This month’s object is a new museum acquisition: paper samples from Bosques del Papel in Peru. The museum collects sample books and swatches like these to document the wide varieties of paper made around the world. These sample books are resources for historians and artists to be able to see first-hand the kinds of papers available and used in different places and times.   

This month’s featured Artifact of the Month is a Costa Rican two-colón note from 1941 (1993.003.033).

This month's feature is a collection of bark samples. Although they are stored among our collection, they are uncatalogued. In a collection as vast as ours, it is not uncommon to have hidden treasures, like these charming bark samples. Bark samples of this nature are often kept and shared in order to better understand which fibers would be good candidates for pulping and pulling sheets of paper. Samples of this type can either be in the form of solid pieces of a branch including both the bark and meat of the tree or solely the stripped bark.