News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • Women’s voices dominate the 2020 Windham-Campbell Prizes

    March 19, 2020

    Yale University today announced a female-dominated slate of recipients for the 2020 Windham-Campbell Prizes. The eight writers, including seven women, were honored for their literary achievement or promise and will receive $165,000 each to support their work. This year’s prize recipients are: in fiction, Yiyun Lee (United States/China) and Namwali Serpell (Zambia); in nonfiction, Maria Tumarkin (Australia) and Anne Boyer (United States); in poetry, Bhanu Kapil (United Kingdom/India) and Jonah Mixon-Webster (United States); and in drama, Julia Cho (United States) and Aleshea Harris (United States).

  • 14 Beautiful London Libraries That Will Bring Out The Bookworm In Everyone (Secret London)

    March 10, 2020

    The British Library. No self-respecting list of London libraries is complete without it, really. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, boasting a whopping 170 million items – including artefacts from every age of written civilisation, which is damn impressive. The library doesn’t rest on its laurels, either, as three million new items join the collection each year. Anyone is welcome to visit (although the Reading Rooms are for members only), and the library’s inner six-storey glass tower, which was inspired by Yale University’s Beinecke Library, has become a rather photogenic addition. The tower is home to the the King’s Library, accommodating 65,000 printed volumes, 19,000 pamphlets, and manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820. Cheers George!

  • Cooking from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Recipes (The New Yorker)

    March 5, 2020

    On Thursday, the day of the auction, Sotheby’s announced that the card file would go to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University, where scholars can visit them ... This means that they will be kept pristine for future generations.

  • Frederick Douglass Railed Against Economic Inequality (Jacobin)

    February 20, 2020

    No single document, of course, can solve the riddle of Douglass’s complex political ideas. But while doing research at Yale’s Beinecke Library, I came across two articles in the 1856 Frederick Douglass’ Paper that have not, to my knowledge, been reprinted or digitized since. (Most of Douglass’s journalistic writing remains unpublished, though a forthcoming volume in the Frederick Douglass Papers should help address that problem.) Nor have they been excerpted, quoted, or discussed at length in the extensive scholarship on Douglass.

  • At Yale, you can now study Hebrew and Arabic — in the same course

    February 18, 2020

    Al Ani and Roginsky spent some three years developing the course, identifying materials and weekly themes, and planning cultural events that would interest students. In addition to the topics of food, identity, music, and gender relations noted by Van Deusen-Scholl, other weekly class themes include cultural manners; etiquette, gestures, and body language; ecology and the environment; and globalization’s effect on Hebrew and Arabic. In addition, the class features a visit to the Beinecke Library to explore the Arabic calligraphy collection and the decorated Jewish Ketubah collection.

  • In Memoriam: Frederick R. Koch (New York Times obituary)

    February 13, 2020

    His most substantial gift was to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, to which he donated an exceptional collection of musical and literary manuscripts. His core collection held more than 2,000 items, including scores by Debussy, Wagner and Verdi. “These working scores are really important because they show how something evolved from its first appearance through subsequent productions,” Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, said in an interview. Mr. Koch’s literary donations to the Beinecke included Noël Coward’s diaries, page proofs of parts of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” and the corrected typescript of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” A separate donation was of 50,000 photographs, most of them of celebrities, taken by Jerome Zerbe, the photographer of mid-20th century cafe society.

  • Clark art Institute’s research and academic program presents Lecture on the Collages of Henri Chopin (Hudson Valley 360)

    February 13, 2020

    Caitlin R. Woolsey is the Manton Post-doctoral Fellow in the Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program. Her research revolves around the historical confluence of visual art, performance, and media in the twentieth century. Before joining the Clark, she assisted in curating an exhibition of experimental poetry at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in fall 2019.

  • At Home With Elizabeth Bishop (Poets & Writers)

    February 12, 2020

    Image: Elizabeth Bishop seated on the back steps of the house near a sea grape tree, circa 1938. Credit: Louise Crane and Victoria Kent Papers, Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, Yale University

  • Gordon Bunshaft and SOM (A Daily Dose of Architecture Books)

    February 6, 2020

    More than the corporate headquarters that Bunshaft designed in and near New York City in the 1950s and 60s, it's three buildings -- one from 1963 and two from the following two decades -- that for me define the range of his design sense. These are the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and the Hajj Terminal in Saudi Arabia. Those impressive buildings, and others, are discussed in the chapters that follow the third chapter, but with Gordon Bunshaft and SOM being as much biography as architectural history, Adams also delves into Bunshaft the person -- as much as he can, that is. Still, plenty is revealed.

  • The Best New Novel Was Written 90 Years Ago (Vulture)

    February 6, 2020

    McKay left a longer, 172-page draft in possession of his only child, who eventually donated it to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The shorter one wound up at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The two have now been reconciled for the first time to yield the book as published. Romance in Marseille, in other words, was never actually a lost or forgotten novel; it was just peculiarly hard to track down.

  • A Book So Far Ahead of Its Time, It Took 87 Years to Find a Publisher (New York Times)

    February 5, 2020

    More may be coming. Cloutier stumbled on the forgotten manuscript of “Amiable With Big Teeth” while studying at Columbia in 2009. The two manuscripts of “Romance in Marseille,” held by Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Yale’s Beinecke Library — the Penguin Classics edition is based on the later Schomburg manuscript — have long been known to scholars, but copyright conflicts and a lack of market interest prevented the book’s publication. As archival research accelerates and 1920s-era writing is freed from copyright restrictions — this year, works from 1924 came into the public domain — it’s likely that more rediscovered works are on the way. Cloutier recently worked with the Beinecke to locate an uncataloged collection of manuscripts by Petry.