There is a certain predictability in the ways the gardens enchant visitors from season to season. And you can always count on visitors lining up to see the Gutenberg Bible or the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But each year you can also count on the unexpected. Here are some stories about the many ways the collections surprised us this past year, from a postage stamp to a flagpole, from a death mask of Isaac Newton to a marble likeness of George Washington.

10. A painting on display in the Virginia Steel Scott Galleries was granted “forever” status by the U.S Postal Service in August, when Edward Hopper’s The Long Leg became the latest stamp in the American Treasures series. Art aficionados and philatelists alike lined up at The Huntington to purchase the 44-cent “forever” stamps and have them inked with commemorative pictorial postmarks.

9. Shortly after the opening of “Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California,” archivists for the Aerospace History Project explained that for every item on display in a show, there are thousands of others that remain in the archive awaiting review by scholars. One of the hidden treasures, from the personal collection of JPL engineer Al Hibbs (1924–2003), is a statistical survey of winning numbers from roulette wheels in Reno and Las Vegas. The charismatic physicist and mathematician parlayed his genius into thousands of dollars before he was blackballed from the casinos.

8. Like Huntington archivists and catalogers, summer interns also get a close look at some remarkable objects in the collection. One of our interns wrote about a plaster death mask of Isaac Newton that was formerly in the collection of Thomas Jefferson. It came to the Huntington in 2006 as part of the Burndy Library, the massive collection related to the history of science that was donated by the family of Bern Dibner.

7. This past summer we also wrote about the unique back story of a sculpture of George Washington. The 400-pound marble bust, newly installed in the upstairs hallway of the Huntington Art Gallery, was made around 1832 by the top portrait sculptor in France at the time, Pierre-Jean David, called David d’Angers (1788–1856). Art conservators have now reported that the bust had been subjected to intense heat, possibly a fire, thereby providing scientific evidence supporting a disputed theory about the bust: that it had been on display in the Library of Congress, which was then located in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., when a devastating fire broke out there in 1851 and gutted the place. Later sold as scrap marble, it was eventually purchased be an art dealer and sold to Henry Huntington in 1924.

6. Conservators in the Library were also busy this year. Marieka Kaye, an exhibits conservator, was featured in an episode of “Armchair Archivist” on the website for the Disney Fan Club after she repaired the paper and binding of the spectacular gold-plated book that was used in the opening of Disney’s animated movie Sleeping Beauty (1959).

5. The towering flagpole that stands over the Shakespeare and Rose gardens might look like metal but is in fact 148 feet of solid Douglas fir. On Independence Day weekend we told the story of Henry Huntington’s superintendant, William Hertrich, who bought the piece of lumber in 1909 and then drove it by wagon through the back roads of early Los Angeles. The pole stands 132 feet, with the other 16 feet anchored underground.

4. The Huntington’s Early California Population Project is a comprehensive database of the sacramental registers—the baptismal, marriage, and death records—from California’s 21 missions. In January we wrote about how information from the database was adding dimension to the discovery of bones at the site of L.A.’s oldest cemetery, near La Placita church in downtown Los Angeles.

3. The Huntington collection has also played a valuable role in an archaeology dig at Morven, an estate in Virginia near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. In an update to a Huntington Frontiers article, we explained how a Huntington map, with notes in Jefferson’s hand, provided crucial details to a team of historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Our blog post previewed the July broadcast of “The Presidency: Thomas Jefferson and Alternatives to Slavery,” a program on American History TV (C-SPAN 3) that aired some of the findings of the Morven team.

2. You would need a world map to trace the path taken by a teahouse after it was donated to The Huntington’s Japanese Garden in 2010 by the Pasadena Buddhist Temple. In a series of posts, Jim Folsom, the Telleen/Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens, tracked the shipment of the house in pieces to Japan for restoration, its return in the spring via the Port of Long Beach, and its reassembly in a new tea garden in the Japanese Garden, which is still undergoing restoration but will reopen to visitors on April 11, 2012.

