Fine & Rare VI: Rare Books and Ancestral Machines

Step inside the newly renovated Posner Center for Special Collections, a cabinet of rarities and technological marvels where paper-and-string cipher machines, centuries-old books, cogwheel computers, and nineteenth-century “digital” images sit side by side. Part museum and part laboratory, the Center is a space for discovery, research, and innovation with the materials of the past.

In this installment of Fine & Rare, Curator of Special Collections Sam Lemley introduces Rare Books & Ancestral Machines, an exhibition featuring more than thirty rare books, instruments, and early computing devices—many on public view for the first time. Organized into five thematic sections—mechanical computing, robotics, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and scholarly method—the exhibition surveys over four centuries of scientific inquiry, uncovering abandoned prototypes and long-forgotten technologies. Join us for an inside look at the Posner Center’s collections, its inaugural exhibition, and the future of research and teaching in this reimagined space.

Sam V. Lemley is curator of Special Collections at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries (CMU), an affiliate in the Center for Early Modern Print, Networks and Performance (CMU Department of English) and a member of the Print & Probability project. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia and an MLIS with a certificate of concentration in rare books and special collections librarianship from the Palmer School (NYC). At CMU, he administers acquisitions, exhibitions, research and instruction in the Posner Center for Special Collections of rare books, manuscripts and early calculating devices and cryptographic machines. He is a (re)founding member of The Pittsburgh Bibliophiles, a gardener, a book collector and father to a four-year-old son

Lemley has held research fellowships at Princeton University Libraries, the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Rare Book School and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. His work has appeared in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, The Library, Studies in Bibliography, Shakespeare Quarterly, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Hyperallergic and other journals. He edited a book on the four Folios of Shakespeare’s plays (Penn State University Press). The volume accompanied a pair of exhibitions mounted at CMU and the Frick Pittsburgh.

Lemley’s most recent release, Rare Books & Ancestral Machines: A Handbook to the Posner Center for Special Collections at Carnegie Mellon University, spotlights a treasured collection of objects from the university’s special collections to mark the reopening of the Posner Center.