Part 1 of a Journey through the Rare Books Room

Merry Christmas to all of you!  Hope your Holiday season has been off to a wonderful start!  As a special gift, I'm posting Part 1 of my visual journey through a Rare Books Library of Children's books!!  Enjoy:

Earlier this past semester, I had a chance to delve into the Baldwin Library for my classes.  The Baldwin is a library of historical children's literature, so pretty much an awesome rare books collections filled with children's books, old and new!  So I wanted to post a here a sort of visual tour, not a exhaustive one, but just some of the treasures I saw that day during our class time there.  Hope you enjoy (There are even a few videos I took, one with one of the original pop up books, look for them below!)!

So, this library has more than 130,000 books and periodicals in it's collection, so we got a sampling of some of the best and most interesting pieces:

A tiny "thumbnail" Bible:

A really old and AMAZING pop up book!!:

Peter Pan Portfolio of Arthur Rackham's illustrations!

Thought I'd include this video as well, to get a sense of the texture of working with this portfolio:

More from the collection:

I had never seen these illustrations for James and the Giant Peach, but I just fell in love with them:

Really old Red Riding Hood, I wish I could remember the dates!

This book was a collection of tons of illustrations from Randolph Caldecott, and there were just some of the most beautiful illustrations in here, every time I flipped to a random page I'd just find another wonderful image!