This curious pamphlet came across our desks today. Purchased in 1948, The Prayer of Old Plodder, a Presbyterian teacher during the late election at Lancaster, in the county of Lancashire is purportedly published in Geneva and printed, for the instruction of the elect, in 1733. We thought it appropriate, with primary season upon us, to…

While looking through oversize drawings last week, Clark staff discovered this lovely drawing of the original garden plan for the Clark Library and estate, probably dating from the library’s construction in the 1920s.  Rendered beautifully in colored pencil, the plan details some aspects of the Clark grounds that are familiar, and others that were never…

Of late, the Clark Library cats have been receiving attention from more than just the staff members and visitors who see them everyday. The February 2010 issue of Cat Fancy magazine ran an article entitled “Library Cats and their Favorite Books,” featuring none other than our very own Hannah. The Neighborhood News Online recently posted…

A new finding aid to the Robert Gibbings collection at the Clark is now available via the OAC.  Gibbings (1889-1958) was an Irish author and artist best known for his wood engravings. He bought and ran the Golden Cockerel Press in Berkshire, England from 1924-1933. During and after World War II he wrote and illustrated…

Architect Robert D. Farquhar is famous in the Los Angeles area for designing a number of notable buildings, including the California Club, the Fenyes Mansion in Pasadena, and the Canfield-Moreno Estate in Silverlake.  He also designed multiple buildings for William Andrews Clark, Jr., including this library, the Alice McManus Clark Library (now Clark Administration Building)…

In 1923, Mr. Clark purchased a set of promptbooks made by actor Lark Taylor, documenting the Shakespearean productions of Julia Marlowe and E.H. Sothern in which Taylor took part.  Until last year, however, these volumes had never been cataloged.  (Oops!)  Now however, they are cataloged and discoverable through UCLA’s online library catalog and via the…

In 2008, the Clark Library purchased both the library and archive of the Savage-Armstrong family of County Antrim, Northern Ireland, a collection that contains a wide variety of material collected and produced by George Francis Savage-Armstrong (1845-1906), his children and other various family members. George’s brother, Edmund John Armstrong, was a promising poet before his…

The Clark collections hold a number of manuscript cookbooks, most of them compiled in the 17th and 18th centuries.  The item of the week this week, though, is a much more recent work, written around 1915 by Harriet Burlingame Mink (1879-1967). A part of our Montana Collection, the cookbook was donated by UCLA archivist and…