Adopt A Book

The holiday season has kitchens humming around the world, whether it’s churning out a favorite cookie recipe or prepping a celebratory meal with loved ones. In the 1700s, kitchens in England regularly consulted Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy for tried-and-true recipes. Among Glasse’s readers was a food lover near and dear to our hearts: Smithsonian founder James Smithson. Whether he knew it or not, Smithson had a bit in common with Glasse.

Did you know you can honor friends and family, enable important research, and skip the mall this holiday season? Adopting an item from the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is a unique way to celebrate your loved ones while providing essential funding to support our work. Whether your gift funds the preservation of volumes from hundreds of years ago, the purchase of new titles for our collection, or increased accessibility to items on our shelves, your adoption enables all that we do.

The Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ Adopt-a-Book program has brought donors, Smithsonian staff, and treasured collection items together for twelve years. This year our annual event went virtual in a series of Adopt-a-Book Salons. Across four evenings, we were able to showcase 77 items from our collections. We featured selections from the Smithsonian Institution Archives for the first time, giving our attendees a look into our incredible archival materials.

Mark your calendar for this year’s Adopt-a-Book events! Join us on April 20^th and April 26^th, 2022 for a closer look at our collections and the opportunity to support their preservation and acquisition.