Letterlocking book named one of The Wall Street Journal’s best of the season
Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter by Jana Dambrogio, the Libraries’ Thomas F. Peterson (1957) Conservator, and Daniel Starza Smith was named to The Wall Street Journal’s best reading of the season for summer 2025. In the book, Dambrogio and Smith, who have pioneered the field over the last 10 years, tell the fascinating story of this centuries-old document security technology. With more than 300 images and diagrams, Letterlocking explores the practice’s history through real examples from all over the world and even offers a comprehensive guide to making one’s own locked letters.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light: A Century of Cultural Heritage Preservation in Aleppo
The newest Maihuagen Gallery exhibit draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. Ink, Stone, and Silver Light explores how Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved through manuscripts, built form, and photography. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place. The exhibit is on view in the Maihaugen Gallery through December 11.