1. Maps also played a role in one of the most unexpected stories to emerge from the collections this year. On May 17, Rockstar Games launched L.A. Noire, an action-packed video game set in the mean streets of Los Angeles in 1947. Rockstar and its Australian-based collaborator Team Biondi used street maps from The Huntington to lay the foundation for their vintage cityscape. Dating from the mid-1930s, these detailed land-use maps were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, a Depression-era program to create jobs—in this case, for surveyors, draftsmen, and urban planners.

A special thanks to everyone who contributed to the Huntington Blogs this year and to the many readers who shared their comments! Happy New Year!

Captions: The “forever” stamp of Edward Hopper’s The Long Leg; the bust of George Washington sculpted by David d’Angers around 1832; Alan Jutzi (right), chief curator of rare books, and colleague David Mihaly look at one of the L.A. city maps used by researchers developing the video game L.A. Noire. (Bottom photo by Lisa Blackburn.)

A look back on the year of the Huntington Blogs, where we covered more than a hundred stories about the Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

The Huntington will be open every day this week for extended hours, 10:30 am to 4:30 pm. All major garden areas are now reopened after windstorm cleanup, which is reason enough to take a walk in the gardens. Here are some botanical highlights from 2011 that might entice you to keep returning in 2012.

10. Trees—pine trees, palm trees, oak trees, and citrus, to name just a few. Throughout 2011, Jim Folsom, the Telleen/Jorgensen Director of Botanical Gardens, has blogged about all things tree related, including the good, the bad, and the ugly that staff members encounter when stewarding a massive collection of living specimens. There’s no better place to start appreciating trees, he told us in one post, than with the Tipuana tipu in the parking lot or with the Quercus robur, which translates as Oak Oak.

9. Long before a massive windstorm created piles of broken limbs and leaves, Huntington gardeners had perfected the art of pruning, brush removal, and mulching, thanks in part to a 650-horsepower machine dubbed “Yeager.” Last spring, Jim Folsom wrote about the tub grinder donated to the gardens a dozen years ago by Gene and Billie Yeager. From its hidden corner of the gardens, “Yeager” provides mulch and renewal.

8. New Year’s Day is, after all, a time of renewal. A look back on Chinese New Year festivities from February 2011 also serves as a preview of the upcoming Year of the Dragon. Each year, The Huntington’s Garden of Flowing Fragrance, Liu Fang Yuan, is the site of performances, demonstrations, and plants rich in symbolism, including plum blossoms (symbolizing the beginning of spring), peonies (prosperity), and narcissus (longevity). With its combination of plants, architecture, water, and rockery, the Chinese garden offers an enticing destination at any time of the year.

7. Another plant rich in symbolism is the four-leaf clover, but at The Huntington St. Patrick’s Day brings a much larger version of a shamrock—a green bromeliad. At the bottom of the Desert Garden is the giant Puya berteroniana, which amazes visitors in March with stalks of pale teal and other shades of green.

6. Flowering plants are nature’s version of show time—for bees, hummingbirds, and plant lovers who might become obsessed with one particular species over all others. Each year, The Huntington hosts a number of botanical shows and events, including the Camellia Show in February, the Clivia Show in March, the Cactus and Succulent Show in July, and the Orchid Show in October, to name just a few. Displays of each of these plants can be spotted in the gardens as well.

5. At many of these shows, visitors can purchase plants and speak with expert horticulturalists. The highlights of the year for plant buyers are the spring and fall plant sales. Plant sales also take place on the second Thursday of each month, following a garden talk in Friends’ Hall at 2:30 pm. In March we wrote about a talk by avocado experts Carl Stucky and Julie Frink, who brought dozens of avocado varieties in a show-and-tell presentation.

