Faculty, staff, and students engaging with artists’ books, and rarebooks at Books and Bites’s spring 2024 event in the reading room at Rotch Library.
Books and Bites – an annual event highlighting new acquisitions, rare materials, ephemera, zines, and artists’ books – has become biannual with a return this fall. While previous events have been held in Rotch Library, this one was held on a different side of campus in the Distinctive Collections reading room on November 20, 2024. It offered a curated selection of new publications, rare collections, and digital resources.
Select highlights from the Fall 2024 event include:
- The artists’ book /The Record/ by Anne Covell uses the Internet Archive screenshot captures of whitehouse.gov to explore the transition from the Obama to Trump administration through snapshots of whitehouse.gov and the erasure of key issues like health care, education, immigration, and keyword searches for terms such as “climate change,” “LGBT,” and “civil rights.” Request to view.
- Historic Photo Album Documenting a Heiliglandfahrt (Holy Land journey): A well-preserved 1928 album documents a Heiliglandfahrt (Holy Land journey) undertaken by a German travel group, likely from Stuttgart, between April 9–29, 1928. The album (36 x 25 cm) features 109 vintage photographs showcasing famous landmarks, rare street scenes, and snapshots of daily life in cities such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nablus, as well as the countryside. Accompanying the album is a folder with 17 large vintage printouts (28 x 38.5 cm), mounted on thick cardboard (48 x 63.5 cm), some of which were likely produced for exhibition purposes. These prints include both duplicates from the album and additional images from the region. Request to view by contacting AKDC.
- Printed in 1647, Johannes Hevelius’ Selenographia contains the first topographical maps of the moon. More than 300 years before humans stepped onto the moon’s surface, Hevelius conducted observations using his telescope documenting craters, valleys, and slopes from his homemade rooftop observatory. Request to View.
Visitors explored recent library acquisitions and collection highlights and enjoyed light bites and refreshments afterward. The event continues to bridge academic research with accessible, engaging discovery, inviting students, researchers, and design enthusiasts to engage with the collections.
The past success of Books and Bites led to the decision to host two events per year: one on the Hayden side of campus and one at Rotch Library. We hope this will ensure the event is more accessible to a broader range of communities across campus. Join us at Rotch Library on March 11, 2025, for the next biannual Books and Bites event that will be a part of Artfinity, the MIT Arts Festival program. The theme will be techno-vernacular creativity, and the event will feature titles that reflect discovering new perspectives and expanding intellectual horizons.
MIT community engaging with rare and circulating materials at the fall 2024 Books and Bites event in the Distinctive Collections Reading Room.
You can view titles featured in past Books and Bites events at these links: Fall 2024 and Spring 2024. We invite you to request to view the titles in the Distinctive Collections reading room using the QR codes or hyperlinks listed in the documents.
Books and Bites Fall 2024 curators:
- Kai Alexis Smith, Architecture & Planning Librarian
- Matt Saba, Program Head, Aga Khan Documentation Center
- Rebecca Bramlett, Instruction & Outreach Archivist, Distinctive Collections
- Rami Alafandi, Collections Curator, Aga Khan Documentation Center
- Amanda Hawk, Public Services Manager, Distinctive Collections
