This photo of students from the class of 1898-1899 in front of Old Main was taken for a newspaper but its publication was delayed for 52 years due to the concerns of the university president.

I love archives because every time I’m in one I find something of intellectual curiosity and value.  Much of the time what I find is the sort of item that an undergraduate professor once told me was really only useful for “good cocktail party conversation.”

At least he deemed it “good.” 

Whether you have always been curious or experienced something yourself, July 2, World UFO Day is the time to find out more about the alleged existence of unidentified flying objects and beings from outer space.  While Special Collections may not have the answers on the existence of aliens (that we know of anyway) we do have manuscript and book collections that might provide more information about the study of this phenomena. 

Within the walls and upon the shelves of Special Collections lie many works, powerful and invaluable. At times, the stories about the books themselves are more marvelous than what appears on their pages.

One such work, devoted scholars, concerns alchemy. (For more, pursue this to that troth trove agreed, the OED, and its entry sub vivo “alchemy”.) What it purports to be, it is almost certainly not; what it is, more fantastic, is forgery.

As cacti in Arizona bloom from April to June, the University of Arizona campus has its very own cactus garden.  With a long history and several moves, the cactus garden survives as the Joseph Wood Krutch Garden, a small plot of land just south of the Administration Building.  Amid a sea of grass, native Arizona plants showcase the beauty of Sonoran Desert plants.

Animals are everywhere. In nature. On our laps. In our lives. On our plates. And one may – or may not – be reading this blog post. Yet human-animal relationships remain largely unexplored. Volumes have been written about animals, but only recently have scholars studied human-animal relations: our use of animals, our interdependence, and ideas underlying the human-animal dichotomy, or prospectively beyond it.

On Wednesday, April 8, 2015, Special Collections saw Lectio Vergiliana, an annual reading of the Roman author, Vergil. This year’s gathering involved a five-hour reading of Book Two of Vergil’s Aeneid by faculty and students from the Classics Department. Organized by Professor Cynthia White, Director of the Basic Latin Program, and graduate students Stephanie Hutchings and Elizabeth Del Curto, the Special Collections classroom was alive with Vergil’s words, clapping and laughter, and good food. There was even a Trojan horse to lend some atmosphere.

University of Arizona alumnus Raúl Héctor Castro, who overcame hardship and discrimination to become Arizona's only Mexican-American governor and a U.S. ambassador, died Friday, April 10 in San Diego at the age of 98.

Castro had many ties to the UA, including his graduation from the James E. Rogers College of Law, his support of a scholarship fund in the Center for Latin American Studies in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and his donation of his manuscript collection to Special Collections at the University of Arizona.

If you were among the standing room only crowds in Special Collections at the recent Tucson Festival of Books you may have noticed Steve Hussman, the new director of Special Collections at the University of Arizona. A sign of his all-hands-on-deck philosophy, Hussman was busy chatting with guests, answering questions about the archives, directing people to exhibitor tents – even scouring his new office for the last few chairs to bring into the Reading Room.

We place ourselves and others. Here. There. Across a divide. Happy together. Those who love cats – those who abhor them. Those who find wonder in puppets – and those who recoil from them.

Maps mark another division: those who use maps – and those who delight in them.

Maps in Special Collections are distinct from those in other campus libraries because of their age or significance. Like our interests, Special Collections maps are diverse, but most deal with the Southwest, Arizona, or Mexico, and range from the early sixteenth century to the early twenty-first century.