Special Collections
Click on the tabs below to view more information about each collection.
Culinary Collection
The library houses a collection of over two thousand cookbooks and texts on food with a focus on local cuisine, southern cooking, and community cookbooks. The collection also includes reference sources concerned with culinary history and history of foodways, international and regional cookbooks, and guides to entertaining and hosting. It also includes a small manuscript collection comprised of papers on housekeeping in the South. These books and papers date from the 1850s to the present and are used by researchers from all over the world.
The Culinary Library also sponsors the work of the New Orleans Culinary History Group and an almost annual series of programs on culinary history. These programs rotate between lectures by nationally known culinary scholars and lectures by or discussions with prominent members of the culinary profession in New Orleans.
In these endeavors, the Center works with a number of other groups in New Orleans, including the Historic New Orleans Collection, Slow Food New Orleans, the Food and Beverage Museum, and other groups.
 Richard H. Collin Collection
Although not found in the actual culinary collection, the books donated in memory of Richard H. Collin by Phyllis Mayronne and Michael Ledet can be found throughout the Nadine Vorhoff library and can be checked out as well. The most famous book Collin wrote was The New Orleans Underground Gourmet, establishing him as the first New Orleans restaurant critic.
More about our Culinary Collection
The Culinary History Collection was established in 1992 with gifts of two rather sizeable collections of historic and contemporary cookbooks. The Courtney Werner Collection dates primarily from the first half of the twentieth century and contains many specialty books featuring such topics as cooking with herbs and spices and the varieties of cooking particular to different regions of the United States. Perhaps the most impressive is the large selection of international cookbooks, many of which are published in their original languages. The Stella Adams Collection dates from the second half of the twentieth century and includes a great variety of southern, Louisiana, New Orleans and women’s groups cookbooks. An unusual example from this collection is Bon Melange (1976) a homemade book from the Amigas Club of Thibodaux, featuring original recipes for Louisiana specialties.
Because cooking and eating with others are fundamental human rituals, cookbooks provide important records of tradition and change within human cultures. Since women have traditionally been responsible for preparing and serving food, cookbooks also frequently disclose historic accounts of women’s domestic experiences as well as recipes for their own culinary creations. In addition, regional cookbooks document the rich cultural history and heritage of our population, including Creoles, Cajuns and African Americans.
| The Drag King Collection
The New Orleans Drag King Collection Project is housing its new collection of oral histories, personal papers, ephemera reflecting the community activities and personal experiences of the drag king performance culture in New Orleans from its beginnings in the late 1990s to the current day. Old and new flyers, press releases, sketches, notes, letters, and any other papers that document and provide insight into the various drag king activities in town are some of the pieces in the library and are looking to be acquired.
 
View the Making History: Documenting and Preserving Drag Culture Zine.
Newcomb Authors Collection
This collection is comprised of books written by Newcomb students and alumnae. The collection has also recently been expanded to include texts written by faculty Associates of the Gender Studies Program of Tulane University.
The Newcomb Archives and Nadine Vorhoff Library collect the published works of Newcomb alumnae, faculty, and staff. The collection has also recently been expanded to include texts written by faculty associates of the Gender Studies Program of Tulane University and Newcomb Fellows. This collection is non-circulating, but available to researchers and visitors on site in the Vorhoff Library. Some duplicate copies of the works may be available in the circulating collection of Vorhoff, Howard-Tilton or other libraries on campus.
Below is a list of our current "Newcomb Authors" holdings. If you know of books you think that we should have, please send us an e-mail at newcombarchives@tulane.edu. Any donations of books that are not on our list would be most welcome!
Video Collection
The Center houses a number of videos and DVDs that discuss women’s issues across time and culture through both documentaries and video-taped lectures held at Newcomb College, and they are housed alphabetically in the video collection in Vorhoff Library. Students may watch videos at the Vorhoff Library, but may not check them out. Professors may check out videos for up to two days for classroom viewing. DVDs may be checked out for one week at a time, one at a time. Faculty members can check DVDs out for longer loan periods than one week.
Check out our newest acquisitions, listed below, or view a complete list of our videos.
The Accused
Anne Braden: Southern Patriot
Audre Lorde: the Berlin Years 1984-1992
The Edge of Each Other's Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde
The Education of Shelby Knox
The Evolution of Dad: Fatherhood is Finally Growing Up
Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
Half the Sky
Intersexion
The Invisible War
It Was Rape
Ma Vie en Rose
The Sons of Tennessee Williams
Street Fight
Strong
The Village Called Versailles
Zale-Kimmerling Writers Collection
Every year, Newcomb brings a nationally known writer to campus to give lectures and teach classes and workshops. This collection includes all books written by these authors, correspondence with the authors, photographs, and publicity related to the project. Learn more about the Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence Program.
Prescriptive Literature
Zine Collection
Zines can be defined as small, self-produced semi-periodicals, ranging in a vast variety of subjects that interest the author. The collection includes but is not limited to fanzines, personal zines or perzines, and scene zines.
More information about or zines can be found at our Biblioblog.
Marla Custard Collection
This GLBT collection was donated and funded by Marla Custard, a Newcomb College graduate. It is one of our largest and most recent collections.
Check out books like the one below and more!
Metropolitan Lovers, by Julie Abraham
From the destruction of Sodom to the selling of Gay Street and from Tales of the City to The L Word, urban life and homosexuality have been made inseparable in Western culture. In this sweeping work, Julie Abraham investigates the evolution of this symbiotic relationship over the past two centuries, tracing how homosexuals have simultaneously become model citizens of the modern city and avatars of the urban.
Exploring the lives of prominent gay men and women, literary depictions of gay city life, classic works of urban theory, and the rhetoric of political reformers, Abraham challenges conventional thinking about what it means to be metropolitan and what it means to be queer. She provocatively juxtaposes works from writers such as Balzac and Baudelaire, Henry James and James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin and Jane Jacobs to redefine such familiar urban types as the flaneur, the prostitute, and the drag queen. From Paris, London, and Manchester, to Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, Abraham deftly maps the connections, the exchanges of meaning, and the transfers of value that inform ideas of homosexuality and the city, ideas that have shaped modern life. Bringing this history to bear on the present, she argues against the commodification of gay urbanites as contemporary signs of city life.
While the city and homosexuality have long been associated, Abraham analyzes their convergence with unprecedented insight. In the process, she shows us how the urban and homosexuality have been intertwined and the inescapable consequences—both positive and negative—of this union. |
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