4. The Huntington boasts its own avocado orchard—a heritage grove of 33 varieties that was dedicated this year as the Shepherd-Brokaw Orchard, in honor of Jack Shepherd and Hank Brokaw, giants of the avocado industry in Southern California and long-time supporters of The Huntington. The trees occupy the heart of the Ranch, the Huntington’s new sustainable urban agriculture site, which conducted open houses, workshops, and a symposium this year.

3. Beyond practicing urban gardening or viewing the blue ribbon prizes from plant shows, visitors can learn to appreciate the craftsmanship of masters of the art of bonsai who prune small specimens of Japanese black pine, maples, elms, or junipers into miniature trees. We blogged about The Huntington’s own Ben Oki prior to the California Bonsai Society’s annual show at The Huntington in March.

2. Landscapers, too, practice their craft in places like the Shakespeare Garden. But as Jim Folsom has mused in many posts this year, nature creates its own beauty time and time again, from the spectacular cardinal-red flowers of the lobelia, which sustain Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds on their annual migrations each year, to the peonies that bloom each spring with massive, overblown crepe paper flowers in luscious colors.

1. As New Year’s Day approaches in the Pasadena area, it’s impossible to avoid the Rose Garden, even if January brings pruning shears rather than spectacular blooms. Breathtaking displays come in April. But as we look back on 2011, we must note the retirement of Clair Martin, the Ruth B. and E. L. Shannon Curator of the Rose Garden and Perennial Gardens, who said good-bye after a 28-year tenure. Under Martin, The Huntington became a center for interpretation and conversation about the history and development of cultivated roses.

For more highlights, browse through Jim Folsom’s posts on “Mr. Huntington’s Garden.”

Caption: The Chinese garden; the Ranch; Clair Martin (right) with longtime garden supporter and trustee emerita Ruth Shannon.

A look back on the year of The Huntington Blogs, where we covered more than a hundred stories about the Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

The Huntington records dozens of lectures and conference proceedings each year and posts them to iTunes U. Here are some audio programs to round out your holiday playlists.

10. The exhibition “The House That Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley, 1945–1985” is accompanied by a set of audio interviews with Maloof and six of his contemporaries. Hal Nelson, curator of American decorative arts, also gave a talk on a unique chair that Maloof crafted for musician Jan Hlinka. And as a bonus, you can watch a set of videos produced by Peter Kirby, who filmed Maloof at his workshop and home in 1990.

9. In June, The Huntington and Caltech were venues for the 22nd North American James Joyce Conference, which was presented by Libros Schmibros Lending Library and Bookshop and sponsored by the Pasadena Arts Council. By the time it culminated on Bloomsday (June 16), it had featured an interview with novelist Nicholson Baker; poetry readings by Eavan Boland, Paul Mudoon, and Sinéad Morrissey; and a reading of Joyce’s short story “Counterparts” by actress Fionnula Flanagan.

8. To commemorate William Shakespeare’s birthday in April, we wrote about a talk by Bruce Smith, the Dean’s Professor of English at the University of Southern California, who spoke about “The Congeniality of Shakespeare’s Genius.” That talk is available for download with other presentations about “Shakespeare and His World.”

7. Great literature at The Huntington goes far beyond Joyce and Shakespeare to talks on subjects as diverse as “Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper,’” by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, and “Making a Literature: Black Writing and Jim Crow,” by Kenneth Warren. Horowitz and Warren were among the class of distinguished fellows at The Huntington for the 2010–11 academic year.

6. Other distinguished fellows touched on topics of a more supernatural persuasion. In October, Frances Dolan, the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow for 2011­–12, evaluated stories of witchcraft in 17th-century England; and back in February, Bruce Moran, the Dibner Distinguished Fellow for 2010–11, held forth on “Better Living through Alchemy: Private Lives and Applied Science in the Early Modern Era.”

5. Astronomy is another popular lecture topic in The Huntington’s annual offerings related to the history of science, and each year the Carnegie Observatories sponsors their own series of talks, which included a presentation by physicist Edward W. “Rocky” Kolb, of the University of Chicago.

