Shelf Life

In this episode, we’re joined by scholars Bill Wallace and Isabella Magni to dissect a letter written by Michelangelo in 1545. But we’re less interested in what the letter says than in the way it was written. What does Michelangelo’s style of handwriting reveal about who he was as an artist and how he saw himself in Renaissance Italian society? 

Non-lexical vocables—your fa-la-la’s and hey-nonny-no’s—didn’t originate as nonsense filler-syllables for brightening up a song. In Renaissance England, they were used to advance a song’s satirical critique of society or as a lyrical surrogate for something that couldn’t be expressed explicitly. 

Newberry research fellow Katie Bank tells us all about the history and legacy of non-lexical vocables.

Host: Newberry Fellowships Manager Keelin Burke

Copies of the Gutenberg Bible weren’t always prized collectors’ items. During the Reformation, which emphasized the importance of vernacular translations of the Bible over the canonical Latin version, many Gutenberg Bibles collected dust or worse: disbound and scattered to the winds, their pages were used to bind other books or to wrap and protect archival documents. Eric White, Curator of Rare Books at the Princeton University Library (and author of "Editio Princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible"), tells us about his quest to find these fragments, two of which are right here at the Newberry. Eric speaks with Jill Gage, the Newberry’s curator of printing history.

Newberry conservators systematically intercept spiders, ants, book lice, and other bugs before they can reach the treasures in our collection. We speak with conservation staff about this important (and kind of gross) work, and then we join them as they patrol the deepest recesses of the library for pests. 

Book historian (and esteemed Twitter user) Sarah Werner discusses memes, reaction GIFs, and the promise and peril of being a library on social media.