Published: Paris, 1870 Through the years, many members of MIT’s faculty have donated materials and resources to help build the Libraries’ collections.  This volume was presented to the Libraries by Professor Charles R. Cross, an early head of the Physics Department. Cross was the individual who invited Alexander Graham Bell to use MIT’s facilities for research that would result in Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876. Cross was also a major academic innovator, having developed MIT’s electrical engineering curriculum, the first in the nation. An early MIT graduate, Cross taught at the Institute from 1870 to 1917. He donated […]

Published: London, 1869 This volume illustrates beautifully what could come of a 19th century publisher’s determination to sell books: finely detailed cloth bindings embellished with gold accents, intriguing color plates, and a reader-friendly approach to the sciences. As the author notes in her preface, the book was written “to attract those readers who, unversed in microscopic marvels, might possibly feel repelled by a complete and lengthened treatise.” Her publisher took additional steps to make the volume non-repellent. MIT owns two copies of the third edition of The Microscope; one is red, the other green. An already-attractive cover is rendered even […]

Published: London, ca. 1868 In mid-19th-century Britain, as the Industrial Revolution flourished and the empire prospered, popularized science and natural history became increasingly favored forms of entertainment for the growing middle classes. National museums, world’s fairs and expositions, and public lectures and demonstrations showed off imperial spoils as well as sharing “useful knowledge” and the output of the emerging scientific professions. At the same time, children’s literature was taking off to meet growing demand for educational material. Publishers like Routledge rose to meet this demand, producing such books as Papers for Thoughtful Girls, Jabez Hogg on the Microscope, Rev. J.G. […]

Published: London, 1867 This volume is not a first edition, nor is it part of the Libraries’ rare and special collections. It’s in the open stacks, part of a 19-volume set of the novels of Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer Lytton, 1st Baron. Though this specific title hasn’t circulated during the past few years, some of Bulwer Lytton’s many other novels are still read on occasion. His Last Days of Pompeii has been filmed repeatedly (and badly) beginning in the silent era and up through the 1980s, when it was turned into a TV miniseries. But if the author is […]

Published: Philadelphia, 1866 “When a book reaches its sixth edition,” we read here, “a preface is hardly needed.”  Still today, the continuous reprinting of a work is often a mark of its enduring value.  When it came to obstetrics in the latter half of the 19th century, both Europeans and Americans turned to Pierre Cazeaux, an unchallenged expert who had served on the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris and worked at one of Paris’s largest lying-in hospitals.  As late as 1884, when the seventh American edition of this work was published, The Weekly Medical Review still lauded […]

Published: London, 1865 Today, we showcase a book that is important for its intellectual and artistic content, and also serves as an outstanding example of the art and technology of colored book illustration. Owen Jones studied architecture, but his real interest was in architectural ornament. Early in his career he was heavily influenced by Egyptian, Turkish, and Moorish aesthetics. His designs for the interior of London’s Christ Church (1842) and, particularly, for the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851, attracted wide attention. The Grammar of Ornament is Jones’ attempt to articulate specific principles of decorative beauty, with a […]

Published: London, 1864 The Civil War had a major impact on MIT’s early history. On April 10, 1861, Governor John Andrew signed the act of the Massachusetts Legislature establishing the Institute. Exactly two days later Fort Sumter was attacked, and the conflagration began. Of course MIT’s opening would be delayed. But the nightmare at the root of the war – slavery – was already an issue of importance to MIT’s founder, William Barton Rogers. His personal library, now part of the MIT Libraries’ special collections, includes tracts condemning the practice. This particular antislavery volume is inscribed to Rogers by its […]

Published: Boston, 1862 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. did it all: doctor, professor, poet, novelist, BFF with Emerson and Longfellow, and 19th century superstar.  He’s remembered for coining the term “anaesthesia,” as well as for noting – before the articulation of germ theory – that doctors themselves could serve as unwitting disease carriers. As an author Holmes was popular and esteemed; his poem “Old Ironsides” is widely credited with saving the USS Constitution from the scrapheap. This is an extended version of a lecture in which Holmes instructs a new Harvard class of doctors-in-training to discard the dangerous, discredited assumptions of […]