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 2nd 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.
To sleep, perchance to dream . . . of bagpipes and tamarinds.
A dream dictionary too good not to post in its entirety.
The Universal Dreamer, Or, Dreams Realized: Being the Truest Guide to the Interpretation of Dreams Ever Published. London: R. Walwyn, ca. 1837 – 1845.
Next Stop . . . Planet Hershel
A late 18th century guide to astronomy listing the most recent observations.
Included in the list of known planets is a then-recent discovery, a planet named “Hershel” –
what is today known as Uranus. Discovered in 1781 by the German polymath, Sir Frederick William Herschel,
the planet was first known as “The Georgian Star”, for Britain’s King George III.
Due to the King’s lack of popularity in France, that country used the name “Hershel”.
Prévost, de S. A. L’astronomie Mise a La Portée De Tout Le Monde: Contenant Un Traité De La Sphère, Un Traité D’astronomie & Un Traité D’uranographie. A Saint Maixent: Chez François Lainé, Imprimeur, 1792.
Georgia O’Keeffe — New Acquisitions
Beinecke acquisitions offer insights into public and private life of Georgia O’Keeffe
Recent acquisitions by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library shed light on the life and work of artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The collections document O’Keeffe’s public face and the business of showing and selling her art, and also her private friendships, casual observations, and unguarded moments. Several of the acquisitions include not only letters and manuscripts, but also photographs of O’Keeffe and her friends and family. These photographs depict her residences at Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch as well as many other settings (a beauty parlor, while hiking, shopping, driving, and boating). The artist’s legacy was managed and promoted for two decades by the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, whose records document the distribution of O’Keeffe’s assets and the perpetuation of her artistic legacy.
The new additions complement Beinecke’s holdings relating to O’Keeffe and to other American artists. Beinecke continuously adds to its exciting collection, which consists not only of vast and comprehensive collections relating to O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, but also numerous small collections and individual letters, manuscripts, photographs, works of art, and books.
The lives and work of American artists and arts communities are well documented in Beinecke’s Yale Collection of American Literature, especially at points of intersection between literature and the visual arts. Activities around Alfred Stieglitz’s important photography and art galleries, 291 and An American Place, and his influential publication Camera Work, as well as conversations and exchanges among artists and writers in the Southwest are documented in the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive; the archive includes work, correspondence, and writings by artists Anne Brigman, Marsden Hartley, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, and others.
The recent O’Keeffe acquisitions include:
Georgia O’Keeffe letters to the Girard family, 1957-1983 (YCAL MSS 209)
Georgia O’Keeffe letters to Alan Priest, 1950-1961 (YCAL MSS 271)
Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation records, 1950-2006 (YCAL MSS 342)
Georgia O’Keeffe letters to Betty Pilkington, 1952-1976 (YCAL MSS 344)
Georgia O’Keeffe letters to Edith Evans Asbury, 1957-1986 (YCAL MSS 363)
Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz letters to Erma Stix (uncataloged)
Related collections at the Beinecke include:
Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe archive, 1728-1986 (YCAL MSS 85)
Flora Stieglitz Straus collection of Stieglitz family papers, 1860-1999 (YCAL MSS 89)
Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe collection, 1893-ongoing (YCAL MSS 104)
O’Keeffe at Abiquiu (YCAL MSS 263)
Angna Enters and Louis Kalonyme papers, 1919-1960 (YCAL MSS 430)
These collections are available for research. Researchers may contact the Beinecke Library Reference Staff for further information. Selections from Beinecke’s collections are included in the recent publication of letters by O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, available from Yale University Press.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is open for research year-round and visitors can plan their research or read about fellowship opportunities online. (LC)
Ansel Adams, [Photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe, seated, writing a letter, in Yosemite, California],
1938 Sept 11, Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive (YCAL MSS 85).
Featuring Beinecke
#22 YALE
Yale Special. Planned, edited & designed by graphic design department, Yale School of Art.
PARTICIPANTS & CONTRIBUTORS include Beinecke curators Kevin Repp and Timothy Young.
