Rauner Special Collections Library

In addition to our current collections of phenomenal books and manuscripts, we are always collecting new amazing items that we know will be used eagerly by students in our classrooms. The breadth and depth of our teaching across the curriculum is represented in the following list of recent acquisitions, all of which were added to our shelves over the last three or four months.

When A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, it came with the subtitle "Being a ghost story of Christmas." Ghosts might not be the first thing we think of at Christmas-time, but in the U.K. there is a well-established storytelling tradition on just that subject. It's difficult to say if Dickens is completely to blame for this, or if he merely provided the literary text that brought an existing folk practice into a more traceable medium.

One of my responsibilities at Rauner is ingesting PDF scans of archival material into our digital repository for long-term preservation. If you request a scan of an entire folder from us, after it is delivered to you, it will almost certainly pass through my laptop. We scan and deliver thousands of pages of files a year, and I don’t read them all, but if something happens to spark my curiosity, I do like to take a look. This is how I came across this surprising find earlier this year. Hidden in Box 4 Folder 1 of the Dinsmoor family papers, I found a secret message.