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.

Visit our website to learn more about this home movie or to explore the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers online.

It is with great pleasure that I write to announce the appointment of Edwin C. Schroeder as Librarian of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Associate University Librarian.

Known to all as E.C., Mr. Schroeder came to Yale in 1989 to work with the Rare Book Team as a catalog librarian at Sterling Memorial Library, and since then has held positions of increasing responsibility at the Beinecke Library.  He brings an impressive breadth of rare book and managerial experience to his new position.  E.C. earned a BA in History at the College of the Holy Cross in 1988 and an MS in Library Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1989.  Since June 2004, E.C. has been Head of Technical Services for the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where, working closely with curators and the Beinecke Librarian, he has set priorities and managed acquisition, cataloguing, conservation, archival processing, and digital projects for the Library.

Through E.C.’s work with staff across the Beinecke, changes in cataloguing have expanded access to the collections, and publicity and improved digital access have increased where and how scholars learn about the renowned collections found at the Library.  Just two of the many ways E.C.’s leadership has augmented the role and reputation of the Beinecke include collaborating with the University Library to enhance the cataloguing of the Beinecke’s outstanding collections of Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese manuscripts, and increasing collaborations with national and international library consortia that have made the Beinecke’s collections more well known internationally.  In addition, E.C. has overseen efforts that have dramatically improved digital access to the Library’s collections and enabled the opening of two new off-site processing facilities, which have greatly improved productivity.

E.C. is active in a number of professional library organizations, and he has held numerous leadership positions, including chair of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.  He is also a member of the ACRL budget and finance committee, the American Library Association’s representative to the Rare Book & Manuscript Section of the International Federation of Library Associations, and Yale’s liaison to the Consortium of European Research Libraries.  At Yale, his committee work ranges from chairing the University Library Travel Committee and the Map Cataloguing Planning Group to serving on the Adrian Van Sinderen Undergraduate Book Collecting Prize Committee.

Colleagues have praised E.C.’s intimate knowledge of both the collections and the workings of the Beinecke, his technological savvy, and his thoughtful administrative style. The Beinecke will continue to concentrate on its core responsibilities of acquiring, describing, preserving, and providing access to world-renowned collections, as well as expanding efforts to digitize the collections.  As Beinecke Librarian, E.C. looks forward to building on Frank Turner’s accomplishments and to working closely with colleagues in the Beinecke and across the University to expand ways in which students and scholars at Yale and from around the world use the collections to improve scholarship.

In a field that included outstanding internal candidates, several of whom are respected senior scholars, E.C. was the unanimous choice of the Search Committee.  Special thanks go to committee chair Pericles Lewis for his indefatigable work and steady counsel throughout the process. I am deeply grateful for the effort and advice of the others who served on the committee: Rolena Adorno, Meg Bellinger, John Mack Faragher, Paul Freedman, Brian Lizotte, Joseph Manning, R. Kenny Marone, Douglas Rae, Holly Rushmeier, Lloyd Suttle, and Christine Weideman.

We look forward to sustaining the unique excellence of the Beinecke, and I know you will all join me in welcoming E.C. Schroeder to his new position as Librarian of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Associate University Librarian.

Sincerely yours,

Richard C. Levin

And reported in an online exclusive by the Yale Daily News. Join us in welcoming E.C. Schroeder.

Campagnoli, Bartolomeo. Nouvelle méthode. “Tab. II”

]]> http://beineckeblog.library.yale.edu/2010/10/01/god-save-the-king-music-from-the-british-royal-court-1770-%e2%80%93-1837/feed/ 0 Rebekah http://beineckeblog.library.yale.edu/2010/10/01/american-indian-portrait-album/ http://beineckeblog.library.yale.edu/2010/10/01/american-indian-portrait-album/#comments Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:49:39 +0000 Beinecke Library http://beinecke.wordpress.com/?p=382 Continue reading →]]> This album of 616 photographs, assembled in 1876 from images in the collection of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, consists primarily of portraiture of male delegates to the United States with occasional images of women and children. The images were created for ethnographic portfolios of the Blackmore Museum, Salisbury, England. A few images show individuals with mixed descent and interpreters as well as an image of a seated Dakota Indian, Red Cloud (Ma-Kpe-Ah-Lou-Tah), shaking hands with William Blackmore, May 1872.

Portraits represent various tribal groups, including, among many others, the Apache Indians, Arapaho Indians, Arikara Indians, Bannock Indians, Cherokee Indians, Cheyenne Indians, , Oglala Indians, Ojibwa Indians, Omaha Indians, Oohenonpa Indians, Santee Indians, Seminole Indians, Tohono O’odham Indians, Ute Indians, Wichita Indians, and Yuma Indians.

Find the entire photograph album online and learn more on our website.