4. Another event sponsor this year was the Pasadena Arts Council, which hosted an evening in Friends’ Hall as part of its AxS Festival 2011—Fire and Water. The evening featured a conversation between William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and Philip Connors, author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout. The pair talked about how fire has shaped the West and explored great nature writers from Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold to Norman Maclean and Jack Kerouac.

3. Talks about the Civil War are popular on iTunes, especially with the unfolding of sesquicentennial commemorations this year. The Huntington added many programs to its already rich categories about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, including presentations from this year’s conference “Civil War Lives.”

2. In another fall conference, historians gathered to honor Roy Ritchie, the recently retired director of research at The Huntington. In “The New Maritime History,” talks by Margarette Lincoln and Michael Jarvis paid homage to Roy’s role fostering great research as well as to the impact of his own scholarship on the history of piracy. Ritchie also gave his own talk back in February, on Founder’s Day, when he spoke about the intricate history of The Huntington’s research program.

1. A highlight of the annual Chinese Garden Lecture Series was Peter Sellars’ appearance on stage with Hua Wenyi, an internationally renowned master of Kun opera. Sellars is renowned in his own right as a director of musical theatre and opera. The pair’s informal conversation, full of humor and fond reminiscences as well as insightful commentary, emphasized what Sellars described as the “flowering of cultures that comes from creative collaboration.”

Visit The Huntington’s site on iTunes U.

Captions: Title page of Shakespeare’s first folio edition, 1623; Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, by Philip Connors, published by Harper Collins; Hua Wenyi (at left) and Peter Sellars (right) discuss their work together. Susan Pertel Jain (center) is executive director of the UCLA Confucius Institute and was responsible for bringing the two together. Photo by Martha Benedict.

A look back on the year of The Huntington Blogs, where we covered more than a hundred stories about the Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

The year 2011 was strong in new acquisitions—and also in stories about gifts and purchases that added to the riches of the holdings in The Huntington’s collections.

10. In January, The Huntington displayed a remarkable acquisition—six pages from a diary already in the collection. Boston preacher Samuel Cooper’s entry from April 18, 1775, is now joined with his musings of April 19 as well as the entries in the rest of a diary that is an eyewitness account of one of the first military engagements of the American Revolution.

9. And speaking of letters, during the summer The Huntington acquired a set of 68 letters written by World War I sailor Anthony Edward Mrazek. On Veterans Day we wrote about his granddaughter, Linda Goluskin, a staff member at The Huntington who wanted her family’s history to become part of a wider fabric of historical material at The Huntington.

8. After The Huntington acquired several Andy Warhol items from the estate of Robert Shapazian, we wrote about how Warhol’s Small Crushed Campbell’s Soup Can (Beef Noodle) (1962) and Brillo Box (1964)—along with a stack of nine copies of Brillo Box by of Pontus Hultén (1990)—added a new dimension to the display of other 20th-century works on view in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art.

7. The Scott Galleries were also enriched by purchases by the Art Collectors’ Council, which added two items following its meeting in the spring: a 22-foot-long sculpture carved as a screen for a pipe organ by the prominent African American artist Sargent Claude Johnson (1888–1967) in 1937; and Harlem Flats (Back Lot Laundry), an important early painting made in 1907 by Ernest Lawson (1873–1939), one of a group of Ashcan school artists called The Eight.

6. The Library Collectors’ Council also convenes every year to purchase new items, and this year’s meeting ended with the selection of five works that represent the remarkable range of the Library’s holdings. On Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, we wrote about one of the new items—the papers of Charlton Thomas Lewis (1834–1904), a true American polymath. The Lewis papers add to the tapestry of materials that have made The Huntington a premier center for post-doctoral scholarship in the antebellum and Civil War eras.

5. MaryLou Boone’s gift of French porcelain went on permanent display in the Huntington Art Gallery this year and includes teapots, pitchers, apothecary jars, sugar boxes, and tea caddies made by the finest factories in 17th- and 18th-century France. The elaborately decorated works of functional art are captivating as individual objects and, together, illustrate the history of the art form.

