Today is the day after Bloomsday, but I wanted to squeeze in a Bloomsday blog post anyway. (Technically,since the day described in the book ends after midnight, maybe June 17 could be grandfathered in a little?) This year we extended our Bloomsday festival into the historic house: facsimiles of passages from the manuscript were spread …
As the world began to mourn the death of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali on Friday June 3, 2016, his spoken words were remembered as well as his punches. Modernist poet Marianne Moore is mentioned in The Slate article “’I Done Handcuffed Lightning’: The Exuberant Spoken-Word Poetry of Muhammad Ali” for writing the liner notes for …
We have just passed through college graduation season, with its new graduates roaming the streets in caps and gowns. The Rosenbach actually has a fair amount of academic dress represented in our collections owing to degrees accumulated by our founder A.S.W. Rosenbach, and even more by Marianne Moore, so I thought I’d post a few. …
As the lead story in history.com’s “Today in History” page points out, today is the anniversary of the publication of Dracula. Simone Berni’s Dracula By Bram Stoker: The Mystery of the Early Editions notes that “There are several sources (mainly letters and memoirs) that report contradictory information regarding the first day Stoker’s novel was available …
Dr. Rosenbach became famous for selling the best books at the highest prices, but how does one amass a great collection when one doesn’t have the money to play the game? The clever but unscrupulous protagonist of Dr. R’s first book,The Unpublishable Memoirs, has a simple solution: clever cons and sly stealing. The Unpublishable Memoirs …
One of the exhibition ideas we’ve considered here is “Wars You Forgot” and I suspect for many of us north-easterners, myself included, the Mexican War is not one we spend much time thinking about. But today marks the 170th anniversary of the U.S.’s declaration of war on Mexico; Congress voted to approve the war on …
There’s only a little over a week left to see our exhibits Down the Rabbit Hole: Celebrating 150 years of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Camera Lens: the Photograph of Charles Dodgson, so if you haven’t seen them, or if you’ve been meaning to see them again, come on by before they close on …
This week’s blog post comes to us from collections intern Rebecca Schott. Hubert Francois Gravelot was a French illustrative artist during the early half of the 1700’s, and is credited with bringing the French Rococo style to English decorative art. Gravelot began his career by studying art in Paris and Rome but eventually settled on …
2016 marks the 400th anniversary of the deaths of both William Shakespeare (whose 450th birthday we celebrated two years ago) and Miguel de Cervantes. Traditionally it has been claimed that both men died on the same date: April 23, 1616, but modern scholars have thrown a wrench into the works by suggesting that Cervantes probably …
We have posted before about William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, which strove to elevate the craft of hand-printing in the late 19th-century. but the Rosenbach also has an interesting example of Morris’s work in another arena: textile design. William Morris (1834-1896) wore many hats in his life: poet, novelist, artist, printer, manufacturer, political activist, and more. …