Having edited and co-authored several volumes of collected essays (Table Talk: Perspectives on Food in Medieval Italian Literature [Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010], Foundations of Modernity: New Worlds in the Italian Renaissance [Leiden: Brill, 2012]; and Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega [Tempe, Ariz.: ACMRS, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming]), she is currently at work on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, A Sacred Banquet: Medicine and Theology in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

At UCLA Library Special Collections, she is exploring the rich collection of Aldine editions of the Comedy, as well as the medieval medical and religious works housed in the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection of Early Italian Printing and in Biomedical History and Special Collections.

On Earth Day, April 22nd, the whole of UCLA joined the hospitals and health science campuses to become tobacco- and smoke-free environments, according to an announcement from the UCLA Newsroom.

A mini-exhibit in History & Special Collections for the Sciences, in the Biomedical Library (4^th floor, up the ramp from Stacks level 9), uses yearbooks, archival photos, postcards, and advertisements to show the other side of the coin, when smoking and tobacco use were taken for granted in surprising (to us) circumstances.

UCLA’s Tobacco-Free Campus [facebook page]
https://www.facebook.com/UCLATFC

UCLA Tobacco-Free Task Force
http://tobaccofree.ucla.edu

UCLA’s Tobacco-Free Policy
http://evc.ucla.edu/tobacco-free-campus

UCLA Policy 810: Tobacco-Free Environment
http://www.adminpolicies.ucla.edu/pdf/810.pdf

Russell Johnson
History & Special Collections for the Sciences
UCLA Library Special Collections

Raisch is a doctoral candidate in the department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. A native New Yorker, she received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in English and Classics and then taught English and Latin at The Field School in Washington, DC. Her research at Berkeley focuses on the reception of Greek in Early Modern English literature and her dissertation, chaired by Victoria Kahn and Joanna Picciotto, examines the role Greek plays in the connection between scholarship and poetics.

At UCLA Library Special Collections, she’ll be mainly working with Greek books from the Aldine press in an attempt to understand the ways in which Greek language and texts were read, encountered, and recovered. She’s interested in how the technical work of the material and historical reconstitution of ancient Greek texts bleeds into the theoretical and speculative work of Early Modern fiction.

The true power of provenance is that it can connect the biographies of individuals from various walks of life through a shared a love of books and reading. This exhibit of manuscripts once owned by illustrious bibliophiles is intended to shed light on some of those connections.

First there was bibliographer and literary scholar Sir Walter W. Greg who lived from 1875 until 1959. With fellow bibliographers Alfred W. Pollard and Ronald Burns McKerrow, Sir Walter cofounded what is now regarded as the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical bibliography. Next, there was Stanley Morison, who lived and worked in England from 1889 to 1967. Morison has gone down in printing history as one of the most well-known editors, typographic consultants, and designers to have worked in the trade.  The current font known as Times New Roman is based on his revision of the type for The Times, London.

Estelle Doheny with Mr. and Mrs. Schad and Doheny Estate librarian Lucille Miller

The other two personalities featured in the exhibit, Isaac Foot and Carrie Estelle Doheny, were included because of their accomplishments in book collecting. The collections of these two book people differed greatly in both substance and style, but they were both representative of two major currents in collecting practice; namely, quantitatively-driven subject collecting and qualitatively-driven genre collecting. The former was represented in the library of Isaac Foot. Foot, a staunch Protestant who lived from the years of 1880 to 1960, built up a massive personal library which had been numbered at somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 volumes at its peak. A large portion of his collection was centered on the study of political philosophy and liberalism; and he possessed a great number of titles from some of the most renowned political thinkers and literary activists of the ages. Some of his more well-loved political influences included thinkers such as  John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, and President Abraham Lincoln. Carrie Estelle Doheny, on the other hand, who would represent the latter style, had a noticeably smaller collection than that of Foot. The aesthetic quality of Doheny’s collection, however, was appreciably richer than the quality of the Foot library in the sense that it primarily contained manuscript and printed works denotative of a sophisticated artistic taste. A devout Catholic and philanthropist, her collection, which was built up during the years following her husband’s death in 1935, included numerous illuminated manuscripts and masterpieces of fine printing. She also collected rare examples of Americana and children’s literature.

