1,500 new pages need your help

John M. Wing is a big deal at the Newberry.

His name lives on in the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing, one of the library’s core collections, devoted to printing history, book arts, typography, calligraphy, bookbinding, papermaking, publishing, and the history of libraries. Wing left the Newberry an endowment to continue collecting materials related to the history of printing and publishing, and that legacy continues to shape the library’s collections today.

Now, volunteers can help transcribe Wing’s own words.

We’ve just added John M. Wing’s diaries to Newberry Transcribe, beginning in 1858, when Wing was still a teenager in upstate New York. The diaries follow him through young adulthood, his move to Chicago after the Civil War, his early work as a journalist, his travels, and the beginnings of a life that would eventually make him a successful publisher, international traveler, book collector, and major figure in the Newberry’s history.

A portion of Wing’s 1865–1866 diaries was published in 2002 as The Chicago Diaries of John M. Wing, 1865–1866. But the manuscript diaries now available on Newberry Transcribe begin years earlier, opening a much wider window onto Wing’s life and world. By working directly from images of the original diary pages, volunteers can help make this larger run of Wing’s writings more searchable, readable, and accessible.

Transcribe the Wing diaries now at nt.newberry.org →

Also just in: letters from Ben Hecht to his daughter Jenny. You loved Jenny’s letters to her dad — full of drawings, dispatches, and magnificently unbothered one-liners — and now you can read the correspondence from the other direction. In these letters, Hecht’s famous fast-talking, wisecracking voice turns tender, funny, and unmistakably paternal.
Transcribe the new sets of Ben Hecht correspondence →
Or see everything recently added to Newberry Transcribe→