This week, the Clark staff congratulates our own Manuscript & Archives Librarian, Rebecca Fenning, on her impending marriage.  She will be married this Saturday in a beautiful outdoor spot in Los Angeles.  As we daydream about how wonderful her day will be and the joys of marriage that lie ahead, we could not help but…

Last weekend, we were happy to welcome Craft in America to the Clark.  They held a panel discussion in the drawing room, and created a wonderful artist’s book display in the South book room.  The discussion was lively, and the audience quite engaged. Our Project Archivist and photographer, Jennifer Bastian, was there to snap a…

In 1937, Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland joined friend Richmond Temple, the manager of London’s Savoy Hotel, on a tour of Copenhagen, Helsinki and Arctic Finland.  He recorded their journey amongst the business and cultural elites of these places in a journal that the Clark was recently lucky enough to purchase. Typed (with some hand-written…

From Library Assistant Lauren Zuchowski Titus Oates was a clergyman with a knack for perjury and by the end of his life was known as a shame to mankind. Oates, the man behind the Popish Plot, was responsible for creating anti-Catholic hysteria in London from 1678-1681.  During this period fifteen innocent men were executed and…

The William Andrews Clark Lecture on Oscar Wilde “Green Carnations: Wilde, Culture, and Crime” given by John Wilson Foster at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Saturday April 2,  3:00 p.m. Oscar Wilde’s fiction and criticism are laced with poison, both as theme and motif, both “real” and vicarious. Before his incarceration for criminal wrongdoing,…

Our friend Jim Gilbert from Curating L.A. has posted a lovely article promoting the Enso Quartet’s upcoming April 17th performance at the Clark Library!  Information on how to join the lottery for this performance is at Curating L.A. and on the website of the Center for 17th- and 18th-century Studies.

The Clark recently acquired a letter to Oscar Wilde from Charles Godfrey Leland, American author, arts educator and folklorist, written during Wilde’s North American tour in 1882.  Leland (1824-1903), the founder of the Public Industrial Art School of Philadelphia, was writing to Wilde to thank him for discussing the school during a recent lecture, in which…

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Clark has acquired a very rare chapbook published by George Smeeton, entitled “The Lover, or Cupid’s Mirror.” Chapbooks were small, cheap booklets that dispensed writings that were political, religious, poetical, literature or popular to the general public. Because they were so cheap to make and distribute, not many…

Oscar Wilde is remembered for many things, his writing, his poetry, and his infamous trial for gross indecency in 1895.  But what few remember are his crime-solving exploits with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Although Wilde was (as far as historians can tell) never an actual sleuth, he plays one in three new novels by Gyles…

The Clark’s Paul Landacre Archive is highlighted in a new post today on KCET’s SoCal Focus blog!  This post and others like it, written by USC’s Nathan Masters, are part of a new collaboration between LA as Subject, a local group of which we are a part, and KCET, a local non-profit television channel (formerly…