In the 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray, there are actually two pictures of Mr. Gray — a “before” and an “after”– painted by two different artists. The “after” painting by American artist Ivan Albright now lives in the Art Institute in Chicago, where you can find it on display. The other picture of Dorian was…
Read MoreHere’s more on lying books and false imprints from Mitch Fraas at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Unique at Penn blog:
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From Nina Schneider, Head Cataloger In 1905 a two-day auction took place in Southern Nevada. On May 15th and 16th 1200 lots were up for bid. The area: Clark’s Las Vegas Townsite. The owner: William Andrews Clark, the former state senator from Montana. His activities weren’t limited to copper mining in Montana and Arizona….
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We are often told that we can trust printed books, that the process by which their content has been compiled, vetted, and published is a process that filters out subterfuge, half-truths, and misleading gambits. This is not always (or even mostly) the case. Printed matter is the output of human endeavor and humans have biases,…
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By Karie Jenkins, Clark Reading Room Assistant You never know what great treasures you will come across at the Clark. When discussing the art collection with a colleague this morning, he informed me that we have two watercolor sketches of Marie Antoinette by Jacques-Louis David. The Death of Marat, perhaps David’s most famous painting, has…
Read MoreBy Cataloging Assistant Alejandro Sanchez Nunez This week I had the opportunity to help catalog some of the Shakespeare books that Paul Chrzanowski recently donated to the Clark Library. Working with these books reminded me that whenever I am editing catalog entries, I inevitably stop and smile every time I see a field containing the phrase…
Read MoreThe Clark congratulates Samantha Lusher on winning the UCLA Library Prize for Undergraduate Research, incorporating materials from the Clark Library collections. Ms. Lusher and her fellow students just completed this year’s Ahmanson Undergraduate Seminar taught by Alice Boone. The UCLA English Department capstone seminar, Legacies of The Castle of Otranto, 1764-2014, explored the gothic past,…
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By Nina M. Schneider, Head Cataloger Recently, the news has been filled with reports of the possibility of a new Cold War, while at the same time updating us about the ongoing search for Malaysian Airlines’ missing jet. It might be a coincidence then, that while cataloging Ward Ritchie’s Library, our interns ran across job…
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The Clark recently acquired an early scribal manuscript of Pierre-Corneille Blessebois’ 1676 play L’Eugenie, a work based on the story of St. Eugenia. Though there are many reasons why L’Eugenie is interesting as a text (onstage nudity, transgender themes, and a libertine author who wrote the first zombie novel, just to name a few), I am particularly interested…
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Claude Willan, Clark Fellow We all doodle. Studies have shown (nb, studies may not actually have shown, but I think they have) that doodling can help you think. But there’s a certain point at which doodling crosses over into daydreaming. Here in Clark MS 1986.003, Miss Boyes, the second owner of this commonplace book after…
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