glitters

This is a humourous classic donated by the late philatelist George Townsend Turner, a Smithsonian curator. During his lifetime, George Turner had the largest private philatelic library in the world. The illustrations, called 'perpetrations,' are drawings rendered by the author and are extremely humorous. Mostly caricatures, the drawings depict philatelists battling various illnesses like the flu, and obstacles to collecting like spilled ink. But you don't need to be a stamp collector to enjoy the humor in this masterpiece.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an Italian polymath with a heart of gold. Born into a wealthy Milanese family, Agnesi's brilliance was used to entertain family friends and visitors from an early age. She was a child prodigy, speaking 7 languages by the age of 10 and delivering speeches in Latin about the education of women to her father's circle of academics and intellectuals. As the eldest of 21 children, Agnesi was tasked with teaching the others, a responsibility that inspired this book. Finding mathematical textbooks insufficient, Agnesi originally began writing this text for her siblings.

This is one of a series of reports and maps from the Governor of the Panama Canal between 1906 and 1914, printed by the Government Printing Office. The full title of the map is Map of Panama, Showing Canal Zone & Water Shed of Rio Chagres. To accompany the Annual Report of the Commission, Culebra C.Z., September, 1909. This particular map was printed in 1909, detailing advances in the Porto Bello rock plant, Gatun locks, and further information about construction and engineering of the Canal.

This is a charming account of the author’s impressions of Central American natural and social geography in the early 20th century. Carleton Beals was a progressive journalist who traveled extensively throughout Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, during times of political and social strife in the 1920s and 30s. The Art Deco illustrations of Carlos Merida beautifully complement the picturesque descriptions of small village life and the tropics.

Note: From the library of Alexander Wetmore, Sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an Italian polymath with a heart of gold. Born into a wealthy Milanese family, Agnesi's brilliance was used to entertain family friends and visitors from an early age. She was a child prodigy, speaking 7 languages by the age of 10 and delivering speeches in Latin about the education of women to her father's circle of academics and intellectuals. As the eldest of 21 children, Agnesi was tasked with teaching the others, a responsibility that inspired this book. Finding mathematical textbooks insufficient, Agnesi originally began writing this text for her siblings.

Le Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris, France, is a small zoo within the larger botanical gardens (Jardin des Plantes) which are part of the Museum of Natural History. Founded with animals from the menagerie of Versailles, which was dismantled in 1795 during the French Revolution, it is the second-oldest zoo in the world. This book, written by botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard, features beautiful etchings of many of the animals found in the zoo and botanical gardens. By 1845, when this second edition was published, Paris had the largest exotic animal collection in Europe.

This beautiful book of pressed flowers was compiled by newlyweds Ralph L. and Hetty G. Dixon, who collected the majority of the specimens along the banks of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Towpath in Georgetown in the 1920s. Although the Dixons were amateurs, they took great care in the mounting and identification of their blooms, and it is thanks to this that most of the specimens remain intact. But the love story contained within these pages isn’t the only golden thing about the book; the locally collected flowers include golden corydalis and golden ragwort.

Despite dying at only 28, Edward M. Haight (1863-1891) established a busy career as an enthusiastic naturalist, collector, taxidermist, and publisher. The Golden State Scientist is one of three serials that he edited in the late 1880s, and it is by far the scarcest. This was the only issue ever published, and only 450 copies made it into print, owing to “the many blunders made in the advertisements." Only about a dozen copies survive in libraries today.

This volume tells the story of three French Army officers' balloon expedition through the Peking (Beijing) and Tientsin (Tianjin) areas of China, in 1900 and 1901. Published in 1902, the book includes 41 photographic plates of aerial images of that region of Imperial China, as well as many extraordinary sights on the ground. This rare volume (only 25 copies were printed) is part of the William A. M. Burden aviation book collection donated to the Smithsonian, one of the foundations of the rare book collection in the National Air and Space Museum Library. 

The Thompson Trophy air race (1929-1961) was an annual aircraft speed race with a course set up around pylons. It was an especially prestigious event during the great air race period of the 1930s. This unique limited-edition publication covers the year’s winners from 1929 to 1936.  It has a gold cover and colorful illustrations of the winning aircraft, which are beautifully preserved.  Each illustration of a winning aircraft was designed to be suitable for framing. The book is held together with a spiral binding that is a concern for future preservation.

Le Royaume de l'Air, or the “Kingdom of the Air,” was published in Paris in 1909, during the first decade of machine-powered aircraft flight. It was written for young readers and includes plentiful illustrations and photographs documenting the historical development of aeronautics and contemporary innovations in this new technology. There are very few copies in libraries, and the Smithsonian is fortunate to have two in its collection. This copy is in need of extensive preservation treatment.

This 1967 commemorative newspaper issue documented the 40th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis monoplane. It features photos of a replica of the Spirit of St. Louis and of pilot Frank Tallman, cofounder of Tallmantz Aviation, which built the replica. The replica was flown to Paris by the U.S. Air Force to be displayed during the 1967 Paris Air Show.

Léo Dex was the pseudonym of the brillant and distinguished aeronautical engineer Edouard-Léopold-Joseph Deburaux, who was commander of a company of hot-air balloonists attached to the French Army’s First Corps of Engineers. Under his given name, he wrote many books and papers on the possible uses of hot-air balloons for exploration and warfare. His grand experiment in balloon exploration—sending hot-air balloons across the Sahara from Tunisia to the region of Timbuktu—ended in failure, and he died shortly thereafter.

