News

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

  • The ultimate New England travel guide: Where to go, what to eat and how to get there (Independent, Dublin)

    February 5, 2020

    When you’re not tucking into a slice of pizza at one of New Haven’s many world-famous pizzerias, exploring the city on foot (and working off some off those mozzarella calories) is the best way to explore this compact city. Yale University, the jewel in this Connecticut glistening’s crown, offers multiple daily guided tours across its expansive campus, dating back 300 years (tickets are $40). The tour involves a visit to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, an extraordinary six-storey glass building with “windows” made of translucent Vermont marble panels to protect its valuable contents. It’s a must-visit for any literary lover- and it also gives an opportunity to see one of the last remaining Gutenberg Bibles in person.

  • From the Political to the Personal, the Poignant to the Puerile, Handwriting Reveals Hearts, Minds, Souls (zip06)

    February 4, 2020

    Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800 is on display through Sunday, April 19 at the Beinecke, 121 Wall Street, New Haven. To find out more about the exhibit, and to view and download the exhibition brochure, visit beinecke.library.yale.edu/subscribed. Also on the page is a calendar of related events, videos related to the exhibit, and information on how to play the Paleographic Challenge 2020, where participants can test their manuscript mettle with items from the early modern British manuscript collection. “Our motto: strength and beauty through paleography.”

  • Never Too Late: Rachel Churner on the Late Style of Eileen Myles and Yvonne Rainer (Artforum, note: paywall)

    February 1, 2020

    LAST FALL, at the New School in New York, poet Eileen Myles presented an essay they’d written on the acquisition of their archives by Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Having sold 108 linear feet of personal notebooks, drafts, computer files, and trinkets—what the archivists dryly called “mixed materials”—and aware that all would soon be available to the grubby hands of the public, Myles noted, “It was a little like being buried alive.”

  • Eyewitness to History (True West)

    February 1, 2020

    This portfolio’s selection of Barthelmess’s images from Yale University’s Beinecke Library, plus the “Opening Shot” image on pp. 6-7 from the Library of Congress, are just a small sampling of his first-person primary work as a frontline military photographer.

  • A Yiddish Avant Garde (Print Magazine)

    January 29, 2020

    I was aware of the Yiddish “renaissance” movement during the teens, ’20s and early ’30s, in avant garde literature (in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale); this included the Yung-Yidish (1918–1921), an avant-garde group in Łódź, Poland.

  • 3 lives, many letters, 1 friendship (ASU Now)

    January 23, 2020

    ASU professors unearth details of the lives of three powerhouse Spanish-speaking women Three women, three countries and hundreds of letters spanning five decades. Nearly a century later, three more women — also from three different countries — and hundreds of hours of painstaking sleuthing, transcribing, dating and translating. These are the basic elements of “Preciadas Cartas (1932-1979),” a collection of deeply revealing letters between Chilean poet-diplomat Gabriela Mistral, Spanish lawyer and politician Victoria Kent and Argentine writer and intellectual Victoria Ocampo.

  • Professor Crystal Feimster on the Long Civil Rights Movement (podcast)

    January 20, 2020

    In recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President Salovey and Professor Feimster discuss the “long” civil rights movement, the contributions of civil rights activist Pauli Murray, and how Yale students are using the university’s archival and museum collections in their classes.

  • Celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

    January 16, 2020

    King and the African American Freedom Movement Jan. 20, noon-4 p.m. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St. Highlights from the Beinecke Library’s collections related to King and to the African American freedom movement will be on public view in the courtyard-level reading room.

  • Diamond in Glass (an exhibit preview)

    January 16, 2020

    A peek at the exhibit installation of the “Critics’ Gallery,” part of the forthcoming exhibition at the Beinecke, “Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain.” We...

  • The Forever Bond (99 per cent invisible)

    January 7, 2020

    Rouwenhurst, on behalf of Yale’s Center for International Finance, actually purchased one of the oldest active bonds to date — a 1648 corporate Dutch water authority bond written on goatskin that was originally issued to raise money for the construction of a pier. Most of the oldest active perpetual bonds are from this very same Dutch water board, because this board has been in charge of maintaining all of the dams and levees and dikes in a given corner of the Netherlands for hundreds of years and is very stable. You don’t need a record of ownership to keep the bond active, but the catch is that the bearer of the bond needs to travel to the water board’s registrar’s office to have it notated, meaning the staff at Yale needs to travel all the way to Holland to maintain it.

  • Searching for La Belle Dame (WSU Insider)

    December 18, 2019

    Where in the world had the Clumber Park Chartier disappeared to? Joan Grenier-Winther, the Marianna M. and Donald S. Matteson Distinguished Professor of French at Washington State University Vancouver, really needed to examine the fifteenth-century collection of poems by Alain Chartier and others.