That’s the message of Northwestern University Library’s new exhibit “Life Turns on Two Wheels,” which runs from April 29 to June 26, 2008 in the Main Library at 1970 Campus Drive. In addition to historical materials, the exhibit encompasses a series of events and lectures on related topics.

“What can you do with one wheel?” asks Transportation Library head Roberto Sarmiento, who co-curated the exhibit along with Art Collection head Russ Clement. “But take two wheels, connect them with a pole, and now you have a vehicle that can transport people and goods over long distances.”

Sarmiento and Clement wanted to showcase the ways in which advances in two-wheeled technology have changed people’s lives. For instance:

• In technological terms, the jump from cart to chariot (which was introduced by the Indo-Europeans in about 2,000 B.C.), was roughly equivalent to the jump from carriage to car. Carts had heavy, solid-wood wheels and were pulled by oxen, so they were by nature slow. Chariot wheels had spokes, which made them much lighter, and the vehicles were pulled by horses—a huge advantage in both transportation and warfare situations for their inventors.

• The rickshaw was actually a fairly recent invention, dating back only to the mid-nineteenth century. It originated in Japan, where it caught on immediately because it was a cheap form of transport available to the masses. The Japanese exported it to China and India, and while recently there have been attempts to ban it in several Southeast Asian countries, mainly for safety reasons, these attempts have met stiff resistance because the vehicles are critical to the livelihoods of so many people.

• The bicycle was considered a tool of the early women’s liberation movement. It offered women a way to rebel against the establishment and advocate for their rights. Frances Willard, of Evanston, adopted it enthusiastically at the age of 53 and once said, “If I am asked to explain why I learned the bicycle I should say I did it as an act of grace, if not of actual religion.”

Events and lectures associated with the exhibit explore and highlight the way two-wheel transport enhances our lifestyles today. These include:

May 10: Saturday Bicycle Double-Feature. In conjunction with the Library, the Block Cinema offers free screenings of two bicycle cult-classics: “The Bicycle Thief” at 1 p.m. and “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” at 3 p.m.
May 14: Lecture on “Chariots and Charioteering in the Ancient Roman World” by Dr. Lee Brice, of Western Illinois University, 6:30-7:30 p.m. University Library, Forum Room.
May 16: On “Bike to Work Day,” the Library and the Athletics and Recreation Department will co-sponsor campus events in support of the NU bicycling community. From 8 to 10 a.m., bagels and refreshments will be provided free for cyclists at SPAC. From 11:30 to 1:30, the Wilmette Bike & Sport Shop will hold a series of mini-clinics on Library Plaza on topics like bike maintenance, repair, and security.
May 19: F.K Day and Leah Missbach Day of the World Bicycle Relief Fund will talk about their mission to provide access to independence and livelihood in developing countries through “The Power of Bicycles.” 6:30-8 p.m. University Library, Forum Room.

The exhibit will also highlight the work of local organizations, including the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation and The Recyclery.

For more information, contact Clare Roccaforte at 847-467-5918 or c-roccaforte@northwestern.edu.

Authorized by the Office of the Provost and in conjunction with Facilities Management, this comprehensive study will consider space needs the Northwestern University Library, Galter Health Sciences Library, and the Pritzker Legal Research Center, and propose a long-range plan to suggest approaches to meeting those needs. The architectural firm RMJM Hillier has been selected to conduct the master plan study and will be working with University faculty, students, and staff over the next six months to examine existing spaces and look at new ways to utilize these spaces to continue to provide essential services and perhaps new services desired by the campus community.

In the coming months, RMJM Hillier will be conducting a web-based survey of faculty and students, randomly selecting participants. This spring, if you are selected to participate, we encourage you to represent your peers and complete the survey. Northwestern University Library and Facilities Management will provide forums for general comments on the planning in summer 2008 and responses to proposals in fall 2008.

Questions, comments and feedback may be directed via email to planning@northwestern.edu or to your library liaison.

Updates to the planning process will be posted at the planning website.

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Brought to you by University Archives at Northwestern University Library.

Airline menu cover

But travel by air wasn't always so grim. And to prove it -- just in time for 2007's busiest air travel season -- Northwestern University Library this week launched a Web site featuring hundreds of digitally reproduced airline menus from the 1950s to the present that can be viewed in high resolution and in minute detail.

The menus hark back to days when an in-flight glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label cost all of 50 cents and a beer half of that if free alcoholic beverages were not an option.

"The 380-plus menus not only document the history of airline cuisine, they conjure up a time when flying was a more elegant, more comfortable form of travel," says Robert Sarmiento, head of Northwestern University's Transportation Library. Though primarily airline menus, the collection includes items from cruise ships and railroads.

Written in English, Japanese, French, Urdu, Chinese, Spanish and other languages the menus -- from 54 national and international transportation companies -- are sometimes as noteworthy for their artwork as for their culinary aspects.

Hear the full audio interview in mp3 format
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Visit the website of the Chicago Historical Homicide Website , a searchable database of murder cases in Chicago from 1870-1930.

Starting September 25, 2007 the Main and Science & Engineering Libraries will open earlier on Sundays with both libraries opening their doors at 10am. The Main Library will extend hours until 3am Sunday through Thursday. The Science & Engineering Library will extend hours until 2am Sunday through Thursday.

Click here for specific Library department hours.

