New Additions to our Collections!

In addition to our current collections of phenomenal books and manuscripts, we are always collecting new amazing items that we know will be used eagerly by students in our classrooms. The breadth and depth of our teaching across the curriculum is represented in the following list of recent acquisitions, all of which were added to our shelves over the last three or four months. If you'd like to visit us to see any of them in person, place a request via the linked catalog record and then come to Rauner!

Codex 003545: A 17th-century manuscript scroll containing the Lotus Sutra, one of the most important texts of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism.

Incunabula 171: A single sheet from a 1483-84 almanac printed by Johannes Angelus, a prominent physician/astrologer/astronomer who practiced his trade in Vienna in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. This particular page provides advice on how to pair medical treatment with beneficial astrological signs  for the coming year.

Presses L876lokn: Book artist Angela Lorenz created this volume, titled Known no-bodies, in 2025. The work displays seven original watercolor paintings of "portrait-like figures, each with aspects of a face and a body with various fanciful modifications".

Rare CT3202 .B4 1804: Matilda Bethany's Biographical Dictionary of the celebrated women of every age and country was printed in 1804 and contains short biographies of famous women from antiquity to the present day, organized alphabetically.

Rare RM184.5 .K45 1753: A book printed in 1753 and written in Chinese with Japanese reading marks that explains the locations and relations of fourteen meridians and acupuncture points using woodcut illustrations.

Rare PA6801 .A2 1502: The 1502 Strasbourg printing of the works of Virgil, sometimes known as the "Grüninger Virgil" after the name of its printer. The work contains 137 original full-block woodcuts that were influential for artists and printers across Germany, Italy, and France for several centuries.

Rare G2355 .N577 1666b: Japan's first atlas published in Kanbun 6 (1666), consisting of 1 preface and 16 provincial maps. The accompanying text describes routes on the maps and includes such information as statistics for rice production and distances between various points by land and sea.

A Ghost Story for Christmas

When A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, it came with the subtitle "Being a ghost story of Christmas." Ghosts might not be the first thing we think of at Christmas-time, but in the U.K. there is a well-established storytelling tradition on just that subject. It's difficult to say if Dickens is completely to blame for this, or if he merely provided the literary text that brought an existing folk practice into a more traceable medium. Oral tradition, after all, is tricky to pin down.

Regardless, the Victorians took this idea and ran with it, and the English-language ghost story had a heyday running from the mid-19th century well into the first half of the 20th. Christmas drifts in and out of the picture -- there are many chilling tales taking place during the holiday, but it was just as frequently used as a framing device for something unrelated. The Turn of the Screw, for instance, begins with a group telling ghost stories at a Christmas eve party, leading one guest to dig up a manuscript he possesses entailing a "real" encounter, and thus bringing us to the actual plot.

The medievalist (and rare book man!) M.R. James deserves special mention here, having published collection after collection of chilling tales throughout the first thirty years of the 20th century. Many of these began as entertainment devised specifically to read aloud to his students and colleagues during the holiday season. The same stories served as ready inspiration in the 1970s, when the BBC began an annual television program fittingly called "A Ghost Story for Christmas." From 1971 to 1978, a short ghostly film, most often adapted from James, would be aired on or just before Christmas. The series was revived in 2005 and has continued on and off since then.

We've just installed a new single-case exhibit showing off an array of spooky tales, some taking place at Christmas and some just referencing the storytelling tradition itself. Dickens is there, as is The Turn of the Screw, as are M.R. James's published thoughts on what a ghost story requires in order to succeed. We suggest dropping by to see it sometime, especially if you need a change of pace from what can feel like mandatory holiday cheer.