UNR Special Collections and University Archives

A most excellent mustache, too.

The story of Reno's Chinatown is the focus of one of the archives lesson plans we offer faculty!

Black and white photo of a snowy clearing in a mountain forest. A dogsled team with a driver in heavy cold weather gear traverse the frame from left to right. The snow appears to be less than a foot deep.

We’re in the dog days of summer, so a cool image of a dog sled team in the Sierra snow is a relief! The dog days mark the hot, lethargic part of the summer when Sirius, the dog star, rises and sets in unison with the sun.
Photo: Dog sled team, possibly driven by JE Church, c1910. UNRS-P0454-2.

We can FEEL this image. *shudder*

Paper is variable indeed. Rag paper made from linen does best! Parchment and vellum survive VERY well, though they are sensitive to conditions. If they get wet, you’re in trouble!

Occasionally we remind people that paper is the most stable long-term storage medium* and it's always a surprise.

*Unless you're into carving your own stele, in which case you might have some significant long-term storage SPACE problems.

They do make excellent coasters.

basic library search skills! So many students treat library catalog search the same as an internet search engine, and sadly most catalog platforms aren't able to parse natural language requests.

Watermarks Tell Tales - Preservation Underground This scribal copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence will soon travel for exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution. A declaration of independence by the army of black Haitians from ...

Watermarks Tell Tales 📜
blogs.library.duke.edu/preservation...

This is SO COOL.

Thanks for the shoutout!

Doves Type, currently on display at the Museum of London Docklands.

Opening page of Paradise Lost with large red lettering at the head.

Hammersmith Bridge, where the type was dropped into the Thames.

A member of staff was recently on vacation in London and took photos of Hammersmith Bridge, where the type went into the river, and a few samples recovered by mudlarks. They are on display at the Museum of London Docklands.

Mudlarks and modern technology have foiled this by recovering the small pieces of metal from the river’s shore and creating a digital version of the famous and highly admired typeface. We have a few Doves books, including vellum-bound copies of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd.

In small batches, by night, Cobden-Sanderson made some 170 trips to drop the Doves Type into the Thames so it could never be used again.

They eventually agreed rights would pass to Walker after Cobden-Sanderson’s death. Cobden-Sanderson reneged on the deal in a spectacular fashion. When the Doves Press closed in 1916, he began removing the pieces of type and the matrices - the molds to make more - from the business.

The Doves Press became known for high quality, simply elegant pieces that used a custom typeface designed by Walker and Cobden-Sanderson. Sadly, the partnership collapsed in under a decade, and the two men fought a vicious battle over the rights to the Doves Type.

In 1893, he opened a bindery in Hammersmith, London, binding books from Morris’ Kelmscott Press and exploring his aesthetic ideas. The bindery, joined by Walker and a press in 1900, took a name from the local pub, the Dove.

Cobden-Sanderson and Walker were both friends of famous English designer William Morris, a leading force behind the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cobden-Sanderson actually coined the movement’s name in 1887.

🧵Have you ever heard of T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, Emery Walker, or the Doves Press? It’s a story that particularly brings together seemingly disparate groups of specialists: rare books/typography enthusiasts and Thames mudlarks (people who hunt for fragments of London’s past along the river shore).

Nice work!!

While the #digitalarchives represent a small portion of our entire collection, more is added all the time. Two particularly useful collections feature text-searchable scans of past UNR course catalogs and commencement programs. These resources are available to all! unr.dgicloud.com/special-coll...

Researcher registration | University Libraries | University of Nevada, Reno Learn how to register with our Special Collections and University Archives department as a campus affiliated researcher or a visiting scholar.

If any of you like to keep your SCUA researcher registration up to date, your 24-25 registration has now expired! Go ahead and do a fresh one for 25-26: library.unr.edu/specoll/usin...

er, no comment? :D

OH NO

*sighs in 12-month contract*

Black and white photo of two men on skis among snowy trees on a sunny day. One holds a scale weighing a long metal tube, while the other bends down to read the measurement. It is only cited as “courtesy of UNR Special Collections.”

This is photograph UNRS-P2004-18-318 in an online news article from 2024. Today we had a patron inquiry about it, and with no item number included, it took an hour to locate. So cite your sources. You’re doing the right academic thing, and you may be saving some future archivist’s sanity. #archives

Title page of “Memoir of the Life and Public Services of John Charles Fremont.”

Browned page with pencil geometry problems and proofs. The teacher has written “not required” across a portion in red pencil.

Browned page with pencil geometry problems and proofs. The teacher has written “B” and some corrections across a portion in red pencil.

Browned page with pencil geometry problems and proofs. The teacher has written “C” and some corrections across a portion in red pencil.

Books in archival collections frequently have signs of previous owners. Today, when doing a condition assessment of John Bigelow’s 1856 memoir of John C. Fremont, we discovered three sheets of geometry homework from the 1940s. It’s a tantalizing hint at a moment in the book’s life! #LibraryLife

Speak up for your libraries - public, academic, school, speciality - we all need your help.

The Digital Dark Ages are very real and already a problem.

Last year we had Great Horned Owls nesting on campus! Three giant fluffy babies would stare down from pine trees near the Judicial College. There's also an entire Instagram account dedicated to the campus geese and swans.