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Special Hours: Day After Thanksgiving

November 24, 2015

The reading room in Special Collections will be open from noon to 4 p.m. on the day after Thanksgiving (Friday, November 27) and closed on Thanksgiving Day (university holiday). If these special hours for Friday pose a problem for your research, please contact us by Wednesday, November 25 (telephone: 608-262-3243 | email: askspecial@library.wisc.edu); and we will do our best to accommodate your research needs. We will resume our regular reading room hours — Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — on Monday, November 30.

Illustration of turkeys, from Pierre Belon, L’histoire de la nature des oyseaux: Avec leur descriptions & naifs portraicts retirez du naturel: Escrite en sept livres (Paris : G. Corrozet, 1555). Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Call number: 739090 noncurrent.

With this illustration of the turkeys in Pierre Belon’s treatise of 1555 on the natural history of birds come our best wishes for Thanksgiving.

The French naturalist Belon (1517-1564) has been described as “the first to bring order into the world of feathered animals, distinguishing between raptorial birds, diurnal birds of prey, web – footed birds, river birds, field birds, etc.” (M. Wong’s article in the Complete dictionary of scientific biography, vol. 1, 2008). Special Collections holds a half dozen books by Belon, and his work also figures in titles by other authors among our holdings. Belon enjoyed the patronage of Charles IX, and was called by Pavlov the “prophet of comparative anatomy.”