Attending Rare Book School at UVA and staying on the Lawn (Jefferson’s “Academical Village”), not far from the room where a young Edgar Allan Poe lived during his brief time as a student here in 1826

The Artist House, Key West (c. 1890), one of the most hauntingly beautiful homes I have ever stayed in…

Spring on the New Haven Green

The Yale Law Library acquires the notes of an American (colonial Maryland) student who attended Blackstone’s 1758 lectures at Oxford library.law.yale.edu/news/new-acq...

“Kirby’s on My Mind: A Material Culture Approach to Critical Legal Information Literacy,” my essay about teaching the foundations of legal research with rare law books, is now out in the Journal of Legal Education and posted to SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Seemed like a good day to break out the tulipiere

San Francisco #AALS2025

“The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876–1917” at the Yale University Art Gallery

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town staring Jim Parsons at the Barrymore Theatre

Happy Saint Nicholas Day, especially to Dutch Calvinists celebrating in private

Attended an incredible talk about the dispersion of and ongoing efforts to reunite and preserve the Salem Witch Trials papers by Margo Burns at the Witch House (the 17th-century home of Judge Jonathan Corwin), Salem, Massachusetts

The result:

A pumpkin pie from the recipe found in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-like Closet, Or, Rich Cabinet (1670)

The grave of Mayflower passenger Richard More at Old Burying Point/Charter Street Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts. His life in America began aboard the Mayflower in 1620 and ended (unrelatedly) amidst the Salem Witch Trials. He is buried just a few feet from the infamous Judge John Hathorne.

Seems appropriate that my first post should be Tiffany glass (one of my peculiar interests): the Chittenden and Trowbridge memorial windows at Linsly-Chittenden Hall and Center Church on the Green, respectively, taken during a talk I gave to the Henry Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty at Yale