On April 27, from 6 to 8 p.m., the University Libraries will hold its Recent Acquisitions Evening in Wilson Library’s Fearrington Reading Room. Please join the Libraries in celebrating outstanding additions to the Wilson Special Collections from the last three years.
During this open-house event, Library staff members will guide you in an up-close experience with rare and one-of-a-kind items from the North Carolina Collection, Rare Book Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Southern Historical Collection and University Archives. These items illustrate why Carolina’s libraries are a point of pride and a destination for research, learning and wonder.
You will have the opportunity to engage with items from across the Special Collections, including materials from:
- Outstanding images from the archives of photographers Roland L. Freeman and Burk Uzzle.
- Scripts and other documents from the collection of comedian Lewis Black.
- Papers from recently retired Rep. G.K. Butterfield.
- Works from the Florence Fearrington Collection, including children’s books on natural history and shell illustrations.
- Woodblocks used to print publications for the Propaganda Fide press. This collection is the University Libraries’ 9 millionth “volume.”
To learn more about Recent Acquisitions Evening, read a Q&A with event organizers Elizabeth Ott and Alison Barnett. You can also get a first look at a few of the items that will be on display.
Roland Freeman is one of the most important and prolific photographers of twentieth-century Black life. His archive, including this photo, “Community Elders, Mississippi,” is now part of the Southern Folklife Collection at Wilson Special Collections Library. (Photo by Roland L. Freeman, July 1975.)
Comedian Lewis Black ’70, Scripts donated his plays, television pilot scripts and other materials to Wilson Library’s Southern Historical Collection in 2021. Here, pages from “A Pizza and A Beer in Search of a Saturday Night” and “Crossing the Crab Nebula” are pictured alongside Black’s handwritten notes.
U.S. Representative G.K. Butterfield visits Louis Round Wilson Library to examine some of his donated collection and meet with library staff. Materials from throughout Butterfields life as a civil rights activist, lawyer, judge and legislator are part of the Southern Historical Collection. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill, January 3, 2022.)
Florence Fearrington ’58 donated more than 4,000 items, including 1,900 rare books on the subject of natural history, to the Wilson Special Collections Library. They include Hires Yoichiro’s color woodcuts of shells, created in 1914.
University Libraries recently acquired 900 woodcut printing blocks from the Propaganda Fide press. The blocks date from 1625 to 1850 and contain a number of languages, from East Asian to Middle Eastern, Slavic and Greek. (Johnny Andrews/UNC-Chapel Hill)