4. Items from another remarkable collection went on view to the public—albeit briefly. In March, The Huntington’s Brandon Tam and Lance Birk took a number of orchids from the S. Robert Weltz collection to the Santa Barbara International Orchid Show, where they garnered five first place ribbons, including the Wilcox Trophy for Best Paphiopedilum in Show (Paphiopedilum hainanense ‘Hang Ten’).

3. The presence of Harvey Christen loomed large in “Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California.” In November we wrote about Christen’s niece, Carol Basney, who together with her husband, Burt, donated thousands of photos and other memorabilia from Christen’s long career at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. You can still see some of those photos on display in the exhibition until Jan. 9, 2012.

2. A post by summer intern John Vining dipped back to an acquisition that came to The Huntington in 2006—the Burndy Library from the family of Bern Dibner. Among the thousands of books in that collection are some surprising objects, including the plaster death mask of Isaac Newton.

1. In 2010 the Pasadena Buddhist Temple donated a Japanese tea house to the Huntington.  In several posts this year, Jim Folsom, the Telleen/Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens,  tracked the shipment of the house in pieces to Japan for restoration, its return in the spring via the Port of Long Beach, and its reassembly in a new tea garden in the Japanese Garden, which is still undergoing restoration but will reopen to visitors on April 11, 2012.

Captions: Andy Warhol, Brillo Box (1964);  from the estate of Robert Shapazian. Tray with Handles, ca. 1730, Rouen, France, grand feu faïence; and Sugar Box, ca. 1746, Vincennes, France, soft-paste porcelain. Gifts of MaryLou Boone. Yoshiaki Nakamura, in black shirt and sports coat, with his team in front of the reassembled tea house house in Kyoto, Japan.

A look back on the year of The Huntington Blogs, where we covered more than a hundred stories about the Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

If you haven’t completed your holiday shopping, you might consider buying a number of books that we covered in the blog this year, many of which are in stock at The Huntington’s Bookstore & More. While some of the books came out before 2011, the conversation about them continues:

10. The exhibition catalogs for “The House That Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in Pomona Valley, 1945-1985” and “Ancient Bronze Mirrors from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection” will give you plenty to think about well beyond the closing dates of the shows next year on Jan. 30 and May 14, respectively. Harold B. Nelson, curator of American decorative arts at The Huntington, edited The House That Sam Built, and Suzanne E. Cahill, professor of history at University of California, San Diego, edited volume 1 of Ancient Bronze Mirrors, which includes a full catalog of the collection. Volume 2 of the set includes an additional 11 essays by experts in the field.

9. You can also still find copies of catalogs for two popular shows from 2011: Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late 19th-Century American Art, by Leo G. Mazow and Kevin M. Murphy; and Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame, edited by Kevin M. Murphy and Jessica Todd Smith. “Three Fragments of a Lost Tale” will open next at the Portland Museum and will run from Feb. 11 through May 27, 2012.

8. Big sprawling books often arise from scholars conducting research at The Huntington. The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order, by Robert S. Westman, weighs in at 704 pages. In November, the author (and current Dibner Distinguished Fellow) was featured on NPR.

7. And speaking of massive, check out Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs, from Getty Publications, which features two essays by Jennifer A. Watts, the Huntington’s curator of photographs.

6. Photography aficionados might also enjoy Jack London, Photographer, co-authored by Sara S. “Sue” Hudson, The Huntington’s curator of literary manuscripts. Out in 2010, the book continues to keep Hodson busy.

5. Award winners are high on the list of any discriminating reader. Louise Pubols won the Ray Allen Billington Prize in April for her book The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California, a spectacular debut in the Huntington Library’ Press’s new Western History series, edited by William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

4. California and the West is a popular subject with Huntington scholars as well as with readers. Deanne Stillman’s book from 2008, Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, still enjoys strong sales in paperback and has caught the attention of TV producers, song writers, and environmentalists.

