Anza-Borrego Desert by Edwin Way Teale from his 1965 book Wandering Through Winter.

“The dirt road we followed led us through a region of arroyos, desert washes and tilted plains scarred by runoff.  Clouds of fine dust trailed behind and billowed around us when we stopped.  And we stopped often.  Here we examined the purple-red of the Mexican rose prickly pear cactus, there the trails of wild burros crossing the road on their way to the water.  … We paused to watch red-tailed hawks hunting among the yuccas,” wrote Edwin Way Teale in Wandering Through Winter, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book from 1965 documenting a  20,000 mile journey from Silver Strand, California to Caribou, Maine.  Teale, a writer, naturalist and enthusiastic photographer, thrilled his readers with his discoveries and depictions of places and people he encountered along the way.  Many photographs from his travels have never been published.  Browse nearly 100 of Teale’s pictures now available in the UConn Archives digital repository.

In this month’s edition of “item of the month”, we take a look at a unique collection of Spanish magazines and newspapers that was assembled by renowned Spanish bibliophile Juan Perez de Guzman y Boza, Duque de T’Serclaes. Born in 1852 in the town of Jerez de los Caballeros, the Duke was well known by antiquarian booksellers in Spain for his exquisite taste and voracious appetite for all types of Spanish books and publications. His ability to find and acquire unique and rare materials was legendary and it was not uncommon to find specialized bibliographies of Spanish materials citing that the only copy available was in the hands of the Duke. Toward the end of his life, the Duke collection was in deposit at the National Library in Spain, but after his death in 1934, his collection was sold in sections by his heirs. In the 1960s the Special Collections Department at the Wilbur Cross Library (the predecessor to Archives & Special Collections) acquired this collection of periodicals and newspaper through the famous rare book dealer and bibliophile, Hans Peter Kraus, known for being one of the few private people to own a Gutenberg Bible way back in the 1970s. Learn more