Dean Smith’s fan mail, a Qur’an small enough to fit in a locket around your neck, 17th century French novels embossed in gold – all these items and more will be on display on Thursday, April 4 from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at Wilson Library’s Recent Acquisitions Evening.
The event, which is free and open to the public, will feature more than 100 items that have been added to the Wilson Library collections in the past two years. The items will be on display in the Fearrington Reading Room.
This is the first year that pieces from all five of the library’s collecting areas will be featured. The collections include Rare Books, the North Carolina Collection, the University Archives, the Southern Historical Collection and the Southern Folklife Collection.
Elizabeth Ott, the Frank Borden Hanes Curator of Rare Books, said this year's display will be the most diverse one yet.
“A lot of the times people think that in Wilson Library we’re only interested in the far distant past, that it’s really old books,” Ott said. “As the curator of the ‘really old books collection,’ I like that, but also it’s not true. We collect all the way up to the present day and we collect all sorts of historical materials.”
Some of these materials include 2017-2018 editions of La Conexión, a Spanish-language newspaper published in Raleigh; hand-printed lecture posters created by biology professor Bob Goldstein; and a copy of American Studies professor William Ferris’ Grammy-winning album, “Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris.”
“We’ll have some interactive displays that will be available at the event that will also show not just how we collect the paper past, but also how we're collecting the electronic future,” Ott said.
In addition to the present-day materials, historical artifacts will also be on display, like a 16th century Czechoslovakian notebook featuring a hand-copied transcription of Aristotle’s “Ethics.”
“We will have material in so many different languages, Latin, German, French, Cherokee, just across the board,” Ott said. “We’re gonna have everything from art and artists books to some of the commercial-type records. There will be music, there will be video, it’s gonna be fun.”
