“Lost Play Found: The ‘Exorcism’ of Eugene O’Neill,” NPR, 3/25/12

The play, which Louise acquired for the Beinecke Library collections in 2012, adds to the Library’s Eugene O’Neill archival holdings. 

A  great review of Remembering Shakespeare, the Beinecke’s current exhibition, in Friday’s New York Times Weekend Arts.

Vulgar Venus and Politic Poetry: Reading Shakespeare in the Renaissance

Wednesday, February 29, 4:30 pm

Adam G. Hooks is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa and an Associate Instructor at the UI Center for the Book, where he teaches courses in Shakespeare, early modern literature and culture, and the history of the book.

All events and exhibitions are free and open to the public.

The lecture is sponsored by the Beinecke Lectures in the History of the Book, and accompanies Remembering Shakespeare, an exhibition on view through June 4, 2012.

Follow these links for a web exhibition and exhibition blog for Remembering Shakespeare.

Remembering Shakespeare tells the story of how a playwright and poet in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England came to be remembered as the world’s most venerated author. Curated by David Scott Kastan, George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale, and Kathryn James, Beinecke Library Curator, the exhibition brings together works from the holdings of Yale University’s Elizabethan Club, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale Center for British Art, and Beinecke Library, in an unprecedented display of one of North America’s finest collections on Shakespeare. Drawing on these extraordinary resources, Remembering Shakespeare offers a unique visual history of how the “Booke” of Shakespeare was made and read, written and remembered, from his lifetime through the present.

EXHIBITION OPENING

Wednesday, 15 February 2012, 4:30 pm
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
121 Wall Street, New Haven, Connecticut

Remembering the Corpus:  The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Lecture by David Scott Kastan
Yale University George M. Bodman Professor of English

Click here for the full list of exhibition events.    Questions?  Please contact the exhibition curator, kathryn.james@yale.edu.

Remembering Shakespeare is part of Shakespeare at Yale, a program of events and exhibitions across Yale University to celebrate the Bard in Spring 2012.

There are few couples in the history of 20th-century American art and culture more prominent than Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). Between 1915, when they first began to write to each other, and 1946, when Stieglitz died, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged over 5,000 letters (more than 25,000 pages) that describe their daily lives in profoundly rich detail. This long-awaited volume features some 650 letters, carefully selected and annotated by leading photography scholar Sarah Greenough.

To learn more about My Faraway One or to order a copy, visit the Yale University Press.

And learn more about the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive housed in the Beinecke Library and browse thousands of digitized photographs, documents, and letters.

Written in 1940 and intended as a follow-up to her children’s book The World Is Round, published the previous year, To Do is a fanciful journey through the alphabet. Each letter is represented by four names (including Gertrude for “G”) and features a short story told in verse. “[This is] a birthday book I would have liked as a child,” said Stein of To Do.

Learn more about A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays through the Yale University Press.

vol. 4, p. 14-15

This is one of 16 volumes describing an 1849 Western expedition by Joseph Bruff, a draftsman in the Bureau of Topographical Engineers. Learn more about the Bruff journals here.

To quote Robert Frost’s 1923 poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.

And we too, have many miles of library shelves to go, and many, many items from our expansive collections to digitization before we sleep. A few more highlights from the recent group that helped to push us over the 300,000 mark:

Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Trois Vertus, ca. 1475

Histoire des nobles & vaillans cheualiers, Lyon, 1568

The muses garland, London, 1603

Gertrude Stein at Radcliffe College, circa 1894

El Lissitzky, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, and their child

The Russian artist El Lissitzky is best remembered for his striking Constructivist and Suprematist works in the early era of Soviet avant-garde propaganda. Books like The Story of the Two Squares, his design work for UNOVIS, and the posters and exhibitions for Soviet pavilions at international fairs in Europe and the United States continue to make a powerful impression on artists and graphic designers today. What is less well remembered are the many works of Yiddish literature lavishly illustrated by Lissitzky for the Jewish Kultur-Liga in the years immediately following the First World War. Part of the reason for this is that the Kultur-Liga was suppressed soon after the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War.

Lissitzky and others were forced to turn away from Jewish cultural legacies toward an art that emphasized class as the primary (if not sole) criteria for identity politics. Published in 1919, Lissitzky’s Chad Gadya appeared at a

crucial juncture in this transformation, and elements of both his later turn to the stark geometric forms of Suprematism as well as his earlier works in traditional illustration are both evident in this extraordinarily rare survival from a pivotal moment in the development of Russian and modernist aesthetics. Only 75 copies were printed, and many of those were destroyed during the suppression of Jewish and other ethnic identities in the early Soviet era. Beinecke’s copy, which fills out our extensive holdings of Lissitzky’s Yiddish and Constructivist works, is one of just three known copies for which the fragile dustjacket, itself a masterpiece of modernist design, has been preserved. Some examples of our other Lissitzky holdings can be found here, here, here, and here, to share only a few.

Had Gadya or “one little goat”, refers to a folk song possibly derived from a late German medieval source. By the late 15th century Had Gadya had been incorporated into the Passover seder, the ritual meal marking the beginning of the holiday. Traditionally sung in Hebrew and Aramaic, El Lissitsky chose Yiddish, the common vernacular of European Jews, to depict the playful narrative whereby a series of characters destroy each other: a cat eats the titular goat, a dog bites the cat, a stick beats the dog, a fire burns the stick, water extinguishes the fire, and on and on…

Learn more about our copy through Orbis Yale’s online library catalog and read the introduction to the 2004 facsimile edition published by The Getty.