Blog

This guest post is by Sophia Natasha Sunseri, a Doctoral Candidate in the English department at the Graduate Center (CUNY).

The collections at the Morgan Library & Museum span a rich and diverse spectrum, from the ancient Mesopotamian period to the contemporary. As a Graduate Archival Fellow working in the Sherman Fairfield Reading Room, my attention was specifically drawn to the Morgan’s collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “extra-illustrated” books: texts that were enhanced by the inclusion of letters, manuscripts, prints, drawings, and ephemera.

In this guest post, Anne Higonnet, Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University, discusses the Style Revolution project, including the digitization of an extremely rare set of the world’s most radical fashion plates.

The Morgan celebrated its annual Spring Family Fair on Sunday, April 15, 2018. Among the activities was a craft session with Azi Amiri, who led students in making paper dragons inspired by the Morgan’s collection of medieval manuscripts.

The Little Prince, a story of an intergalactic traveler in search of meaningful connection, was published in New York seventy-five years ago today—on April 6, 1943. This guest post is by Adrian Arturo Peña, a student in CUNY’s Language Immersion Program (CLIP), whose class recently visited the Morgan with instructor Gretchen Irwin-Harada to view and discuss Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s draft manuscript and watercolor drawings for The Little Prince.

On March 12, 2018, Amanda Gorman, the twenty-year-old Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, visited the Morgan to place a manuscript of her poem “In This Place (An American Lyric)” in a vitrine in the Morgan’s majestic East Room alongside the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Carson McCullers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Peter Paul Rubens.

Ann Julia Hatton (1764-1838) lived a highly dramatic life, appropriate for a member of the Kemble family whose ranks were full of actors and actresses, the most famous among them being Sarah Siddons.

The Thaw Conservation Center at the Morgan is a world-class laboratory for the conservation of works on paper and parchment—drawings, prints, photographs, illuminated manuscripts, rare books, fine bindings, and literary, historical, and music manuscripts—as well as a place for conservation studies. A critical piece of the Morgan, the Thaw Conservation Center also relies on donations from the public to remain on the cutting edge of scientific research and discovery. 

Laurie Strickland is a creative professional working in television, film, theater, photography, and voice-overs writing. Her most recent projects were inspired by past visits to the Morgan's galleries to see Charles Dickens's writing on display.

As a cataloguer working on the Morgan’s collection of materials related to the eighteenth-century novelist Frances Burney, I’ve come across little-known items which, when examined closely, prove to have unexpected depths.

Working my way through the Morgan’s enormous collection of letters, one by one—as I’ve been doing for the past ten months on a cataloging grant from the Leon Levy Foundation—has meant regularly encountering extraordinary items whose significance often hasn’t been fully understood.