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Manuscript Digest: March – April 2026
This complimentary e-digest, now published bi-monthly, covers significant acquisitions and sales, manuscripts lost and found, rare books and ephemera, document conservation, and more news in this digest. To start your free subscription click here. You’ll begin receiving the Digest with the next issue. Add Manuscript_Society@mail.vresp.com to your address book or the [...]
Recent Posts
Manuscript Mondays: The Handwritten Provenance of Fore-Edge Paintings (9/14/26)
Overview Fore-edge paintings have existed for centuries, but what do we really know about these hand-painted works of art? Dr. Wick will talk about his exploration of known fore-edge painting collections and the discovery of handwritten documentation found in the books, sometimes, unbeknownst to collectors. Fore-edge paintings have existed for [...]
MM On-Demand: The Lure of Oblivion – Exploring Drugs in Art and Literature (8/3/26)
Overview Presenter George Snook will explore the collection of drug literature and artifacts that he has assembled since the mid-1960s. An impulse purchase of de Quincey’s English Opium Eater in a used bookstore in London sparked a lifelong interest in drugs and their influence on culture. This journey has led [...]
MM On-Demand: Digital Scriptorium: Towards a National Union Catalog of Premodern Manuscripts in North American Collections (7/13/26)
Overview Launched in 2024, the new Digital Scriptorium Catalog aims to be the first national union catalog for premodern manuscripts in North America built on Linked Open Data technologies and practices. Following a brief history of similar attempts, Lynn will discuss the motivations and principles behind the redevelopment project and [...]
Manuscript Society Comes to Boston
This article is reposted with permission from Jaren Gendron (Collected Culture). One of the great pleasures of collecting is the people it brings together and the communities that are built around shared collecting interests. This past Wednesday evening, we had the opportunity to attend the opening event of the 2026 [...]
MM On-Demand: Monsters in the Archives: Exploring Stephen King’s Personal Papers (6/15/26)
Overview Stephen King has published close to 70 books in the last 50 years. In 2021, he and his wife Tabitha collected all of his available manuscript drafts into a secure, climate-controlled archive attached to their home in Bangor, Maine. Bicks was the first scholar to be granted extended access [...]
MM On-Demand: Arturo Schomburg and the Schomburg Center (5/11/26)
Overview Barrye Brown, Curator of Manuscripts for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library will talk about Arturo Schomburg, an Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile, whose collection of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and prints established the Schomburg Center in 1926. The book, Black Studies on 135th [...]
MM On-Demand: How Can Book Bindings Sing? (4/13/26)
Overview How Can Book Bindings Sing? will examine Renaissance books bound in fragments of medieval music manuscripts. These “singing bindings” are hundreds of years older than the printed text blocks inside them, and the texts are on mathematics, physics, or astronomy and absolutely not on music. How is that possible? [...]
