. . . 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.
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”
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities 
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