WHEN: Saturday, January 11, 11 a.m.

WHERE: National Museum of Natural History, 10th St. & Constitution Ave. NW

RSVP: By email to Paul Levy ’72 by January 9.

Leslie Overstreet ’71, Curator of Natural-History Rare Books in the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, will lead a tour of the rare book collection focused on the materials and structures of books from the hand-press era (roughly 1450–1850) and what they reveal about any individual book. In addition, the hand-coloring of scientific illustrations in these books was enormously important, and naturalists’ attempts to standardize both the pigments used in the prints and the names of colors in textual descriptions will also be a focus of the tour. Come explore:

• books bound in pigskin, vellum, calf, goat, and sheep… and what a book bound in blind-stamped pigskin tells you compared to one in gilt-decorated morocco;

• watermarks in paper that indicate folio, quarto, or octavo formats, and how format affects the printing and book-binding processes;

• illustrations colored differently from one copy of a book to another, and what gamboge means.

Tours are offered at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. There are strict limits on the number of attendees who can be in the rare book room. When you RSVP, please say whether both times are fine and, if not, which one you can do. If these times fill up, a third tour is possible at 3 p.m.

Because this tour has sold out in the past, we will only be reserving spots for guests once all alumni have been accommodated. No children under the age of 10 years.