Tag Archives: vintage

Tigers in the (Mobile) Makerspace

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We do plenty of children’s programs in our gallery space, but this fall we did a special event for a different demographic – Princeton University students! We’ve had a ton of amazing undergrads contribute their talents to Cotsen over the years, and we definitely wanted to send our love back. What better way to show it than historic tigers from the University archives?

The event was a collaboration with our colleagues at the Princeton University Library’s Makerspace, which is housed in the Lewis Library and features a multitude of ways for students, faculty, and staff to gets hands-on experience with artistic equipment and have creative collaborations.

Makerspace Specialist Ariel Ackerly made our gallery the first stop on her innovative “Mobile Makerspace” initiative, bringing a 3D scanner, custom stickers, button makers, and a Cricut machine to the Cotsen Library. She’s planning to visit other destinations on campus too!

There were two sets of images available for stickers and buttons. The first were Pokemon-esque folk tale creatures from a 2016 Cotsen event. Drawn by student Aliisa Lee, the cartoon creatures were paired with their historic tales. The most popular was Moon Rabbit from China. If you’d like to read more about the event, read the tales, and see more illustrations, you’ll find all that here.

moon-rabbit-artwork-by-aliisa-lee The second set of illustrations were from the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, which holds the University archives. Library Collections Specialist April C. Armstrong provided a number of amazing historic tiger images from the Princeton University collections, including the three you see below. April also wrote a fantastic blog post this week that features a brief history of Princeton’s tiger, as well as more interesting tiger images from the vault!

Tiger pasted on the inside cover of the scrapbook made by Charles H. Shick, Princeton Class of 1892. Mudd Manuscript Library. Scrapbook Collection (AC026), Box 161.

1911 postcard series by Christie Whiteman. Mudd Manuscript Library. Historical Postcard Collection (AC045.)

From The Quindecennial (i.e., 15th annual) Dinner of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) Class of 1878, 1893. Mudd Manuscript Library. Princeton University Class Records, Box 10.

The Mobile Makerspace event was a huge success, with students (and staff!) stopping by to try equipment, ask questions, and get a fabulous button or sticker to take home.

Many thanks to Ariel Ackerly for making this event happen! A big shout out to April C. Armstrong at Mudd Library for the historic Princeton University tigers, and to Brianna Garden for digitizing them. Additional thanks to Brandon Johnson, Office of Library Communications, for the event images!

Animals in Kodomo no Kuni

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It’s time for the annual #ColorOurCollections, hosted by the New York Academy of Medicine! Each year libraries, archives, and cultural institutions around the world share free coloring sheets based on their collections.We’ve shared birds and alphabets, but this year we just wanted…CUTE ANIMALS. So we delved into our vaults for Kodomo no kuni (The Land of Children), a Japanese children’s magazine that was in circulation from 1922-1944. It did not disappoint!

You can find our awesome coloring pages here, and you can read more about the magazine in this excellent post on Cotsen’s curatorial blog. If you’re still hankering for cute animals, try some of our blog projects, starting with this bouncy bunny cup!

Or fancy up a hamster…

furry and fabulousPerhaps you’d like to expand to entire household with this tiny dog house

itty bitty home

Or craft a very learned canary…

tweet-reading-is-sweetEven alligators can be cute (and this one is a chomping puppet!):

finished alligator puppetOr make up your own animal entirely!

be you

Cotsen Ghosties

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book cover 3Last Halloween season we took a stroll through our special collections pumpkin patch. Today, we’re looking for ghosts! And we found them in this amazing optical illusion book titled Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions. Showing ghosts everywhere, and of any color. Published by J.H. Brown in London in 1864, the book teaches the concept of “the persistency of impressions, and the production of complementary colours on, the retina.”

The illusion is very simple. In the image above, stare at the small black dot by the ghost’s neck for 20-30 seconds. Then look away at a white wall or ceiling. Her ghostly image will appear in your vision, except in different colors (in this case green wreath, blue ghost)!

Scientifically speaking, this is called an afterimage. The color receptors in your eyes work in pairs (red/green, blue/yellow, etc.). When you stare at the drawing and one color fatigues your receptors, the other receptor will step in and dominate for a bit.

The book has a very lengthy description of this concept, as well as viewing instructions that include having the “gaslight turned low.”

Spectropia also has a disclaimer at the beginning: “As an apology for the apparent disregard of taste and fine art in the plates, such figures are selected as best serve the purpose for which they are intended.”

I wish they might have reprinted the disclaimer before THIS image, which honestly is going to haunt me clear through December:

The book concludes with a grand finale image that is not a ghost, but a rainbow! Definitely try this one, because it is so cool to see the colors flip in the afterimage!

Looking more more optical spooky fun? Try making our tabletop Pepper’s Ghost illusion!

Images from Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions. Showing ghosts everywhere, and of any color. J.H. Brown, London. Griffith and Farran.1864. Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.