#PageFrights & Pumpkin Carving

Our library cat is very skittish and only sighted in the weeks leading up to Halloween.

Halloween is just days away and we’re sad to see the end of #PageFrights, a social media celebration of Halloween, library & archives-style. All month long, libraries and other cultural institutions have been showing their scary side on social media, using the hashtag #PageFrights.

With shelves of anatomical atlases, books on bones, and natural histories filled with peculiar creatures, our collection has plenty of strange, frightful content to share, and this month has been spectacularly spooky fun. The campaign was spearheaded by the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Medical Historical Library at Yale University, Smithsonian Libraries, and us, and many other fantastic institutions are participating! Be sure to check out the hashtag if you haven’t yet.

In addition to exploring all the #PageFrights action on social media, you can take part by carving pumpkins. Now, we are strongly opposed to the presence of pumpkin pulp around books (a truly terrifying thought to librarians), but #PageFrights participating institutions have created a number of collections-inspired pumpkin carving patterns! These designs are available here. We created two patterns using sources in our natural history collection: Gesner’s Historia Animalium Liber IIII, 1558, and Aldrovandi’s Serpentum, et draconum historiae libri duo, 1640. If you use them, be sure to post your creation to social media with the hashtag #PageFrights!