A 1681 edition of Flavius Josephus's Histoire des juifs; a printed Ordonnance of Louis XIV; a copy of A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, uncut, in original boards; and, the first edition, first state of Thomas Boswell's Life of Johnson. Those are just a few of the many remarkable donations the Fisher received in 2011, and which are detailed in the December 2012 issue (No. 50) of The Halcyon, the newsletter of the Friends of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. As the Fisher's Acting Director Anne Dondertman points out, 2011 continued a pattern of generous gifts to the Fisher that are incredibly rich and diverse. In all, there were over a hundred individual donations of books and manuscript material.

To read the the full report on the 2011 donations to the Fisher, including manuscript gifts, please visit The Halcyon's main page. (All the back issues of the newsletter can be accessed from the page as well.) The current issue also contains an article about the British Armorial Bindings database, along with an article by the Fisher's Chris J. Young about Harold Innis's book Empire and Communcations, and a fascinating story on the American artist Rockwell Kent and "the tragedy of Newfoundland," written by Graham Bradshaw.

For more information about being a Friend of the Fisher, please visit the Friends page on the web site. Below are images from the current issue of the Halcyon: a two-page spread of Harold Innis's annotations to Empire and Communications, the Rockwell Kent-illustrated frontispiece from After Long Years, and a photo of Joe Rosenblatt, taken by Marty Gervais.

New issue of Halcyon now available