Smithsonian Books

11/12/2025

November marks National Picture Book Month! A IS FOR ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE is our beautifully illustrated picture book that celebrates what makes us unique as individuals and what connects us as humans.
https://s.si.edu/43gdIFB

11/11/2025

This adorable white lion cub and protective lion are from the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve in South Africa. Find more like them in the stunning photography book THE LAST LIONS. 🦁 Image credit: © Chad Cocking https://s.si.edu/46kOOoJ

11/10/2025

November is Native American Heritage Month, and our book WATER'S EDGE celebrates the talent and legacy of Native American artist Truman Lowe. Lowe was most well known for his incredible sculptures that turn wood into water, evoking the rivers, streams, and waterfalls in Black River Falls, Wisconsin where he was raised.
https://s.si.edu/47rb2ay

11/09/2025

Last night was the 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Los Angeles. Pictured here is the newly inducted Cyndi Lauper at Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre in California in 1984, featured in SMITHSONIAN ROCK AND ROLL: LIVE AND UNSEEN. 🎤 The book is like its own hall of fame, celebrating musics, musicians, and its fans. 📸Image credit: Abel Armas II /Smithsonian Books
https://s.si.edu/44YDtse

11/08/2025

Happy birthday, Rhea Seddon! Seddon was part of NASA's first class of women astronauts. The 1978 class is pictured here: (front, left to right) Sally Ride, Rhea Seddon; (rear) Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, Anna Fisher, Judy Resnik. Read all about these incredible women in ON A MISSION! 👩‍🚀
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Image credit: NASA

11/07/2025

STATE FAIRS: GROWING AMERICAN CRAFT features crafts from across the United States. Enjoy pieces like this beautiful "Vase with deer (untitled)" circa 1939 from Cambridge, IN and made by Mary Frances Overbeck 🦌 Courtesy of Overbeck Museum, Cambridge City Public Library, Cambridge, IN https://www.smithsonianbooks.com/store/art-architecture/state-fairs-growing-american-craft/

11/04/2025

Happy publication day to ETHIOPIAN DEVOTIONS! The book celebrates the distinctive religious architecture, visual arts, literature, liturgical traditions and poetry of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church that dates back to the fourth century C.E. with stunning photographs and enlightening essays! https://www.smithsonianbooks.com/store/art-architecture/ethiopian-devotions-paintings-illuminated-manuscripts-and-processional-crosses-from-the-fourteenth-to-the-twentieth-centuries/

11/02/2025

This National Native American Heritage Month, enjoy Truman Lowe's incredible ! From sketches to woodland sculptures, WATER'S EDGE is a gorgeous tribute to work inspired by the home and history of his Ho-Chunk community. https://www.smithsonianbooks.com/store/national-museum-american-indian-titles/waters-edge-the-art-of-truman-lowe/

10/31/2025

STAGING THE SUPERNATURAL sets the perfect mood for your Halloween reading 🎃 Happy Halloween from Smithsonian Books and all of the cat demons, skeletal ghosts, and other supernatural beings in this beautiful book. https://www.smithsonianbooks.com/store/art-architecture/staging-the-supernatural-ghosts-and-the-theater-in-japanese-prints/

10/30/2025

We have a mission for you—find a more beautiful book than ON A MISSION when the sunlight hits its holographic foil! Get the book and follow US women astronauts into space: https://smithsonianbooks.com/store/aviation-military-history/on-a-mission-the-smithsonian-history-of-us-women-astronauts/

10/29/2025

Check out this ZME Science interview with our ON A MISSION author Valerie Neal about how women astronauts transformed NASA and redefined what it means to explore space.

Historian Valerie Neal reveals how women astronauts transformed NASA and redefined what it means to explore space.

10/28/2025

"Neal had interacted with astronauts during her time as curator and was always interested in their stories—who they were before they became astronauts, how they accomplished that feat and what being in the space program meant to them. With that in mind, she found her project: telling the history of America’s women astronauts. Her new book, On a Mission: The Smithsonian History of U.S. Women Astronauts, traces over 45 years of this history."

In 1978, Ride and five other women became the first group of female astronauts in the U.S. A new book by a longtime curator of spaceflight artifacts explores the nearly five-decade history of women in the space program