By Reading Room Assistant Stella Castillo A lesser known holding here at The Clark is the Mexican Manuscripts Collection comprised of documents dating from 1579-1828 regarding the Spanish settlement and colonization of California, New Mexico, and one document from 1802 concerning Louisiana. The collection of 29 manuscripts written in Spanish cover issues relating to establishment…
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By Reading Room Assistant Stella Castillo The riddle of your future may be solved at The Clark! Recently, I was wondering what the future may hold, so I decided to look into fortune telling and came across several books detailing how to read your palm among other things (like your moles!) to determine your future….
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Le tombeau de Louis Ménard and A propos du tombeau de Louis Ménard were among the first things I cataloged when I began working at the Clark 6 years ago and they were a great introduction to the wide variety of formats in the Clark’s manuscript collections. Though these two companion volumes look like innocent codex manuscripts, bound…
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Introducing the Clark’s latest exhibition: THE TEARS OF THE PRESS: PRINT AND AUTHORITY IN 17TH-CENTURY ENGLAND Curated by Dr. Stephanie Koscak and students in her UCLA History Department capstone seminar, Media and Politics in Early Modern England: Nicholas Barlow | Hillary Rose Cleary | Ricardo Aaron Garcia | Brian Jordi Thomas Knight | Amber Ward…
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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…
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