Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities

New acquisitions, unique documents, and visual and textual curiosities from the collections.
  • Page from La fin du monde filmee par l’Ange N.-D. by Blaise Cendrars; Image by Fernand Leger

    The Art and Craft of Pochoir

    March 30, 2020

    For several years, I had the pleasure of writing articles on book and print culture for Design Observer I'm taking the opportunity to flesh out some of those articles into teaching moments.

  • The Forever Bond (99 per cent invisible)

    January 7, 2020

    Rouwenhurst, on behalf of Yale’s Center for International Finance, actually purchased one of the oldest active bonds to date — a 1648 corporate Dutch water authority bond written on goatskin that was originally issued to raise money for the construction of a pier. Most of the oldest active perpetual bonds are from this very same Dutch water board, because this board has been in charge of maintaining all of the dams and levees and dikes in a given corner of the Netherlands for hundreds of years and is very stable. You don’t need a record of ownership to keep the bond active, but the catch is that the bearer of the bond needs to travel to the water board’s registrar’s office to have it notated, meaning the staff at Yale needs to travel all the way to Holland to maintain it.

  • Maggot and Crow

    November 1, 2019

    Recent Ruth Stephan Research Fellows Margaret Woodward and Justy Phillips on writing, creativity, and collaboration

  • New Scholarship: Jennifer Carr on Didier Mutel

    May 22, 2019

    "Acid Reams: The Corrosive Craft of Didier Mutel" A pop-up exhibition curated by Jennifer Carr in Professor Karin Roffman’s Literary Biography: Archives and Life Stories master class at Beinecke Library, May 2019

  • Female American Poets: Archival Connections

    April 16, 2019

    The next poet in our series, Female American Poets: Archival Connections, is Maya Angelou. A poet, autobiographer, activist, and director, Angelou explores sound, memory, and sexuality in her poetry and prose. Her work investigates and colors the history of Black oppression, activism, and power in America.