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Green, Green — It’s Green, They Say. A Selection of Books from Special Collections

August 24 – November 20, 2015

In celebration of the lush landscape of summer, this exhibit drew upon the holdings of Special Collections to explore the color green — from matters botanical to dye samples, book bindings to frogs. Examples included

  • Elizabeth Blackwell, botanist, A curious herbal: Containing five hundred cuts, of the most useful plants, which are now used in the practice of physick, engraved on folio copper plates, after drawings, taken from the life (1739)
  • works on the theory and practice of aniline dyes
  • books from the Thordarson Collection, bound by Rivière & Sons in a distinctive bottle green with marbled endpapers to match
  • Sarah Wyman Whitman’s binding design for Sarah Orne Jewett’s The country of the pointed firs (1896), as highlighted in Publishers’ Bindings Online, 1815-1930
  • John Norris Wood’s An alphabet in praise of frogs & toads, from the Inky Parrot Press, as well as illustrations of ferns and mosses, maps of the Emerald Isle and of Greenland, early editions of The Emerald City of Oz, book covers designed by Margaret Armstrong, and many other works. Check here for a checklist of titles exhibited.
Cover design by Sarah Wyman Whitman for Sarah Orne Jewett’s The country of the pointed firs (1896). Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Binding design digitized as part of Publishers’ bindings online, 1815-1930.
Pears, from George Brookshaw, Groups of fruit: accurately drawn and coloured after nature, with full directions for the young artist: designed as a companion to the treatise on flowers and birds. One of two editions in the Thordarson Collection, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Edition of 1817 digitized as part of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections.
Endpaper from William Cole, Philosophical remarks on the theory of comets (London : Printed by J. Barfield … for B. J. Holdsworth … , 1823). Thordarson Collection, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.