Dueling Apple Pies

Two versions of the well-known ABC tale, The History of An Apple Pie, both from the early 19th century, but which came first?

. . . from the bottom UP!

A pop-up book created as a promotional item for the Mutual Broadcasting System, featuring a group of three-dimensional sports scenes: . . . from the bottom UP!, ca. 1943.

‘Satisfy Your Soul and Let the Good Times Roll’

Rent party cards from the Langston Hughes Papers (JWJ MSS 26)

Face to Face to Face to Face

Polaroid portraits of poets, writers, artists, critics, and others from the Jonathan Williams Photograph Collection.

Jonathan Williams, a poet, photographer, and editor and publisher of The Jargon Society, made formal and informal portraits of friends and associates in the United States and Europe from the 1950s until his death in 2008; the Jonathan Williams Photograph Collection includes several thousand images, including, in addition to portraits,  photographs of  landscapes, grave sites, artworks, and art installations.  This recently acquired collection is currenlty being organized and processed by Beinecke Library Archivist, Matthew Mason.  Jonathan Williams Photograph Collection record in Orbis:  Jonathan Williams Photograph Collection; view additional images from this collection.

Photographs by Jonathan Williams are used with permission of the copyright holder,  Tom Meyer; permission is required to publish Williams’s  photographs in any format. To learn more, contact the Curator, Yale Collection of American Literature.

Beinecke Library Archivist, Matthew Mason.

Bigger, Better

New Beinecke Library Shelving Facility

As part of its ongoing commitment to improve research capabilities by increasing and preserving its collections, the Beinecke Library has created a state-of-the-art off-site shelving facility to house our growing manuscript and book collections. As a result, some collections now housed off-site must be paged at least 24 hours in advance for use in the Library’s reading room. Collections housed in the new shelving facility will be identified in Orbis, the Library’s catalog, with the following information “LSF-Request for Use at Beinecke Rare Book Library.” Requests must be made with the Beinecke Library Access Services Department by email to beinecke.library@yale.edu .  Please be sure to include the call number, author and title of the item(s) you wish to view and include in the subject line of your email, “LSF request.”  Contact the Access Services Desk for more information: 203-432-2972 or beinecke.library@yale.edu.

Image:  Photograph of Beinecke Library under construction. Additional photos of the Library’s construction can be viewed here: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Construction Photographs, 1961-1963.

Brakhage Scrapbooks

Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, compiled by Jane (Brakhage) Wodening, [1958–67].

Podcast: A description of the scrapbooks by Richard Deming, lecturer in the Department of English at Yale University –  Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1958-1967

View additional images from the Wodening-Brakhage Scrapbooks

Jane Wodening, then Jane Brakhage, assembled three remarkable scrapbooks in the early 1960s, when she was the wife and muse of experimental film maker Stan Brakhage. Celebrated today as a pioneer in avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage was just gaining recognition for his non-narrative and hand painted films during the period documented by the scrapbooks. Wodening created the scrapbooks from literal “scraps” of their family life, Brakhage’s creative process, and the artistic communities of which they were a part. Pages are covered with the widest array of verbal and visual materials including but not limited to letters, manuscripts, photographs, original art, clippings, pamphlets, filmstrips, and flyers. The scrapbooks demonstrate, too, Jane’s own aesthetic vision and creative drive.

The books document a crucial time in Stan Brakhage’s career (during which he made some 30 films, including Dog Star Man, one of his most important) and in the Brakhages’ lives, a period during which they encountered and shared lively creative exchanges with many filmmakers, artists, Beat Generation poets, and other writers. Writers and artists who are, in some way, “contributors” to the scrapbooks include: Kenneth Anger, Wallace Berman, Joseph Cornell, Robert Creeley, Guy Davenport, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Jess, Robert Kelly, Gregory Markopoulos, Michael McClure, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, and Louis Zukofsky. “We were all young and wild and articulate and creative,” Jane Wodening has written about the creative community of the period, “we were right; we were gods; we were going to change the world, bring it around to sheer truth.”

As Time Goes By

New Hours At Beinecke Library

New Reading Room Hours, Effective June 1, 2009
Mondays – Thursdays 9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Fridays 9:00 a.m.– 5:00 p.m.

New Exhibition Gallery Hours, Effective June 1, 2009
Mondays – Thursdays 9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Fridays 9:00 a.m.– 5:00 p.m.
Saturdays 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Image: Wrist watch belonging to Eugene O’Neill (from the Eugene O’Neill Papers, call number: YCAL MSS 123, Box 130, Folder 2464). A detailed descriptioon of the archive is available online:  Guide to the Eugene O’Neill Papers

Qui est Henri Roorda?

Well, according to our research, Henri Roorda van Eysinga (1870-1925, who often wrote under the pseudonym Balthazar) was a Swiss educator, humorist, anarchist, and pacifist who wrote everything from math textbooks to plays to essays. Hardly known in the US, he is feted in an exhibition at the Musee Historique de Lausanne.

Beinecke Library has added a small group of books and a typescript of a play “The League against Stupidity”

Wonder Movies

A curious production from the early 1920s intended to mimic motion in a book for young readers. Each “movie” is viewed by turning back successive panels on a scored page to reveal new scenes. While a bit awkward to manipulate, the idea works well enough to entertain and delight.

Wonder movies by Victor M Earle; Illustrated by Benjamin Seielstad
(Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, Page, 1923).