Other Yale contributors include: Jack Balkin, James Berger, Julian Bittiner, Karla Britton, Craig Buckley, Francesco Casetti, Gregory Crewdson, Glen Cummings, Sheila Levrant De Bretteville, Keller Easterling, Paul Elliman, Michael Faison, Peter Halley, Roni Horn, Matthew Jacobson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Karel Martens, Dan Michaelson, Sigi Moeslinger, Alexander Nemerov, Margaret Olin, Sarah Oppenheimer, Mark Owens, Michael Rock, Elihu Rubin, Julika Rudelius, Holly Rushmaier, Susan Sellers, Rob Storr, Masamichi Udagawa, Daniel Van Der Velden, Linda Van Deursen, Lyneise Williams, Yale Gdmfa ’11
New Research from the Beinecke Collections
New from the University of Iowa Press: The American H. D., by Annette Debo
In The American H.D., Annette Debo considers the significance of nation in the artistic vision and life of the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle. Her versatile career stretching from 1906 to 1961, H.D. was a major American writer who spent her adult life abroad; a poet and translator who also wrote experimental novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and a children’s book; a white writer with ties to the Harlem Renaissance; an intellectual who collaborated on avant-garde films and film criticism; and an upper-middle-class woman who refused to follow gender conventions. Her wide-ranging career thus embodies an expansive narrative about the relationship of modernism to the United States and the nuances of the American nation from the Gilded Age to the Cold War.
Making extensive use of material in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale—including correspondence, unpublished autobiographical writings, family papers, photographs, and Professor Norman Holmes Pearson’s notes for a planned biography of H.D.—Debo’s American H.D. reveals details about its subject never before published. Adroitly weaving together literary criticism, biography, and cultural history, The American H.D. tells a new story about the significance of this important writer.
Written with clarity and sincere affection for its subject, The American H.D. brings together a sophisticated understanding of modernism, the poetry and prose of H.D., the personalities of her era, and the historical and cultural context in which they developed: America’s emergence as a dominant economic and political power that was riven by racial and social inequities at home.
Beiencke Collections: H. D. Papers; Bryher Papers; Norman Holmes Pearson Papers
“In The American H.D., Annette Debo examines the importance of the history and identity of America—in the context of theories of nation-state and nation-building—to H.D.’s artistic vision. Debo’s opening chapters invoke the world into which H.D. was born—a mere generation after the end of the Civil War, a decade after the end of Reconstruction—as characterized by a diverse country defining itself as homogenous. Debo’s analysis of the telling influence of the Harlem Renaissance on H.D.’s work comprises a nuanced reading of H.D.’s study of whiteness itself. A final chapter addressing the fraught relationship between women of H.D.’s class and the concept of nation will take its place as a significant corrective to the field of H.D. scholarship. This magisterial study of H.D. as a quintessentially American writer will forever change how we read and teach this great twentieth-century poet.”—Cynthia Hogue, Arizona State University
“The American H.D. reminds us that the nomadic lives of expatriate modernists contain within their transnational scope a rootedness in the landscapes, literary cultures, histories, and politics of their place of national origin. Doing for H.D. what Wendy Flory’s The American Ezra Pound did for its subject, Debo charts the biographical, political, and literary traces of H.D.’s Americanness. The land- and seascapes of H.D.’s national identity constitute a kind of ‘environmental determinism’ that shapes her literary identifications and placement within an American literary canon that includes Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, and Moore. A valuable addition to the growing corpus of work on H.D., The American H.D. is a thoroughly researched and illuminating examination of the tensions between the exilic and the national as they played out in her life and work.”—Susan Stanford Friedman, author, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle
Publication Studio New Haven
Publication Studio comes to the Elm City to redefine the social life of the book.
