Library gets Harry Potter as first national-level exhibit
Posted on Friday, September 26, 2008
Daily Record photograph by David Frank Dempsey Rogers Public Library reference librarian Lesley Knieriem showed the posters Thursday that the library will soon display to announce the upcoming ‘ Harry Potter’s World’ exhibit that will open Oct. 5.
ROGERS - The Rogers Public Library has had no problem garnering interest in the Harry Potter novels in its collection. Library Director Judy Casey said Potter author J. K. Rowling's newest book," The Tales of Beedle the Bard," is already on order. She just hopes the library will have enough copies.
But there are other lessons to learn from the Potter universe, aside from the words included in Rowling's novels, and an exhibit from the National Library of Medicine should help bring those lessons to life in Rogers.
The exhibit will be the first national-level exhibit displayed at the Rogers Public Library, Casey said. She had applied for others in the past but was not approved. Casey hopes this exhibition, and the traffic it draws, will encourage future curators to bring their exhibits to Rogers. She hinted at a substantial exhibit that may grace the library in the future, but she did not want to give any details.
The Potter exhibit - officially titled "Harry Potter's World: Renaissance Science, Magic and Medicine" - draws correlations between the novels and the science of Renaissance times. Casey agreed that the things in those days that were not immediately understood were often called magic.
"It's not just all imagination," Casey said.
The exhibit includes displays, which will be positioned along the library's main aisle, that depict the Potter stories' usage of "Renaissance traditions that played an important role in the development of Western science, including alchemy, astrology and natural philosophy," according to the exhibit's Web site. The exhibit links the familiar names like Albus Dumbledore and Lord Voldemort with real-world scientists and philosophers like Konrad Gesner and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, showing the overlapping themes and directions of study.
Casey said the exhibit will be up from early October through at least Thanksgiving. She expects the exhibit to attract visitors of all ages who have been touched by the Harry Potter novels.
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