Schwimm, Schwamm, Schwumm

Illustrated plates from a German primer on swimming.

Carl Purkart, Vorschriften für den Schwimmunterricht (München, 1826)

Past Times

Les Jeux des jeunes garçons représentés en 25 gravures à l’aqua-tints

d’après les dessins de Xavier Le Prince ; avec l’explication détaillée des règles de chaque jeu ; accompagnées de fables nouvelles par MM. Armand-Gouffé, Le Franc, etc. et suivis d’anecdotes relatives à chaque jeu.

(A Paris : Chez P.C. Lehuby, [n.d., after 1822?])

Noted as “sixieme edition” in the preface.

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Scenes of juvenile ludic life in France in the early part of the 19th century.

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A Garden by the Sea

Selected poems and images from a privately distributed volume from 1935:

Noailles, Anna Elisabeth de Brancovan, Philippe Gonin, and Jean Berque. 1935.
“Les jardins”: Poèmes de la Comtesse de Noailles. Paris: Frères Gonin.

Evidence of follies past

An exceedingly rare paper share for an English company traded at the height of the stock mania in the summer of 1720 – perhaps the only known survival of this iconic type of object that appears in numerous satirical prints and plays from the period as the symbol of folly – worthless bits of paper being blown by the wind of speculation.

M. M.

A pair of Mickey Mouse books from the early 1930s.

Mickey, chercheur d’or [Paris] : Hachette, [©1931]
whose endpapers advertise the adventures of the fellow on film and in the local newspaper.

AND

Mickey Mouse movie stories. Philadelphia, David McKay Co. [©1931]
contains comic strips and images of Mickey and Minnie at the bottom of every page, so that the reader can flip the pages and create miniature “movies”.

But the most charming attribute of this copy is the owner’s inscription:

The Jumble Club

The records of The Jumble Club, a group dedicated to playing whist (and *only* whist) which thrived in Glasgow, Scotland, approximately between 1799 and 1877.
The records consist of 4 ledgers containing minutes of meetings, with additional meeting minutes, inventories, insurance policy, checkbook. flyers and other related papers and ephemera.

And they came in a lovely metal coffer, complete with a set of keys, none of which fit the box lock.

Living Portraits: The Poets

Poets photographed by Carl Van Vechten, including images featured in the exhibition Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939-1964, on view at the Beinecke Library from April 30 through June 30, 2009.

Langston Hughes, 1942

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Owen Dodson, 1942

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Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka),1962

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Countee Cullen, 1941

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Duward Collins, 1962

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Nicolas Guillen, 1949

Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939-1964 features some 140 never-before-exhibited color photographs by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten (1880-1964) had an artistic vision rooted in the centrality of the talented person. He cherished accomplishment, whether in music, dance, theater, fine art, literature, sport, or advocacy.

He began to make photographic portraits in 1932; in 1939 he discovered newly available color film. For a quarter century, he invited friends and acquaintances, well-known artists and fledgling entertainers to sit for him, often against backdrops reminiscent of the vivid colors and patterns of a Matisse painting. Among his subjects were a very young Diahann Carroll, Billie Holiday in tears, Paul Robeson as Othello, and a procession of opera stars, composers, authors, musicians, and others who made notable contributions to the cultural life of the country. The exhibition includes 140 full-sized portraits, digitally reformatted from Van Vechten’s original slides. [ca. 140 items]
Selected images from the Carl Van Vechten Photograph Collection

Images above: Langston Hughes,   Owen Dodson, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Countee Cullen,  Duward Collins, Nicolas Guillen, photographed by Carl Van Vechten. Photographs by Carl Van Vechten are used with permission of the Van Vechten Trust; the permission of the Trust is required to reprint or use Van Vechten photographs in any way. To contact the Trust email: Van Vechten Trust.

April is National Poetry Month!

The Potters’ Wheel

A handmade journal of poetry, paintings, designs, and photographs created by a group of young women, including poet Sara Teasdale who later won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1918). Images: Teasdale’s “Guenevere,” with accompanying illustrations by Williamina Parrish in The Potter’s Wheel;  Teasdale’s and Parrish’s signature marks, 19 April 07 (Sara Teasdale Papers, ZA Teasdale); photograph of Sara Teasdale, 1914 (Uncat ZA Ms 140).

April is National Poetry Month!

Play de Blues and Misery

Play de Blues / Misery — Image by Aaron Douglas, poem by Langston Hughes, from Six Poems, [1926].

(detail)

April is National Poetry Month!

Poets’ Portraits

Photographs of poets by poet, editor, and photographer Jonathan Williams (collection record in Orbis:  Jonathan Williams Photographs; view additional images from this collection).

Robert Duncan

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Simon Cutts

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Charles Olson

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Lorine Niedecker

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Robert Creeley

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Nathaniel Tarn

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Jonathan Williams (self portrait)

April is National Poetry Month!

Modern Poetry in Review

Modernist Little Magazines & Poetry Reviews

Little Review, September 1917

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Blast, June 20, 1914 (more images from this issue)

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Harlem, November 1928

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The Egoist, January-February 1919 (more images from this issue)

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Broom, January 1922

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Transition, 1928

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Poetry, 1912

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New York Dada, April 1921 (more images from this issue)

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These and other literary magazines can be located in Orbis, Yale’s catalog for books; related manuscript collections can be located in the Yale Finding Aid Database.

April is National Poetry Month!