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In Part I, I discussed how bookbinders in the fifteenth century did not have full confidence in the strength of paper for text blocks in books, and how parchment lingered in bookbinding practice to reinforce the paper gatherings.

In the history of European bookbinding, the transition from parchment to paper as the primary material for text leaves caused an associated shift in bookbinding practices, as bookbinders adapted to what they thought of as a weaker material. Parchment is made of animal skin, prepared by dehairing, stretching, scraping, and drying, whereas paper at the time was made of plant-based materials, such as cotton and flax.

Miko McGinty Inc. is a design office based in Brooklyn. Our firm has been working with the Morgan Library & Museum since 2008. We were thrilled to draw on our long-standing collaboration with the Morgan to create a new centennial logo, which celebrates the Morgan’s unique and varied collections.

On my first day as an intern at the Morgan in the autumn of 1993, the head of the department of drawings and prints, William M. Griswold, asked me to accompany him on a trip uptown to return a group of framed drawings to Lore Heinemann.

Ten years ago, the Morgan’s Department of Photography made a landmark acquisition: Peter Hujar’s papers, 100 photographic prints, and 5,783 black-and-white contact sheets. The contact sheets are of great importance: they span the artist’s career from 1955 until his death of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987, and index nearly every black-and-white exposure that he made.

The Herbert Cahoon papers (MA 4733) contain a series of letters dating from 1941 to 1959 from Frederic Hastings Smyth (1888–-1960) to Herbert Cahoon, Curator of the Literary and Historical Manuscripts Department at the Pierpont Morgan Library from 1954 to 1989. Smyth was an Anglo-Catholic priest and Marxist revolutionary who was simultaneously engaged in Christian theological debate and extremist politics.

In the summer of 2023, I was fortunate to accept the CUNY/Morgan Summer Fellowship to assist Dr. Robinson McClellan with research and preparations for the upcoming summer 2024 exhibition focused on the creative conditions and collaborations of the Ballets Russes, Crafting the Ballets Russes: Music, Dance, Design—The Robert Owen Lehman Collection .

The city street in eighteenth-century Europe was a bustling place with crowds, merchants and all sorts of entertainment, among which was the peepshow. A peepshow involved a box with at least one viewing hole, through which a series of images, spaced sequentially, could be seen. Such boxes were carried around by the showmen who were also the narrators, offering a more interesting experience. For people back then, these boxes were portals to distant landscapes, foreign continents, or battlefields.

Belle da Costa Greene was librarian for J. Pierpont Morgan from 1905–1913, J. P. Morgan Jr. from 1913–1924, and director at the Pierpont Morgan Library from 1924–1948. Her career spanned two world wars and the Great Depression.

Saffron is much more than a pigment, and its many uses can be traced back to the ancient world. Harvested from the crocus sativus, a delicate flower cultivated in places like Greece and Persia (Iran), it appears as a spice, a dye, perfume, and is regularly used in holistic medicine.