A One-week Residency in the Coop Center for Creativity
November 14 – 19, 2011
Publication Studio, founded in Portland, Oregon in 2009, is an experiment in sustainable publication that has branched into six independent sibling studios around North America. They print and bind on demand, creating original books quickly with writers and artists they admire. They attend to the social life of the book, cultivating a public that cares and
is engaged.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
POP-UP SHOP
196 College Street, New Haven, CT
Hours: 11:00 – 6:00 MTWTF (NOV 14-18); 12-5 SAT (NOV 19)
Demonstrations (open to the public)(refreshments served)
MONDAY, NOV 14 5:00 – 6:00
TUESDAY, NOV 15 5:00 – 6:00
WEDNESDAY, NOV 16 5:00 – 6:00
THURSDAY, NOV 17 1:00 – 2:00
FRIDAY, NOV 18 12:00 – 1:00
Rebinding Party
SATURDAY, NOV 19 12:00 – 5:00
“Five Buck Book Binding Blow-Out”!
Bring in your old, falling-apart paperbacks
or a book whose cover doesn’t suit you,
and get it rebound into a sturdy manila
bound edition. $5/rebind.
PUBLIC LECTURES
Matthew Stadler, founder of Publication Studio
“The Ends of the Book: Authors, Readers, Public Spaces”
Thursday, November 17, 4:00 – 5:30.
Location: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
121 Wall Street, New Haven, CT
Free and open to the public
Diana Balmori, internationally renowned landscape and
urban designer, speaking at the launch of Publication
Studio’s facsimile edition of her Moleskin Diaries.
Friday, November 18: 6:00 – 7:30
Location: 196 College Street, New Haven, CT
Free and open to the public.
Seating is limited, so please arrive early.
Co-sponsored by ArtSpace New Haven and
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
in conjunction with the ArtSpace exhibition
“Library Science”.
The Moon at one Meter
A souvenir from the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, an attraction that allowed visitors to view the moon through a giant telescope.
The imagery for the attraction may be related to the Georges Méliès 1898 film “La Lune à un mètre” (or “The Astronomer’s Dream”)
Window Picture
Research in Beinecke Library Collections:
Photographic Memory Workshop – Graduate Student Working Group 2011-2012
The Photographic Memory Workshop is pleased to invite graduate students, post-doctoral students and academic fellows of the Yale community to submit presentation proposals to its 2011-2012 Graduate Student Working Group. In addition to our usual calendar of visiting scholar lectures, our workshop series offers members of the Yale community working on photography an opportunity to present and discuss works in progress.
Our aim is to bring together people from a variety of disciplines to give feedback and to inspire productive critical conversation about the visual material.
At each meeting, the speaker will give a 20-30 minute informal presentation centered on a set of photographs, instruments, or materials. These presentations can be formal papers, works in progress, or curatorial projects. Electronic images of the subject being presented (but not the text of the presentation itself) will be pre-circulated to the group by email prior to each meeting. The presentation will be followed by critical conversation and feedback about the speaker’s research project/paper/exhibition.
We are open to any submission related to photography. This includes, but is not limited to, photography’s material processes and cultural history, scientific and applied photography, photographs in books, as well as conceptual, fine-art, and commercial photography. We especially welcome proposals relating to objects in any of the Yale University collections.
Photographic Memory Workshop Meetings:
The Workshop meets several times throughout the semester, generally at 6pm on Wednesdays. Specific dates and time TBA–contact the organizers for details or to receive announcements about meetings and related events.
Submission Guidelines:
Please send a 250-500 word proposal along with a selection of images relating to your research topic by October 1st, 2011 to photographicmemoryworkshop@gmail.com.
About the Photographic Memory Workshop:
This is the thirteenth year of the Photographic Memory Workshop under the mentorship of Professor Laura Wexler. The workshop, which brings together graduate students, faculty, and staff from a wide variety of disciplines, explores the myriad of possibilities inherent in the study of photographs and/or memory. Should you have any questions about the workshop or our activities, please email photographicmemoryworkshop@gmail.com or contact the graduate student fellows at heidi.knoblauch@yale.edu and audrey.sands@yale.edu.