3. Also still popular in paperback, after more than 20 years in print, is Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates, by Robert C. Ritchie. In November, the author—and former director of research at The Huntington—received a very special tribute.

2. We’re not even one year into the four-year Civil War sesquicentennial commemorations, which gives you plenty of time to catch up with your reading. Books mentioned in the blog this past year include A Lincoln: A Biography, by Ronald C. White Jr.; Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict Over the American Civil War, edited by Gary Gallagher and Joan Waugh; Hearts Touched By Fire: The Best of “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” edited by Harold Holzer; and The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), by Sean Wilentz.

1. And to send a certain message to someone on your gift list, there’s no better book than Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, authored by NPR commentator Joe Palca, who served as the science writer in residence at The Huntington in 2009.

Follow the above links to read about these books and link to the publishers’ descriptions.

His interest in science and technology led him first to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to earn his undergraduate degree and then on to the University of Pennsylvania for a doctorate. His dissertation was about the history of astronauts as a labor force from the early Apollo program up to the Space Shuttle era.

While he was well aware of the charismatic astronauts and engineers who came out of California, including men like Joe Walker (see photo, lower right), who merged a cowboy mentality with the test pilot culture at Edwards Air Force Base, Hersch’s studies had never brought him further west than Philadelphia—that is, until he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and its Aerospace History Project. During the 2010–11 academic year, Hersch taught two classes at USC and helped the project’s director, Peter Westwick, sort through the burgeoning aerospace archive at The Huntington and plan “Blue Sky Metropolis.”

“I jumped at the chance to be part of a museum exhibition,” he now recalls of the fellowship. “When you have material this good, you want to share it.”

Hersch admits he has been accused of being somewhat provincial, even by his Pennsylvania friends who begrudge his East Coast bias. And to those in California, his views of the history of aerospace were more Cape Canaveral than Edwards Air Force Base.

All of that has changed from his year here working with the collection. But he also says visitors to the exhibition should see it beyond a regional history. “California created modern aerospace, and modern aerospace helped to create California, but it wasn’t just the local culture—it was an American culture.” Aerospace’s impact has been felt on everything from surfing and the entertainment industry to construction techniques and architecture.

Even those visions of space colonies from his childhood carry a new meaning for him, in part driven by the materials he has helped organize at The Huntington. “When you look at those images very carefully,” he says, “you realize that they aren’t just selling a life in space, but they’re depicting communities that look a lot like California suburbs.” The architecture was California modern. These were communities where life was made easier through modern technologies.

“And when we talk about traveling in space, it’s not just one person in a rubber suit trying to breathe in a tight compartment. This is a vision of humanity’s future and of a world that will be better than the world that exists today. And I didn’t realize how much of a California story this was back when I was a kid, but I understand that now.”

Hersch’s fellowship ended in the fall of 2011 and he is now a lecturer in the department of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. Hersch says his experience in California will stay with him. “The fellowship at The Huntington has enriched my teaching, it has enriched my scholarship, and it has given me something I think every historian needs, which is experience not only to help put together collections but also displaying those materials for a large public audience.”

“Blue Sky Metropolis” is on view in the West Hall of the Library through Jan. 9, 2012.

Captions, Top: Matthew Hersch at the Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum. Photo by Eric Long. Bottom: Test Pilot “Cowboy” Joe Walker and the Bell X-1A rocket plane at the NASA High-Speed Flight Station, Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., 1955. NASA photo.

Through the end of January 2012, you can see more than 20 Bibles and other books inspired by the Bible in a new exhibition at the Honnold/Mudd Library at Claremont Graduate University. Ferrell, who is professor of early modern literature and history in CGU’s School of Arts and Humanities, has supervised a team of graduate students that has organized a display of works from Claremont’s holdings that commemorate the 400^th anniversary of the first printing of the influential King James Bible.

