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Peek in the Stacks: special collections

Nancy Drew Mystery Stories: The Secret of the Old Clock

In 1930, a publishing company called the Stratemeyer Syndicate, working with Grosset & Dunlap, published a mystery novel featuring Nancy Drew, a teenage girl detective, as its protagonist. Now a best-selling work of children's literature, it is titled The Secret of the Old Clock, and is the first of 175 novels featuring Nancy, her family, and her friends that make up the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories....

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Dreaming Reality with Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinian writer known for his surreal storytelling and poetry such as Fictions, "The Aleph," and many others. Borges was inspired to write stories and poems on the theme of dreams and his view of reality, which takes shape as a mixture of reality, dreams, and sometimes even nightmares...

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Emanuel Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books Collection

Emanuel Julius (later Haldeman-Julius upon marriage) grew up an avid reader. He was born in Philadelphia in 1889 to Jewish immigrants who had fled the pogroms of 19th century Odessa. This would lay the groundwork that would later lead him to create the Little Blue Books, a series of pocket sized books that was published from 1919 through 1978...

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