New Exhibition: By Hand

By Hand: A Celebration of the Manuscript Collections of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

January 18 – April 29, 2013

By Hand celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript with an exploration of its manuscript collections. The exhibition begins where the Yale College Library collection of early manuscripts began, with a mirror of humanity, a copy of the Speculum humanae salvationis given by Elihu Yale. It ends with the manuscripts and drafts of “Miracle of the Black Leg,” a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey while she was a research fellow at the Beinecke Library in 2009.

Manuscript, from the Latin term “by hand,” derives from the ablative case: locational, instrumental, situated always in relation to something or someone else. Like the term, this exhibition explores the reflections of humanity in the Beinecke’s manuscript collections, presenting them as markers of the social contracts of love, creativity, need, power, that bind us into historical record even as they bind us to one another.

The exhibition ranges across the Beinecke Library manuscript collections, in an extraordinary display of the Library’s manuscript holdings, from papyri of the 2^nd century A.D. through working drafts by contemporary poets, from manuscripts in the original Yale Library to recent additions to the collections. On view are manuscripts, notes, and proof copies of works by Langston Hughes, Rachel Carson, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Terry Tempest Williams, James Joyce, F. T. Marinetti, Goethe, and others; the Voynich Manuscript, the Vinland Map, the Lewis and Clark expedition map and journals, the Martellus map; the last paragraphs of Thoreau’s manuscript of Walden; letters, postcards, poetry, and notes by Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Franz Kafka, Mark Twain, Erica Jong, and others; early manuscripts from a tenth-century Byzantine prayer roll, a fragment of lyric verse on papyri, the Rothschild Canticles, a fourteenth-century ivory writing tablet, and the first illuminated medieval manuscript known in a North American collection.

Fontana’s White Manifesto

An retrospective/homage to the work of Lucio Fontana, reproducing in full his original Manifiesto Blanco from 1946 in which he set forth the parameters for his art movement, “spatialism”. (Fontana, Lucio, Noci G. Le, and Ugo Mulas. Manifiesto Blanco. Milano: Galleria Apollinaire, 1966.)

Op Art Kalendar

A calendar for the year 1967 created by the artists Klaus Burkhardt and Luitpold Domberger.
Featuring 6 optical art silkscreen prints, this work was issued in 26 copies only.

New Student Research

Liana Epstein, Yale College Class of 2014
“The Great American Writers’ Cookbook”

written for Professor Stuart’s Fall 2012 English 121 class:
Writing About Food

An excerpt: “The late 70s were politically tumultuous as scientific experimentation increased and the American public became wary of new technology following disasters such as the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident. By 1981, the nuclear arms race had intensified to a peak tension where Mutually Assured Destruction by the US and Soviet Union was generally accepted. These years also witnessed John Lennon’s assassination, the eruption of Mount St. Helens, and the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia. The Great American Writers certainly had enough serious material to work with. This cookbook provided humor to diffuse some of the apprehension many Americans were likely feeling in response to these historical events.”

Read the essay: Liana Epstein, The Great American Writers’ Cookbook

About the book: The Great American Writers’ Cookbook, edited by Dean Faulkner Wells and with an introduction by Craig Claiborne, Oxford: Yoknapatawpha Press, c1981.