Watch, Read, Listen

Astronomers throughout history have searched the skies in hopes of locating the Star of Bethlehem, the famed star of scripture. Meanwhile botanists have found their very own "Star of Bethlehem" among the Orchid family.

This publishing season, books on the American Revolution and Founding Fathers have garnered tough reviews and a little controversy, but one book stands out as a once-in-a-generation reassessment of scholarship on that subject: The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution.

"What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself." The baptismal certificate of Ludwig van Beethoven is dated Dec. 17, 1770. Since custom dictated that families not wait longer than 24 hours to baptize a newborn, we assume that he began his tumultuous life on Dec. 16, in Bonn, Germany.

Another post in a series from the cataloger of the Anne M. Cranston cookbook collection, which consists of approximately 4,400 British and American cookbooks from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Finding a rare and endangered plant species in the wild is hard enough. What is even more difficult is spotting an albino form of that flower!

With this post we introduce a new Verso series from Shelley Kresan, one of the rare book catalogers in the Library. She is in the process of cataloging the Anne M. Cranston cookbook collection

Heavy boxes of glass. A portable darkroom. Noxious chemicals. A cumbersome camera. Field photography during the U.S. Civil War was an arduous process far removed from the relatively effortless digital image-snapping of today's pocket-sized cameras and phones.

It's a bird.... It's a plane.... It's orchid pollen? Pollen has been flying at the information desk in The Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science this past month! Lucky visitors who were in the Conservatory at the right place and at the right time were able to witness