Every Monday, we feature an Internet Archive Book of the Week, which will highlight an item from the 25,000 or so Fisher items that are freely available on the… Read the full post.
Through the Revolving Door: Fisher Blog
Towards the end of the last century, during the few brief years that I spent teaching high school history, nothing heralded the long-awaited coming of summer vacation for me more than the annual erasing of the textbooks. On one glorious June day… Read the full post.
As a new month begins, it seems a good time to begin a new feature on the Fisher Blog: An Internet Archive Book of the Week, which will highlight a book from the 25,000 or so Fisher items that are … Read the full post.
At the end of this week, Jews around the world will be celebrating the holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost; literally: “weeks”). While in the Hebrew Bible Shavuot is primarily an agricultural holiday, marking the wheat harvest, Jewish tradition has… Read the full post.
Going over some of the catalogue records in our general collections in preparation for the switch to a different library platform is an experience not entirely unlike walking through the stacks. While I can’t see the volumes themselves,… Read the full post.
The Fisher has an excellent, and growing, collection of medieval manuscripts in French. Recent additions include: the earliest known copy of a French translation of the Secretum secretorum (MSS 01027), one of the most widely… Read the full post.
Exactly forty-six years ago today, on 12 May 1974, Otto Schneid passed away in Toronto. In 1998 Schneid’s widow, Miriam, donated his archive to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. The initial donation of 1998 was followed by two additional,… Read the full post.
The drama of the medical world has long captured the cultural imagination across various forms of media and entertainment. We see this popular genre perhaps most prominently on television, from Dr. Kildare in the 1960s and 1970s to … Read the full post.
Between 2016 and 2018, three new archival collections came across my desk that had one thing in common – the creators, nineteenth-century upper-class British men, had all been in the Royal Navy and all three were talented watercolourists. Before… Read the full post.
By the time Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) wrote Le livre de paix (The Book of Peace), a… Read the full post.
Over these last weeks many of us have been trying to find our way to the future through the past, hoping to discover lessons for this ‘new normal’ by comparing our situation to such earlier events as the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. I have… Read the full post.
One day last year, as I was working as a graduate student on the Judaica collection of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, a box of old Hebrew and Yiddish books was brought to my attention. Apparently, it had been in the library for quite a… Read the full post.
Have you found yourself doing more cooking and baking during the Coronavirus pandemic? You’re not alone! Orders to work from home have led to a surge in home baking, and many consumers are finding their local stores unable to keep up with the… Read the full post.
Deep in the belly of the Fisher Library, there is an entire wall of shelves dedicated to Arabic manuscript materials. While many of these are uncatalogued, those that are can be found by searching for… Read the full post.
The antiquarian booksellers Simon Beattie, Justin Croft, Ben Kinmont, and Heather O’Donnell recently issued a joint catalogue, At Home with Books… Read the full post.
At first glance, one might think it highly unlikely that the sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries would have much in common. The pandemic of 2020, however, has aligned our two eras in a way unimaginable, even as recently as a few months ago.… Read the full post.
As we adjust to working from home, one of the projects that we have been working on is cleaning up older catalogue records, which is leading to some interesting discoveries as well as opportunities to make these items easier for researchers to… Read the full post.
Leora Bromberg
MI & MMSt Candidate
Graduate Intern, Thomas Fisher Rare Book LibraryAround this time last year, I was looking back on a semester in which I developed some new research interests in Judaica materials, from… Read the full post.
The issues of book censorship and book banning are always paramount among librarians. The head of our department, PJ Carefoote, is one of the foremost experts on this important topic. Back in 2005, his exhibition Nihil Obstat asked visitors… Read the full post.
Hello to our Fisher Library community!
We know these are difficult days for everybody. Moreover, it is tough to be closed and not providing access to our materials and our exhibition space. But we will all get through this and we… Read the full post.