Clark Library receives grant to digitize bound manuscripts

Gull. Hutton, Methodos facilis, or, A plain and easy way for attaining the knowledge and practice of common arithmetick both in whole and broken numbers opera et studio, 1701. [MS.2001.003, UCLA Clark Library]

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 for the creation of electronic facsimiles of 300 bound manuscripts produced in Great Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Clark’s collection complements holdings of other research libraries and specifically enriches the digital resources available to scholars of British cultural, political, and social history. The manuscripts comprise commonplace books, sermons, inventories, poems, plays, recipe books, accounts, and music.

Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton Q&A

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 it in person again.

We hope you will be able to join Dr. Bristow and other scholars at next week’s conference on “Oscar Wilde and the Culture of Childhood,” which will be held on campus in Royce Hall!

2015 UCLA Library Prize for Undergraduate Research

The 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.  A longer article about Michael and the other students who won research awards in order areas is online at the UCLA Newsroom.

Congratulations to Michael and this year’s other winners!

 

“Oscar Wilde and the Visual Arts” at the Clark, 3/31/2015

William Andrews Clark Lecture on Oscar Wilde

“Oscar Wilde and the Visual Arts”

Given by Nicholas Frankel, Virginia Commonwealth University

Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 4:00 p.m.

Oscar Wilde had much to say about the visual and decorative arts. His relationships with leading figures in the art world—notably James Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Edward Burne-Jones, and Charles Ricketts, as well as the critics John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and John Symonds—were integral to his ideas, and he was himself the subject for several important visual artworks, including the Clark Library’s own portrait by R. G. Harper Pennington. For students of literature, Wilde’s direct engagements with art and artists are important chiefly for their effects upon his practice as an imaginative writer. The lecture traces the influence of fine art on Wilde’s poetry, fiction, and criticism, while demonstrating the centrality of the decorative and book arts to his published work. Touched upon are Wilde’s early quarrels with Whistler over the respective merits of painting and literature. But increasingly Wilde came to see language itself as something iconic and inherently visual, and it is in his books of the early 1890s—Dorian Gray, The Sphinx, and the famous English edition of Salome, illustrated by Beardsley—that we see the full flowering of Oscar Wilde’s interest in the visual arts.

Oscar Wilde, by R.G. Harper Pennington

Nicholas Frankel is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author or editor of a number of books relating to Oscar Wilde, including Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (University of Michigan Press, 2000); Masking The Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s (Rivendale Press, 2009); The Sphinx, by Oscar Wilde, with Decorations by Charles Ricketts (Rice University Press, 2010); and The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated Uncensored Edition (Harvard University Press, 2011). The last was named an Honor Book in both fiction and criticism categories at the 2012 Stonewall Book Awards and has been translated into Portuguese, Greek, and Italian. His annotated edition of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest will appear from Harvard in 2015, and he is currently preparing further annotated editions and a new biography of Wilde for Harvard. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Yale Center for British Art.

This biennial lecture on Oscar Wilde is made possible by a generous endowment founded by Mr. William Zachs.

Registration Deadline: March 26, 2015

Admission is complimentary, but advance registration is requested:

www.c1718cs.ucla.edu/wilde14-r

Please be aware that space at the Clark is limited and that registration closes when capacity is reached. Confirmation will be sent via email.

Clark closed from April 1, 2015-Spring 2016

The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library will close to the public in April 2015 and re-open to the public in spring 2016. During the closure the Clark Library will undergo a seismic retrofit; construction will include a new entrance pavilion and increased book storage on the basement level. We regret the inconvenience to our library users.

All lectures, symposia, and conferences currently held at the Clark will be offered on UCLA’s main campus from April 1, 2015 through early spring 2016. All Chamber Music at the Clark concerts for the 2014–15 season will take place in the Clark’s drawing room. The 2015–16 chamber music concerts will take place on UCLA’s main campus. Updates on construction and programming will appear periodically on the Clark Library and Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies websites.

Reminder: Clark Book Club, Thursday 11/20

Dear Friends of the Clark,

Please join us next Thursday, November 20th, for the second meeting of the Clark Library Book Club. We’ll be discussing Peter Ackroyd’s prize-winning novel Hawksmoor, which interweaves tales of murder and mayhem in eighteenth-century London with a twentieth-century counterpart involving Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor’s investigation of a bizarre series of deaths in churches designed by Sir Christopher Wren’s apprentice, Nicholas Dyer.

