SAN MARINO, CA.- In the third iteration of “Stories from the Library”, visitors will encounter rare materials from across the Huntington Library’s collections in two exhibitions that examine how people have made meaning from imperfect objects and from the moon. Presented in the Huntington Art Gallery’s Large Library and Focus Gallery, the exhibitions—“Damaged Goods” and “The Mirror of the Moon”—place well-known works in conversation with less familiar collection materials. One exhibition considers the stories revealed by damage, mistakes, and acts of erasure; the other traces the moon’s role in science, navigation, literature, art, and imagination.
Together, the exhibitions show how Library collections can illuminate human experience from unexpected angles: through the marks left on the page and through centuries of looking upward.
The exhibitions run through Nov. 30, 2026.
Finding Meaning in Imperfection: “Damaged Goods”
“Damaged Goods,” on view in the Large Library on the Huntington Art Gallery’s first floor, brings together collection materials marked by natural processes, human error, and intentional acts of censorship. Rather than treating flaws as distractions, the exhibition shows how physical traces can make library materials more compelling, beautiful, and revealing.
The central object in the exhibition is Benjamin Franklin’s draft manuscript of his autobiography. It has long been believed that Franklin knocked over the inkwell that left a large stain on the page. The manuscript offers a vivid reminder that even the most famous historical figures were fallible.
The exhibition also features Hirose Tomoshige’s Sanpō chie no umi taizen 算法智恵海大全 (Practical Mathematics for Commerce), an Edo-period arithmetic guide whose pages were bored through by bookworms. The damage obstructs the text while also pointing to the material life of the book itself, whose mulberry paper attracted insects.
Early photography’s fragility appears in Alexander Gardner’s last official portrait session with Abraham Lincoln. Gardner’s “cracked-plate” portrait, made weeks before Lincoln’s assassination, shows how a glass plate negative likely broke under thermal stress; Gardner placed the two pieces together to create a single print before discarding the negative.
“Imperfections often tell us as much as the works themselves,” said Erin Chase, associate curator of architecture and photography. “These marks, stains, and alterations preserve moments of use, emotion, and human intervention that might otherwise be lost to history.”
Other materials reveal how damage can create unintended meaning. In Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology, one of the first major books on North American birds, ink from an illustration reacted with the facing page to create a brown “ghost image” of an ivory-billed woodpecker believed to be extinct.
Tracing Lunar Wonder and Discovery: “The Mirror of the Moon”
“The Mirror of the Moon,” presented in the Huntington Art Gallery’s Focus Gallery on the second floor, follows surprising threads across centuries, showing how artists, scientists, writers, and dreamers have traced their ideas onto the lunar surface. The exhibition begins with Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger), the 1610 publication that recorded his groundbreaking telescopic observations of lunar craters and mountains, challenging the long-standing belief that the moon was a smooth sphere.
“The moon is more than a rock bound to Earth in its orbit. It is a mirror of humanity,” said Joel Klein, Molina Curator for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
The exhibition places Galileo’s book near a model based on German astronomer Johannes Kepler’s improved telescope design. By using two convex lenses, Kepler’s design provided a wider field of view and greater magnification than Galileo’s did, helping to make Kepler’s astronomical telescope the preferred instrument for mapping the heavens in the 17th century and beyond.
Earlier and contemporaneous works show how the moon shaped daily life before modern astronomy. Johannes Regiomontanus’ 1476 Calendarium predicted lunar and solar eclipses with striking precision, while George Gilden, in his early 17th-century A Meteorological Dyary and Prognostication for This Present Yeare of Our Lord, calculated and illustrated a lunar eclipse amid broader astrological, technical, and household knowledge.
Lunar imagination also runs through literature and speculative thought. In a 1969 notebook, speculative fiction writer and longtime Pasadena resident Octavia E. Butler documented the Apollo 11 moon landing as it unfolded on television, recording times, data, and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first words from the lunar surface. Her later Parable series of novels begins on July 20, the date humans first walked on the moon.
The exhibition extends into photography and space exploration. Prints from the Observatoire de Paris’ Atlas photographique de la lune (Photographic Atlas of the Moon), produced between 1896 and 1910, represent one of the most ambitious lunar imaging projects of the era. A 1992 photographic mosaic made by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft shows the moon’s north pole, a region difficult to observe from Earth, while earlier Apollo-era materials document the carefully planned missions that made the first moon landing possible.
The Huntington, located near several of California’s leading scientific research hubs, holds extensive resources related to the history of astronomy, including archives and rare books from the Carnegie Observatories’ Mount Wilson Observatory Collection.
“Stories from the Library”
The “Stories from the Library” exhibition series celebrates The Huntington’s world-class Library collections by presenting rare archival materials through new and unexpected thematic lenses.
Future iterations will explore such topics as early science and medicine, international relations, and reflections on mortality. The series will continue through 2029, coinciding with the transformation of The Huntington’s Library/Art Building.
