in America that showcases—through books, broadsides, woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, watercolors, etc.—the places and events that particularly prompted the act of reading. By exhibiting these material and visual objects of the past, and in exploring the geography of reading, we hope to raise new questions—and answers—about readers and reading in America. A Place of Reading is a collaboration between the Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Room and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society , which has loaned most of the items on display. Main themes of the exhibition include: the Colonial Home; Revolutionary Taverns; North/South/East/West: Newspapers, Periodicals, and the Popular Press; and Reading at the Front: The Civil War. In addition, a section called “Caught in the Act” highlights other places of reading, such as the kitchen, bedroom, bath, prisons, and public spaces. See more information and images from the exhibition.
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 This image from Harper’s Weekly of March 14, 1847, depicts the newsboys’ habit of dropping copies of books and magazines onto travelers’ laps. They later collected either the book or the purchase price. |
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The Chemist in the Garden: Origins of Natural Products Ford Hall Atrium “The Chemist in the Garden: Origins of Natural Products” is an exhibition showcasing botanical books from the Mortimer Rare Book Room that have particular significance to Lâle Burk, who is retiring in 2013 as a senior lecturer in the Chemistry Department at Smith College. “The Chemist in the Garden” was curated by Signe Dahlberg-Wright, class of 2014, who selected the books to be displayed and researched and wrote descriptive labels, aided by Burk and by Mortimer Rare Book Room staff. Lâle Burk studied chemistry in her native Turkey. She received advanced degrees in chemistry from Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she has been a Smith Chemistry Department faculty member since 1972. The books on display reflect Burk’s special interest in the chemistry of natural products derived from plants, such as essential oils and perfumes. Items on display include Leonhart Fuchs’ 1549 Histoire des plantes, a field guide to plants with delicate hand-colored illustrations; John Gerard’s famous English Herball of 1636; a laboratory and equipment in Diderot’s monumental mid-18th-century French Encyclopédie; and Mark Catesby’s lavishly illustrated book on trees and shrubs of North America, published in London in 1767. |
 Skunk cabbage in William Barton’s Vegetable materia medica (1817-1818) |