Synopses & Reviews
This book celebrates Britainandrsquo;s National Art Library, the first of what was a new kind of museum library, formed in the 19th century by and for artists, designers, and artisans; and intensively used by them and later by the public. Here are more than 100 objects that have helped to define and redefine the subject and scope of the history of the fine and decorative arts, from a 15th-century book of hours to George Cruikshankandrsquo;s studies of Fagin for Oliver Twist to an Yves Saint Laurent design for the House of Dior and Bill Brandtandrsquo;s photos, Word and Image explores some of the worldandrsquo;s finest examples of books.
Review
"My fantasy holiday is a week spent locked in the archives of the National Library of Medicine, so you can imagine how excited I am about this book. It's an incomparable treasure trove. I hugged it to my chest like a four-year-old with a new pair of shoes." Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Packing for Mars
Synopsis
Founded 175 years ago, the National Library of Medicine is the worlds largest medical library, with more than 17 million items dating from the 11th century to the present in its holdings. Today it is home to a rich worldwide heritage of objects, from the rarest early medical books to delightful 20th-century ephemera, artifacts, and documentary and animated films. Despite more than a century and a half of classification and cataloging, buried in the sheer mass of this collection are wondrous items largely unseen by the public and obscure even to librarians, curators, and historians. The individual objects brought to light in this book glow with beauty or grotesquery or wit or calamitous tragedy and include spectacular large-scale, color-illustrated medical books; rare manuscripts; pamphlets and ephemera; magic lantern” slides; toys; stereograph cards; scrapbooks; film stills; posters; and more from the 13th to the 20th century, from Europe, Africa, North America, and Asia. Specially selected and showcased in Hidden Treasure, they once again speak to us, charm us, repulse us, amaze us, inform us, and intrigue us.
About the Author
Michael Sappol is curator-historian at the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine and the author of
A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America and
Dream Anatomy and co-editor of
A Cultural History of the Body in the Age of Empire.
Laura Lindgren designs art and photography books and exhibition catalogs for publishers and museums. She is also publisher of Blast Books in New York, and she is the editor, designer, and publisher of Mütter Museum and Mütter Museum Historic Medical Photographs, and Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 18801930, among others.
Arne Svenson is the author of Prisoners and Mrs. Ballards Parrots and photographer and coauthor (with Ron Warren) of Sock Monkeys (200 out of 1863) and Chewed. He is currently working on a new book on forensic facial reconstructions, Unspeaking Likeness.