Exhibition | What’s your call number?: A Valentine’s Day display
Ah, Valentine’s Day; a celebration of love, passion and devotion. For the occasion, Rare Books and Special Collections is displaying its most fitting materials from several of its eclectic collections.
Items on display include:
From the Sheila R. Bourke Children’s Collection:
• The quiver of love: a collection of valentines ancient and modern, with illustrations by Walter Crane, printed in 1876.
From the William Colgate History of Printing Collection:
• The Bridal Souvenir, illuminated by Samuel Stanesby, printed in 1857.
From the Cookbook Collection:
• Favourite cocoa and chocolate recipes by Mary Moore, printed for Fry-Cadbury in 1900.
From the AV Archival Collection:
• A cassette recording of a talk given by distinguished erotica writer Anaïs Nin at McGill University in 1973.
From the Print Collection:
• Six Valentine's Day cards that illustrate the harsh realities of love by Montreal Star cartoonist Arthur George Racey, printed in 1924.
Also are display are:
• A 1765 Eustache Le Noble matrimonial map.
• Several uncatalogued Victorian era greeting cards. Rare Books has a very large greeting card collection with hundreds, if not thousands of cards from the 19th and 20th centuries.
• Six early Harlequin novels. Rare Books has a collection of 655 Harlequin paperbacks. Not many people know that they started out with mysteries before romance and that they are Canadian.
• Illustrations of the human heart found in 17th and 18th century books from the Osler Library of the History of Medicine.
• Wedding photos from the McGill University Archives, featuring Birks Chapel.