In addition to discussing the novel, we’ll have the opportunity to work with rare books from the Clark’s collection that relate to the story, setting, and characters. Read as much or as little of the book as you’re able. All are welcome.

When: Thursday, November 20th, 4 p.m.
Where: Clark Library, North Book Room
What: Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

The final meeting in our fall fiction series will take place on December 18th. We’ll be discussing Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, the sequel to the acclaimed Wolf Hall. To ask a question or suggest a book, contact Rebecca Munson (rgmunson@ucla.edu).

Reminder: Clark Book Club tomorrow!

Dear all,

A reminder to join us, if you can, for the inaugural meeting of the Clark Library Book Club tomorrow at 4pm in the North Book Room. We’ll be discussing An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. Feel free to come no matter how much you’ve read–there won’t be any quizzes or assignments!

We’ll kick off our discussion by looking at original editions of texts written by the real-life versions of characters in the story like John Locke, Robert Boyle, and Richard Lower. Bring your questions and comments or send them in advance to Rebecca Munson (rgmunson@ucla.edu). Hope to see many of you soon!

 

Mark your calendar for our future fall meetings:

November 20th – Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

December 18th – Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

Introducing the Clark Library Book Club!

Dear all,

It is my pleasure to invite you to join us for a new series of events open to anyone and everyone with an interest in literature, history, and the Clark collections. The Clark Library Book Club will meet monthly to discuss a book chosen for its ability to bring to life an aspect of the library’s holdings. We’ll spend time with spies and alchemists, witches and traitors, printers and players, and many famous figures in literary history.

Our first meeting will take place on Thursday, October 23rd at 4pm in the North Book Room. In honor of Halloween, we will be reading Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost. The full schedule of Fall 2014 meetings can be found below. Updates and information about future meetings will be posted here. To suggest future readings or ask a question please contact Rebecca Munson (rgmunson@ucla.edu). Hope to see you soon!

Clark Library Book Club

Fall 2014 Meetings

October 23rd – Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost

November 20th – Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

December 18th – Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

At 4p.m. in the North Book Room

 

Upcoming Events

Now that the UCLA Fall Quarter is underway, programming at the Clark Library is starting to rev up for the year. The full 2014-2015 event calendar is online at the Center’s website and below we highlight a couple of upcoming programs that you may be interested in attending!  If you are on Facebook, feel free to befriend Mr. Clark and join the Clark Library group  to get updates and reminders about programs and events at the Library and Center.

October 18 & 19, 2014, 7pm:

Arts on the Grounds: Entre Marta y Lope (Between Marta and Lope), written by Gerardo Malla and Santiago Miralles

Fundación Siglo de Oro, a premier Spanish theater company focusing on the classical tradition, will present Entre Marta y Lope, a contemporary play on the last days of Lope de Vega, the foremost Spanish playwright of the Golden Age. The play is designed to introduce audiences to this key figure, whose corpus includes over 400 plays. The Clark Library and Fundación Siglo de Oro present theater about a man who was, all of him, theater itself.

Ticket price – $25 general admission, $10 students (must provide student ID)
More information and tickets:  www.c1718cs.ucla.edu/rakata14

 

November 5, 2014, 4pm:

The Tenth Annual Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade:

“Publishing Easy Pleasant Books for Children: The House of Newbery, 1740­–1800”

Given by Andrea Immel, Curator, Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University

This lecture will revisit the question of whether the Newbery firm should still be considered the most important children’s book publisher of the eighteenth century.

Andrea Immel holds a doctorate in English from UCLA and was a Clark Dissertation Fellow. She has been the curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University since 1995 but got her start as a rare book librarian at the Huntington Library.

Registration Deadline: October 31, 2014

More information and (free) registration: www.c1718cs.ucla.edu/karmiole14-r 

 

Also:

And if you missed it, the Clark’s Oscar Wilde collection was the focus of a recent article on KCET’s Artbound blog.

The Clark will also be attending the LA as Subject 9th Annual Archives Bazaar on October 25th at USC’s Doheny Library.  We will be sharing a table with our friends at UCLA Library Special Collections, and hope you will visit us and our LA-collecting colleagues from all over town for this day-long free event!

 

Our new interim Head Librarian, Victoria Steele

Victoria Steele will be joining the Clark Library for a two-year appointment as Interim Head Librarian, beginning at the end of August.  Currently the Brooke Russell Astor Director of Collections Strategy for the New York Public Library, she was the Head of UCLA Special Collections from 2000-2009 and is no stranger to the Clark and its collections.  A more detailed press release is available here.

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