These recordings accompany "A Few Well Selected Books," an exhibition about the history of the library collection at Haverford College. Evidence of the early collection comes from a 40-page library catalog printed in 1836, just three years after the first young men arrived to study at Haverford. Library staff traced each of the 770 titles in this catalog to discover which books still remain in the collection. For the exhibit, they selected works relating to the three subject areas of the early curriculum: Classical Languages and Literature, English Literature and Mental and Moral Philosophy, and Mathematics and Science. In the following recordings, current faculty working in these subject areas discuss their responses to the selections, speculating on what these choices mean about the kind of intellectual life the school's Quaker founders sought to encourage in Haverford's first students.
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