What happens when great printers, binders, and publishers decide to go small? Miniature books of exquisite craft, structural diversity, and outsized beauty. Come see one hundred tiny volumes spanning four centuries and three continents. Coincides with the 2018 Miniature Book Society Grand Conclave in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Highlights from the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library and the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry featuring the history of scientific accomplishment, patient care, social transformation, and technological evolution at UVA.

Ever since his untimely death at 17, Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) has been one of England’s most fascinating literary figures. His “Rowley Poems”— pseudo-medieval poetry presented as the work of a 15th-century priest—is one of the most famous of all literary hoaxes. That England’s leading men of letters were so unprepared to expose it spurred important advances in textual scholarship. Yet underpinning Chatterton’s forgery was prodigious literary talent, tragically silenced by his presumed suicide.

Thomas Jefferson conceived the University of Virginia between 1814 and 1826 as a village, a self-contained unit with a total population of approximately 400. The University’s architecture from that period uniquely represented the essential ideals of Jefferson’s educational and political philosophies and served as an integral part of the students’ education.

How did readers annotate, mark, and customize their books in an age when the book was king? And what are we to make of those unique volumes now? The Book Traces project is an attempt to answer those questions by looking at individual copies of 19th and early 20th-century books on the shelves of libraries. Over the past two years, here at the University of Virginia, the Book Traces team has examined over 100,000 books from Alderman and other libraries on Grounds, looking for evidence of use by their original owners.

The exhibition, presented in partnership with the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, highlights the ecological disaster created by abandoned and discarded fishing nets off the coast of northeastern Australia. These “ghost nets” are a by-product of the commercial fishing industry: ghost nets drift on the ocean currents, trapping a rich array of marine life and eventually drifting to the ocean floor, suffocating marine animals and coral reefs and creating long term damage to the marine environment.

Inspired by the recent conservation treatment of a portrait of Burroughs painted by Orlando Rouland, this exhibition brings an important American naturalist back to light. The painting serves as the focal point of the exhibition, tying together writer, artist, collector, and library. The exhibition showcases books, manuscripts, and other materials from the Burroughs collection. John Burroughs’ (1837-1921) essays on nature were widely read by both scholars and the reading public during his lifetime.