Please join us for a special event on Wednesday, April 30th from 11am-4pm in The Jack and Jan Creighton Special Collections Reading Room (room 105, Thompson Library). Thompson Special Collections will be a stop on the “Things You Never Got To See Tour”, part of the university’s Commencement Week activities. Everyone is welcome!

Items to view will include:

William Charvat Collection of American Fiction: Come see rare first editions of some of your favorite American authors. On display will be classics by Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Henry Miller, J.D. Salinger, James Baldwin and many more.

Rare Books & Manuscripts: On display will be some of your favorite works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Rudyard Kipling. Take this opportunity to see the original publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Would you like to see the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, the most complex and heavily illustrated book printed during the fifteenth century? What about Henry Billingsley’s 1570 translation of Euclid’s Geometry, the first geometrical “pop-up” book printed in sixteenth-century England? Have you ever wondered what the first edition of the King James Bible looks like? How about original seventeenth-century Shakespeare publications? Or would you like to handle and examine a range of medieval parchment manuscripts produced between 1100-1500? Authentic photographic prints of famous images like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and Harold Edgerton’s Shooting the Apple will be available, as well as a number of very early photographic formats.  All of these items, and much more, will be on display for graduating seniors and their families at the Thompson Library Special Collections Reading Room during Commencement Week.

Also on display will be selections from The Hilandar Research Library and The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute. 

(Everyone attending will be asked to place their personal belongings in lockers just outside the reading room. A key to a locker will be provided upon your arrival).