You never know what you might find in JSTOR. No, really! Just ask Isaure Mignotte, the Department of Comparative Literature coordinator at Harvard University. She wrote us that her mother was preparing an exhibition for Camille Piton, a family artist who was once involved with The Art Amateur, a journal published in the 19th century. JSTOR provides access from 1879 to 1891, but her mother needed an issue from July 1892 — specifically page 35 and three designs reproduced in the journal’s supplement.

JSTOR had digitized The Art Amateur as part of a grant-funded project focusing on the digitization and preservation of rare art history periodicals, but coverage was limited to print copies available from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection’s libraries. JSTOR didn’t have plans to locate and digitize any more issues.

Not ready to give up, our production team found a library with a microform copy of the needed issue. It was then that they discovered that the page Mignotte requested mentioned that the specified designs “appeared in early issues of our magazine, some twelve years ago.” Which meant they were available in JSTOR! The team shared the 1892 issue and the designs from JSTOR, just in time for the exhibition.