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Exhibitions Program

Since 1992, Rare Book School (RBS) has been responsible for an on-going series of exhibitions in the Dome Room of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia. The books and other materials shown in these exhibitions are drawn both from the RBS collections and from the UVa Library, supplemented by occasional loans by other institutions and individuals.

The summer 1996 exhibition, Books Go to War: Armed Services Editions in World War II, was the first Rotunda exhibition to have an undergraduate student curator (Daniel J. Miller '96), and our first show to be mounted on the World Wide Web; since this exhibition, there have been many shows with UVa undergraduate curators, including "You CAN Sell a Book by Its Cover" (October 1998-February 1999), "Two for a Nickel," an exhibition of Thomas Jefferson ephemera (May-September 1999), "The Lives of the Autograph Collectors," on the history of autograph collecting (January-May 2003), "Reading with and without Dick and Jane: The Politics of Literacy in c20 America" (June-October 2003), "116 Years of Corks & Curls" (April-November 2004), "The Call of the Wild: Character Building and the Boy Scout Handbook" (May-October 2005), " Eyre Apparent: An Exhibition Celebrating Charlotte Brontë’s Classic Novel" (November 2005-October 2006), "Bound to Please: American Cloth Bookbindings, 1830-1910" (November 2006-May 2007), and the current show "The Fine Line Between Genius & Inanity: Innovation in Contemporary American Publishing" (May 2007 - 30 October 2007), "The Monster Among Us: Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to Mel Brooks" (October 2008 - 1 May 2009), and the current exhibition.

The subjects of other recent Dome Room exhibitions have included the evolution of 19th-century book-binding styles, American editions of Owen Meredith's Lucile, George Orwell and his publishers, the woodcuts of J. J. Lankes, and novels and children's books set in this city, Charlottesville.

Exhibitions Since 1995