For John Milton, “Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them” (Areopagitica, 1644). This “potencie” often manifests itself in the traces of a book’s social life: in marginalia, inscriptions, doodles, markings, and the like. These are signs of books’ use and abuse by readers and owners, the evidence…
Read MoreThe staff of the Clark Library and Center for 17th- and 18th-century Studies were saddened to learn of the passing of our friend and supporter Paul Clark Newell Jr., on 14 September 2016. A long-time champion of the Clark Library and passionate scholar of Clark family history, Newell was a second cousin of our library’s…
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CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) has announced the inaugural round of projects for “Digitizing Hidden Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials,” an initiative made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One of eighteen successful proposals, “Digitizing British Manuscripts at UCLA’s Clark Library, 1601–1800” provides…
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Though you will have to wait until the Clark reopens in 2016 to be able to consult the material in person (sorry to be a tease), we are proud to announce that the finding aid for the More House Archive is now complete and is available online! This collection originally came from More House, the…
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You may be interested in reading an interview on the UCLA Newsroom website with our own Professor Joseph Bristow about his recent book, Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton! Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton notebook is housed here at the Clark, as the website notes, though of course, you will have to wait until we reopen in Summer 2016 to see…
Read MoreThe Clark would like to congratulate Michael Stinson, who won this year’s award for undergraduate research projects executed at the Clark Library. Michael was a part of Professor Carla Pestana’s Ahmanson Undergraduate Seminar taught at the Clark and won the prize for his paper “A Good Death,” for which he used the Clark’s pirate-related holdings….
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By Nina Schneider, Rare Books Librarian If you haven’t heard (yet!), the Clark is closed for about fourteen months while the building is retro-fitted for earthquakes. Anyone who has experienced the world of construction knows that there is a lot of preparation required before any building activity can start. We’re taking advantage of this period—during…
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(See our first post on Mr. Clark’s library guest book) Ramon Novarro was not the only Hollywood star to visit the Clark Library and sign the guest book — Mr. Clark’s guest book provides some interesting corroborating evidence about his friendship with actress Marie Dressler. There are two very friendly letters from Dressler to Mr….
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While moving material to get ready for our seismic retrofit project, I came across the Clark Library guest book, begun by William Andrews Clark Jr. in 1924 and used until 1957, when the pages were completely filled. Because this item was stored in a different location than the rest of the Clarkive (as we affectionately call our…
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Books of jokes and riddles have a long history. But it’s not too common to find annotated riddle books, with answers added in manuscript by historical readers. The Clark owns one such item, an exceedingly rare copy of a late-eighteenth-century Canterbury riddle book filled with “aenigmas, aenigmatical entertainments,” “one hundred rebuses,” “one hundred and twenty…
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