Besides this glimpse of Willie’s past, Northwestern University Library offers plenty of resources and services to help with your transition to student life here. We’re offering tours all week to give you an overview of the building and our services, and next to the InfoCommons you’ll find a table loaded with publications about our resources. In the first-floor exhibition cases, you’ll also find an exhibit featuring the wealth of Library materials related to the One Book, One Northwestern selection Go Tell It On the Mountain.

And keep your eye on this area of our homepage. It’s where we announce Library news including exhibits, events, and updates on our services. In the coming weeks, we’ll bring you more quick Northwestern history lessons, courtesy of our University Archives, as well as interviews with campus personalities who’ve come to the Library to make—or at least write—history.

View on YouTube (above: click on the left arrow twice and wait for loading), or download the mp4 version (below: may not work if you don't yet have the right software installed on your computer):

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The book retrieval service will also be offered at the Science-Engineering Library, with pick-up at the SEL Circulation desk; but delivery of SEL books to offices through University mail will not begin until October.

Requests can be made online.

“Sculpturally, it’s beautiful,” says Donia Conn, Northwestern University Library’s Head of Conservation Services, “and if the artist calls it a book, it’s a book.”

“Prairie Palimpsest #3: Enlichened” is among the 16 works featured in this year’s annual traveling Chicago Hand Bookbinders exhibit, “High & Low,” in the Library’s main floor exhibit space from July 3 through September 13. The display also includes Eileen Madden’s “Lammas Moon,” a poem by William Morgan printed in hand-set type in silvery ink on long sheets of hand-made indigo paper. Silvia R. Alotta’s “Roller Coaster” features a pop-up roller coaster silhouette. Karen Hanmer’s “The Sleepwalkers” is a copy of Arthur Koestler’s 1959 bestselling history of astronomy bound in hand-made vellum, which Conn describes as “goat skin that’s soaked in lye, stretched to the gills, and scraped and scraped and scraped. It’s really difficult to work with, but it’s soft and smooth and supple and it’s practically alive; no two books you bound with it would ever look alike.”

Chicago Hand Bookbinders is an organization of amateur, student, and professional binders that was founded in 1978 to promote awareness and appreciation of hand-made books. Conn says over the years, the field of bookbinding has broadened its scope from focusing mainly on fine bindings to including the sorts of sculptural and artistic interpretations represented in the current exhibit. “The question this exhibit always raises,” she says, “is: what is a book?”

For more information on Chicago Hand Bookbinders, visit www.chicagohandbookbinders.org.

After an enthusiastic report from the librarian at the Royal University in Berlin concluded that this collection would “serve as an admirable nucleus around which a great library might gradually grow,” Bonbright quickly and shrewdly negotiated a deal to pack up the 20,000-volume collection and ship it to Evanston. Says Assistant University Librarian for Collection Management Jeff Garrett, “This was a ‘coup de bibliotheque’ that was recalled painfully by intellectual Germany for decades thereafter. As late as 1925, Berlin library historian Karl M. Meyer would express ‘regret that this library could not have been kept for the Empire.’”

Garrett is co-curator, with McCormick Library of Special Collections curator Russell Maylone, of a new University Library exhibit called “An Admirable Nucleus: The Prussian Purchase at the Heart of Today’s Northwestern University Library.” Free and open to the public during regular Library hours, it runs May 1 through June 28 in the Main Library’s first-floor exhibit space and on the third floor of historic Deering Library.

In three segments, the exhibit highlights three different facets of Bonbright’s purchase: the history of the acquisition, including the place of collector Schulze at the epicenter of 19th century German scholarship; a display of some of the original volumes, many of them very rare in the library world today; and a look at how profoundly scholarly research has changed from the time of Schulze, when scholars had to travel the globe to consult the sorts of works he collected in his library, to today, when libraries deliver these texts, word-searchable and annotated, literally into the laps of their fully wired (and wireless) student populations.

Schulze was an enormously influential figure in the early 19th century Prussian educational bureaucracy, who championed Hegelian philosophy and was a progressive force in the shaping of modern European education. Co-curator Garrett tells his story—and the story of how Bonbright mobilized Northwestern’s president and trustees to buy the collection at a moment of perfect historical serendipity—through the first part of the exhibit, as well as in an audio broadcast available to stream online or as an MP3 download.

Now known as the Greenleaf Library, after the Northwestern trustee who donated the funds for its purchase, Schulze’s collection contains 13 books from the 15th century, more than 500 volumes from the 16th, and thousands from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Among its unique and priceless volumes are the first printed texts by classical Greek historian Herodotus (published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1502); the first appearance of the nine plays of Aristophanes in the original Greek (published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1498); and the first publication of the complete known works of Archimedes, again in the original Greek (published in Basel in 1544).

“This collection includes the first appearances in print of most of the major classical authors and most of the minor ones,” adds co-curator Maylone. “There are museum catalogs from throughout Europe by the dozen, descriptions of many of the earliest wunderkammer collections in Europe, early literature, history, travels through Europe and especially Italy, and almost the entire range of Renaissance publications of newly excavated ancient treasures.

“Schulze was an omnivorous bibliophile collector who, with enormous knowledge, persistence and drive created this great library,” Maylone says. “And Northwestern was incredibly fortunate to have acquired it.”

Exhibit poster by John Kannenberg

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