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Upcoming Events & Present Exhibitions:
(Click Here for Online Versions of Past Exhibitions)
Exhibition at the Grolier Club, New York
May 12 - July 26, 2008
English in Print:
from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton
Curated by Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson
This comprehensive look at the history of early English printing features over one hundred important and rare works from The Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois and Yale University's Elizabethan Club.
Valerie Hotchkiss, director of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and Fred C. Robinson, Douglas Tracy Smith Professor Emeritus of English at Yale, have put together an illuminating exhibition of many of the English-speaking world's finest print achievements.
For further information about the exhibition, please visit the Grolier Club on New York's Web site at:
http://www.grolierclub.org/ExEnglishIn%20Print.htm
An accompanying catalog, published by the University of Illinois Press, is available at the exhibition, through the Press (www.press.uillinois.edu) and bookstores-storefront or online.
Summer Exhibition at Illinois:
Acquisitions in American Wit and Humor
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library has an impressive collection of books on American wit and humor, anchored by the extensive collections of Franklin J. Meine (1896-1968), which were acquired in three parts, from 1955 to 1969, and supplemented by the Robert B. Downs Collection of American Folklore and Humor. Robert Bingham Downs (1903-1991) was the director of the University Library from 1943 to 1971, and presided over a period of its great development.
This exhibition celebrates some new acquisitions in the field of American wit and humor. Cases 1-4 (and one item in Case 6) are gifts purchased with funds provided by Library Friends in honor on Clarabelle Gunning, who died in April 2007, having retired in 1978 from the Library after 40 years’ service, in part as the secretary of Robert Downs.
Cases 5-7 show examples from the collection of James E. Myers of Springfield, Illinois. Mr. Myers was a great collector of books of American humor, and published his own compilations of humorous material. He was a frequent visitor to the Library, where he consulted books from the Meine and Downs collections. The welcome bequest of his collection in 2000 is allowing the Rare Book & Manuscript Library to add hundreds of scarce (and amusing) early titles to our American wit and humor collection. This is no small matter, since it is otherwise difficult for us to find pieces that we do not own for the period up to and including World War II. The volumes on display have been recently cataloged thanks to a grant awarded through the Library’s National Endowment for the Humanities matching fund competition.
Upcoming Exhibition, October 2008:
"Multiple Merwins: Poet,
Translator,
and Environmental Activist"
Held in conjunction with an international
conference; "Translating
the Middle Ages,"
(October 28-29, 2008), this
exhibition will feature recent acquisitions to the
archive of
Merwin's
papers held by the University Library's
Rare Book & Manuscript
Library.
W.S. Merwin will join us and offer informal remarks at
a reception hosted by
The Rare Book &
Manuscript Library, Room 346 Main Library
at 1:00 p.m. on
Tuesday, October 28th.
The event is free and open to all.
For other events associated with the conference, please visit the Program in Medieval Studies and Center for
Translation Studies at;
http://www.medieval.uiuc.edu/events/translating/index.html
Mr. Merwin will also particpate in a panel conversation with the poet Robert
Pinsky and the novelist Richard Powers at 7:30 in the Colwell Playhouse of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. For more information and tickets to this event,
please visit Krannert at:
http://www.krannertcenter.com/performances/details.asp?elementID=22862
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