Rauner Special Collections Library

Feeling a bit brought down by the season? You’re not the only one. This week we’re highlighting a wry little number, currently on display as part of our “A Ghost Story for Christmas” exhibit. John Updike’s The Twelve Terrors of Christmas attempts to distill the parts of the holiday that inspire more dread than joy in its celebrants into twelve poems. Most of these are commercial trappings like "The Specials" and "Fear of Not Giving Enough". But some are more existential, with the final item on the list being "The Dark".

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.