Watch, Read, Listen

"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

In theory, putting on an art exhibition is a rather formulaic process. You develop a theme, select works, design a layout for the gallery, and then, in the final weeks before opening, the show is installed according to plan.

Green turtle. Jowl with spinach. Coconut cake. Crab à la Mayonnaise. What's on your Thanksgiving menu? If you and yours celebrated the holiday in late 19th-century California, your table might have buckled under the weight of some of these delicacies