Center/Clark newsletter

The newest installment of the Center/Clark Newsletter is now online!  As always, it features information about recent happenings in the library and Center, new discoveries and current research.

by Robert Gibbings

New Additions

The Clark Library has slowly been moving into the digital age.  We recently ordered some wonderful new equipment that should bring our standards of digitization up to par, and perhaps beyond.  One of our new pieces is the item you see below, the Kaiser Kid Pro Copy stand.  It’s a small model copy stand for our Reading Room.  Any visiting scholar can have access to it, and can be trained to use their own camera to photograph materials for research purposes.

We are so happy that very soon  the Clark will be able to bring you bigger, better and more beautiful images!

The copy stand, just put together.

Item of the Week: Barbier’s books

 

Anyone running across an eighteenth century book with no author on the title page knows that one of the first places to check is in the Barbier catalog.

This week’s featured item is the auction catalogue of Barbier’s personal library. Catalogue des livres de la bibliothéque de feu M. A.-A. Barbier, published in Paris by M. Barrois and M. Benou, and printed by the Imprimerie de Fain in 1828,  provides a glimpse into his extensive collections. Sorted under broad headings such as Theology, Jurisprudence, Belles Lettres, and Science and Arts, someone has listed the price realized for each lot. Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1778) was snatched up for 60 francs, De Imitatione Christi by Tomas à Kempis, published in 1660 sold for 1.55, and the 1816 Duchess of Devonshire’s edition of Horace’s Satires was hammered at 23.20.

 

Antoine-Alexandre Barbier (1765-1825) had a distinguished career as bibliographer and librarian. Born in Coulommiers, in northern France, he served as a priest until 1801. Shortly after the French Revolution, Barbier was appointed to distribute books confiscated in the war to various libraries around Paris. He went on to serve as librarian to the Directoire exécutif, the Conseil d’État, and then to Napoleon. Eventually, he became administrator of Louis XVIII’s private libraries , until he was stripped of his titles in 1822, dying shortly thereafter. Barbier saw his Dictionnaire des Ouvrages Anonymes et Pseudonyms published 1806 and was working on a second edition when he died.

 

For more information on Barbier, see

 

http://www.napoleon.org/en/reading_room/biographies/files/472931.asp

 

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/52922/Antoine-Alexandre-Barbier

 

 

Contested Songs, December 2nd

Contested Songs: Music across the Atlantic

 at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Friday, December 2, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

 held in conjunction with the LACMA-UCLA Symposium and Exhibition ” Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World” (November 6, 2011–January 29, 2012) 

Not only persons and goods traversed the Atlantic Triangle during the Spanish colonial period, so also did songs and dances: an immaterial, potent, ever-present currency of human connection. Our short program explores one fascinating current in the enormous Atlantic circulation ofcanciones bailados that flows between 1500 and the present: the adoption, adaptation and still-ongoing transformation of Spanish Renaissance dance-songs in the son jarocho repertory of the Veracruz region of México. Members of the UCLA Early Music Ensemble will perform villancicos (songs in peasant style) from sixteenth-century Spain; each villancico will be answered (a contestado) with its 2011 Alta California version, by members of Son del Centro, a son jarocho collective from Santa Ana, California. The amazing commonality between versions is audible, even after 400 years. What does this tell us about the durability of ‘immaterial’ media?

This event is hosted by the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and co-sponsored by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s Department of Musicology.

This is a free event, but advance registration is required!

Registration form and full program on the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies website.