The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, has an important collection of Greco-Bactrian and Bactrian gold and silver vessels, many of which were likely in the Siberian collection of Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725). In 1940, Kamilla Trever (1892-1974), a curator at the Hermitage and a Russian historian specializing in the history and culture of Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Iran, published this important but obscure Russian-language work on the collection.

Gather out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album is a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance, a period of tremendous artistic and cultural achievement among African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, with New York City's Harlem neighborhood at its epicenter. The book is also based on a current exhibit of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University.

Ah, that glorious golden refreshment—beer! This book was published in 1891 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Hell Gate Brewery. George Ehret, a German immigrant, established the brewery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1866 to make a Munich-style lager. He went on to become an enormous success, one of America's great beer barons of the late 19th century. This interesting and highly illustrated book not only tells Ehret’s story, but also provides an overview of American brewing beginning in 1635.

Published in 1886, Wonderland was a free guidebook promoting travel via the Northern Pacific Railroad to the minimally developed and gloriously natural northern territory of the United States between the Mississippi Valley and Alaska. Wonderland includes a reference to a previous journey through Alaska made by E. Ruhamah Scidmore, who published a travel guide titled Alaska, its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago in 1885.

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) was one of the most celebrated designers at the turn of the 20th century, known for his metal and glass work. But Tiffany was also a notable artist, who created beautiful drawings and paintings as well as three-dimensional works. This richly illustrated biographical account features the portraits and landscapes Tiffany painted as he traveled the world. It includes drawings and photographs relating to every aspect of his artistic career, from stained glass and jewelry to vases and textiles.

Imagine that you are a Victorian gentleman with a reasonable income and a mid-life crisis. You hear about a gold strike somewhere in the far corners of the earth (to you, at least). In hopes of turning your bourgeois into gorgeois, you pack up your things and say "Toodle-oo" to the missus. What’s the first thing you buy to prepare for your new adventure? A book, naturally! Specifically, you want Charles G. Warnford Lock’s Practical Gold-Mining.

Did you know that there is a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s epic pirate adventure Treasure Island? It’s true! Porto Bello Gold, by prolific pulp fiction writer Arthur D. Howden Smith, tells how the treasure got to Treasure Island, complete with Billy Bones, Captain Flint, and, of course, Long John Silver. Despite some kitschy chapter titles, such as “Fetch Aft the Rum, Darby McGraw” and “The One-Legged Man and the Irish Maid,” Porto Bello Gold is more than just Roaring Twenties fan fiction.

Ornamental Textile Fabrics of All Ages and Nations: A Practical Collection of Specimens features specimens from Auguste Dupont-Auberville's collection of ornamental textile designs. The samples, reproduced as simple chromolithographs, serve as a showcase of European, Eastern, and Egyptian design elements used in textile production throughout history.

“Would you mind acting as though you just discovered a gold mine?” Cartoonist George Price finds the humor in the everyday and pokes fun at people from all walks of life. Price is best known for his 60-year career as a cartoonist for The New Yorker; he was one of the early artists who shaped the look and feel of the magazine.

They say every book tells a story, and this one does not disappoint. Loves Garland, or Posies for Rings…contains a selection of posies, or love poems, that could be inscribed onto gold rings and given to a friend or lover as a testament of one’s affection. This edition of Loves Garland, published in 1883, is a reprint of a 1674 edition, which in turn is a reprint of the original 1624 edition.

How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel is the culmination of research on gospel music undertaken by Horace Clarence Boyer, a gospel singer and pioneering scholar on the subject. Boyer skillfully combines the history of gospel music and its social context, tracking the development gospel from its early stages during its golden age (1945-55), into the 1960s, when the music form began to take its place in American popular music. Photographer Lloyd Yearwood’s rare photos of performances and backstage activity further enhance the written history.

Chesapeake Gold is the type of book you read while sitting in an Adirondack chair overlooking the water on a crisp autumn afternoon. Accompanied by rich illustrations, Chesapeake Gold offers a glimpse into the lives of Chesapeake oystermen, as they struggle to manage and maintain their livelihoods and culture in the face of declining oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay. Author Susan Brait shares her experiences of working alongside men and women who make their living on the Chesapeake.

This book is about the global ecological impacts from the natural resources industries. It contains a collection of papers on topics ranging from the importance of biodiversity to best practices according to industry experts. The book promotes the goals of conservation and sustainable development through collaboration and cooperation. One chapter discusses the Camp Caiman Gold Project in French Guiana. This case study shows how a local community worked with non-government organizations (NGOs) to bring environmental problems to the government.

Scientists have named the most recent geological time period the “Anthropocene" (age of humans). A majority of scientists now believe humans are altering various earth system processes—including our weather patterns. This very readable book argues that climate change and global warming affect us all. The book also offers information on how we can participate in solving this problem. Chapter 11 tells the story of the golden toad in the Monteverde cloud forest reserve in Costa Rica.

In 2015, media outlets were abuzz with the news of the discovery of a sunken slave ship near the coast of South Africa. The Portuguese slave ship Sao José Paquete de Africa (often shortened to Sao José) began its journey in 1794 from Mozambique, heading to the cotton and rice plantations of Brazil with a cargo of roughly 500 African captives. The ship never reached its destination—as it rounded the Cape of Good Hope, it was ripped apart by high winds and sank just off the coast. Although the crew survived, 212 of the slaves drowned.