Rauner Special Collections Library

This striking woodcut is found in the 1512 edition of Ramon Llull’s Liber de ascensu et descensu intellectus (Book on the Ascent and Descen...

We have a lot of really amazing guides to midwifery in our collections. They are fascinating--all written by "expert" men for the ...

Four hundred years ago, in the city of Constantinople, an alchemist named Avedis discovered a revolutionary means of treating alloys. Avedis...

When the American Civil War began in April of 1861, a 23-year-old Boston man named George Francis Whitcomb joined the 5th Massachusetts Volu...

When Emma was first published in 1816, it was a simple production. The unadorned title page matter-of-factly stated that the book was ...

“Cream for anal sex. Does that make you nervous?” The camera pans to the plastic baggie Phil Donahue holds. The audience laughs. This Ziplo...

In an age of mechanical and digital reproduction, it is easy to think that books are static objects. But they are not: we alter them in myri...