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…
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Item of the Week: Vyvyan's Arctic Sojourn
Published: March 15, 2011In 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…
Read MoreItem of the Week: The Popish Plot at the Clark
Published: March 9, 2011From 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…
Read MoreW.A. Clark Lecture on Oscar Wilde
Published: March 8, 2011The 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,…
Read MoreA reminder about the Enso Quartet, from Curating LA
Published: February 25, 2011Our 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.
Read MoreItem of the Week: Wilde and the "Great Cause of Art Education"
Published: February 23, 2011The 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…
Read MoreItem of the Week: Valentine's Day edition
Published: February 14, 2011Just 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…
Read MoreItem of the Week: Oscar Wilde, Private Detective?
Published: February 9, 2011Oscar 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…
Read MoreItem of the Week: The Paul Landacre Archive
Published: February 4, 2011The 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…
Read MoreItems of the Week: Our Little Red Books
Published: January 27, 2011Mao, Zedong, 1893-1976. Mao zhu xi yu lu. [Beijing] : Zhongguo ren min jie fang jun, [1964] Call number: DS778 .M3 * First edition. Illustrations are a portrait of Mao and a facsimile of calligraphy by Lin Biao. Clark Library copy 1: first issue of first edition; bound in tan paper wrapper, printed in red…
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