About Photography in the American Literature and Modern Books and Manuscripts Collections:
Photographic materials in the Collections compliment the book and manuscript collections, with a close relationship to archival materials and other primary documentation. Holdings in the collections document the lives of writers and literary communities, cultural spaces, and significant events of various kinds and include everything from snapshots and passport photographs to fine art and portrait photography by some of the most important photographers of the 20th century. Materials in the Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection are primarily from Europe and Africa; photographic materials in the Yale Collection of American Literature document the lives and work of Americans at home and abroad. Brief overviews of the Collections can be found online: Photography in the Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection: http://photostest.odai.yale.edu/directory/dir_single_collection.php?collection_id=14; Photography in the Yale Collection of American Literature: http://photostest.odai.yale.edu/directory.
About Photography in Yale Collections:
A Directory of Yale Photographic Collections provides a portal through which to mine the breadth of the University’s images across repositories and disciplines. The interdisciplinary nature of these resources opens the possibility for endless discoveries of images illustrating sweeping applications of the medium and at the same time presents exciting avenues for the creative use of photographs in object-based learning. http://photostest.odai.yale.edu/directory/index.php
Image:
Jonathan Williams, [Polaroid photo of cat in window], undated. By Permission of Jargon Books/Jonathan Williams Estate.
Historic Dress
Photographs of friends and family from the papers of poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and related archives; posted in honor of the Beinecke Library’s first annual staff H.D. & Co. Costume Party.
[Photograph of Gilbert, Harold and Hilda Doolittle, 1888].
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Hilda Doolittle, inscribed to Marianne Moore.
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Ezra Pound, passport photo
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[Photographs of Richard Aldington, 1928-30]
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D. H. Lawrence, photographed by Nikolas Muray
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[Profile photograph of Robert McAlmon]
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Bryher, Perdita Aldington, and H. D.
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Production still from Borderline, featuring Bryher, 1929
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[Photograph of Bryher, Kenneth MacPherson and Robert Herring in Advent Bay, 1929.]
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Norman Douglas in Venice, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1935
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Hanns Sachs with a monkey at Kenwin
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Marianne Moore and her mother, photographed by Cecil Beaton
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Rascal, Villain, Coward,
“Plan for the improvement of the art of paper war” from: The American museum; or, Universal magazine, 1787 May.
Her Desk
Poet H. D.’s writing desk, beside a portrait of her friend and literary executor Norman Holmes Pearson (Deane Keller, n. d.).
A recent gift to the Yale Collection of American Literature, the provenance of H.D.’s desk is somewhat mysterious; H.D. biographer Barbara Guest writes: “Said to be Christina Rosetti’s, it may originally have belonged to Empress Eugenie, who spent several years in exile in England. Bryher bought the desk for H. D. at the estate sale of Violet Hunt” (Herself Defined, 56). If you have any additional information about this desk, please be in touch with curator Nancy Kuhl (nancy.kuhl@yale.edu).
Related materials and collections: H.D. Papers Finding Aid; H.D. Image Guide; Bryher Papers Finding Aid
Subscribers to the Book of Job
The original notebook kept by William Blake recording patrons for his
major work of prints finished in 1826.
Click here for the complete set of images.
ca. 1909
An Ezra Pound notebook.
A photograph of F. T. Marinetti.
A Western scene by Charles Russell.
A score by Jules Massenet.
Oriental Limited – Observation car by Walter McClintock
A log cabin, with Joseph Hopkins Twichell and his mother.
A letter from W. H. Davies to Edward Thomas.
Venus as a Boy
A deluxe artist’s edition. with illustrations by Leonor Fini, of the 1884 novel by the decadent writer, Rachilde.
The images from this edition (Editions d’Art Agori, 1972) express just a hint of the complicated, soap opera-level plot that starts with a young woman, cross-dressing as a man, who takes a male lover who cross-dresses as a woman. Throw in drugs, prostitution and a bit of necrophila and you have a snapshot of what constituted the wildest urges of the decadent movement.
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”
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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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.
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!
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities 
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