Department of Rare Books Special Collections and Preservation

We dug into our special collections to highlight a sampling of hand lettering, from ancient hieroglyphs to modern conscripts.

Chicago and Delhi. Rome and Rochester. The students in the 100-level course “The City: Contested Spaces” take a virtual tour of them all, while pondering an overarching question—can people’s lives be reshaped by redesigning urban spaces?

For decades, Edward Atwater ’50, a professor emeritus of medicine at the Medical Center, has collected medical history artifacts. In 2007, he began turning his collection of more than 8,000 AIDS education posters over to the University and it is now the world’s largest single collection of visual resources related to AIDS and HIV.

Forgotten for over a century, a recently discovered trove of more than a hundred letters fills in the political details of how the suffrage movement was run and the women activists who ran it.

“I knew I had it,” says Linda Dudman of the University Health Service. “I knew it was a very important item to keep, but I never quite knew what to do with it.” Now the 12-foot square panel will be on display through February and finds a new home in River Campus Libraries.

This year, The New York Times list of the 100 most notable books for 2016 included two that were written by authors who used the River Campus Libraries’ Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation renowned collections for their work.

Founded by University of Rochester students in 1971, the Empty Closet is one of the oldest continuously published LGBT papers in the United States. Its pages reflect the story of the AIDS epidemic.

The AIDS Education Poster Collection, housed in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, is the world’s largest single online collection of visual resources related to the disease.

Archived letters between artist Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz were the inspiration for the Letters from Georgia song cycle by Kevin Puts ’94E, ’99E (DMA). Rochester's collections--like others around the world--provide insight in an age of email and texting.

For the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’s death, students and librarians are hosting an exhibit and a presentation examining how Cervantes and Quixote have inspired interpretations and representations across the centuries.