The Claremont show—which includes a 1611 printing of the Bible as well as a copy of the Book of Mormon and works by Walt Whitman and Toni Morrison—supplements the traveling exhibition “Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible,” organized by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., and the American Library Association Public Programs Office. It is based on an exhibition of the same name developed by the Folger and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, with assistance from the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas. It consists of high-quality reproductions of rare and historic books, manuscripts, and works of art from the Folger and Bodleian collections, combined with interpretive text and related images.

The traveling display of panels from the Folger Shakespeare  Library will be on view at Claremont from November 10 to January 6. The Claremont’s display from its own collection—called “Manifold Greatness: The Bible According to Claremont”—runs through the end of January.

Lori Anne Ferrell is planning a new Huntington exhibition about extra-illustrated books with her co-curator of the 2004 Bible show, Steve Tabor, The Huntington’s curator of early printed books. That show will open in the fall of 2013.

Caption: The Bible and the People (Yale University Press, 2008) by Lori Anne Ferrell.

The Huntington has long offered classes and family programs for a variety of ages—from preschool series for ages 3 to 4 to after-school programs for ages 5 to 6 and Saturday workshops for ages 7 to 12. But this fall, The Huntington debuted a couple classes for high school teens, including a two-part class in November called “Focus on Photography.” Teens 14 to 17 years of age could sign up for one or both Saturday sessions—one on portraits and the other on landscape photography.

The results, said instructor Bia Gayotto, were impressive, as indicated by the accompanying slideshow from the landscape session. Following an opening discussion, Bia encouraged the budding photographers to walk through the Desert Garden to get up close and personal with the plants and flowers. They practiced a number of new techniques—such as experimenting with lighting, framing, background/foreground, contrast, textures, and patterns. They all took their time, in silence, often taking different photos of the same subject many times. They then walked over to the Chinese garden, where they were able to get a view of a garden that incorporates water, architecture, rocks, and animals.

Together with the portrait session—where the Huntington Art Gallery provided the perfect backdrop to create personalized portrait galleries—the Teen Workshop was a great success. Look for listings of programs for kids—and teens—in future issues of the Calendar or on the Huntington homepage.

The Gallery stands in as a Miami mansion turned upscale hotel when “the CSIs expose the seedy underbelly of children’s beauty pageants.” The pageant itself was filmed on the south terrace, complete with runway and a confetti cannon (loaded with dried flower petals); the loggia was the hotel lobby. If you watch the show, see if you can spot a set of doors built by the film company and installed in front of our actual loggia doors so that extras could appear to be going in and out of the hotel without interfering with normal activities inside the Gallery.

The episode filmed in early November, and it marked the third time “CSI: Miami” has filmed here. In 2008, they staged an elaborate wedding on the North Vista—adding their own statuary, columns, and lots of flowers. (Unfortunately, the villain bungled his murder plan, and a misdirected bullet shot the bride at the altar.) Later that same season, they returned to film a scene featuring an orange juice heiress breakfasting on the lawn of her mansion (above).

The south terrace makes for a wonderfully varied film location. Parties and weddings are popular (“The Country Bears,” “Master of Disguise,” “Miss Match”); possibly the most spectacular set was for “Town and Country,” which featured an entire Ferris wheel set up on the Rose Garden lawn, along with other midway attractions. “Captain America” draped the building in red, white, and blue bunting to stage a 1940s awards ceremony. Perhaps the most unusual usage was for Peter Bogdanovich’s “At Long Last Love,” in 1974 (right). In a perfect example of “things we probably wouldn’t do today,” an antique roadster was placed on the terrace to give the appearance of a “morning after” a riotously cheery night out. The south door was their front door, and Cybill Shepherd and Burt Reynolds wandered in and out of the building and down into the Rose Garden.

Our episode of “CSI: Miami” airs Sun., Dec. 11, at 10 p.m. on CBS. You can also view episodes on the show’s website.

Captions: Location shots of an episode of “CSI: Miami” in 2008 and the movie “At Long Last Love” from 1974.