Reading Room's blog

This is a guest post by Saira Haqqi, book and paper conservator at the Minnesota Historical Society.

Every book conservator wonders about the past lives of the books she works on, and I am no exception. It is particularly intriguing when the book bears the marks of an individual craftsperson rather than an industrial bindery.

This is a guest post by Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury, a writer and historian, specializing in modern world history and modern European history.

I came to the Morgan Library & Museum in search of Eleanor Franklin Egan, a forgotten writer of the First World War. While preparing my book manuscript for the First World War, Anticolonialism and British India, 1914–1924 (Routledge, forthcoming), I saw a reference to writings by Eleanor Franklin Egan (1879–1925).

This guest post is by Susie J. Pak, an Associate Professor in the Department of History at St. John’s University (New York).

When I began working on my dissertation at the Morgan Library & Museum in June 2001, researchers still entered from the 36th Street entrance, and the librarians sat in the center of the Reading Room at a raised oval desk. By the time the Piano renovation was completed, I had finished my dissertation, and I returned to the Morgan to the newly modernized Reading Room, where I spent many days for several years until my book, Gentlemen Bankers, went to press in 2012.

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.