Rare Book School - Exhibitions Program

Exhibitions Program

In 1995, RBS began to mount book exhibitions in the Dome Room of the UVa Rotunda, the principal room of the University. (The UVa Library's Special Collections department mounted its own exhibitions in Alderman Library's McGregor Room until 2004, when it shifted its operations to a space in the new building, Harrison/Small.) In recent years most of the exhibitions have been conceived and mounted by students in one or another of Terry Belanger's undergraduate courses in the history of the book. Among the more notable student exhibitions are "Books Go to War: Armed Service Editions in World War II," curated in 1996 by Daniel J. Miller ('96); "Two for a Nickel," an exhibition of Thomas Jefferson and Monticello ephemera, curated in 1999 by Elliot Tally ('99); "Reading with and without Dick and Jane: the Politics of Literacy in c20 America", curated in 2003 by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer ('03); and "The Call of the Wild: Character Building and the Boy Scout Handbook," curated in 2005 by William Ingram ('05). RBS's ongoing program of large-scale book exhibitions using undergraduate curators who have almost complete control over their contents is thought to be the only one of its kind in the United States. Other RBS exhibitions include the widely-reviewed "Eyre Apparent: An Exhibition Celebrating Charlotte Bronte's Classic Novel," co-curated by John Buchtel (formerly on the RBS staff) and Barbara Heritage (RBS curator of collections, which traveled to the Peabody Institute Library at Johns Hopkins University in 2007, after its 2005-06 showing in the Dome Room.