A folio from Psuedo Phalaris, Epistolae

In terms of manuscripts once owned by these figures, each seems to have been indicative of his or her collecting styles.  There was a thirteenth century manuscript copy of Stephen Langton’s Interpretationes Hebraicorum Nominum which was once in the possession of Sir Walter W. Greg. The fifteenth century Italian copy of Psuedo Phalaris’s Epistolae was previously owned by Stanley Morison and, therefore, was likely to have influenced his thinking on typographic design. Isaac Foot’s onetime copy of a dedicatory preface written by the Flemish humanist Victor Gislain is an item featured in the exhibit that is of particular rarity. This holograph document was discovered bound in the front portion of a sixteenth century printed edition of Prudentius’s Opera Omnia. Also included in the exhibit is a fourteenth century Ordo for the use of Rome which, for only a brief time, was owned by Estelle Doheny. The manuscript features a beautifully illustrated frontispiece on the recto of its first folio. Additionally, there are a number of supplementary archival materials on display. Among them is a photograph of Doheny with former Huntington Library curator of the rare books, Robert Schad, a catalog of a USC exhibit of Doheny treasures printed by the famous Los Angeles-based printed Ward Ritchie, and a letter from author Eden Phillpotts (d. 1960) to Isaac Foot.

Letter from Eden Phillpotts to Isaac Foot dated November 18, 1946

By Jesse R. Erickson, Library Assistant and Ph.D. student in the department of Information Studies

Harriet Quimby in her flying togs

Are you familiar with the name Harriet Quimby? If not, it’s understandable.

Her career as an aviator was very brief, but in 1911 she became the first woman in the U. S. to get a pilot’s license. She was also the first woman to fly across the English Channel. However, her flight took place on April 16, 1912 — one day after the tragic sinking of Titanic, the story that occupied the newspapers for weeks to come. At any other time, her feat might have been front page news, but as it was, she rated barely a mention.

Quimby cut quite a figure in her striking custom-made purple satin flying suit  when she performed at airshows. She died in an accident at one such event on July 16, 1912, just three months after her historic Channel crossing.

For more information about Quimby and other aviators, see the Elizabeth Hiatt Gregory Collection of Material About American Aviation, 1900-1945 that features items about many firsts in flying.

By Megan Hahn Fraser, Processing Projects Librarian

UCLA Library Special Collections is now celebrating the recent acquisition of 53 typed and autograph letters signed from French film director Jean Renoir and his wife, Dido Freire, to screenwriter Dudley Nichols between September 1941 and November 1959.  Formerly owned by a private collector, these letters are new to the world of scholarship. This new addition was purchased through a generous allocation from the University Librarian discretionary funds.

Although often overlooked, Los Angeles was a significant site of Beat culture in post-WWII America. There was North Beach in San Francisco. Greenwich Village in New York. And Venice Beach in L.A.  Los Angeles poets such as Stuart Perkoff, John Thomas, Charles Bukowski and Lawrence Lipton, author of the classic narrative, “Holy Barbarians,” typified the spirit of the era. Well known Beats from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to  Michael McClure and Jack Kerouac traveled frequently to Los Angeles, built friendships with local writers and artists, and performed in Los Angeles coffee shops, clubs and bookstores.

The Beats flourished in a larger literary and artistic context in L.A.  Serious and gifted poets such as  Thomas McGrath, Bert Meyers,  Gene Frumkin,   Estelle Gershgoren Novak, Ann Stanford, Don Gordon, Mel Weisburd, Josephine Ain, along with others, feuded with the Beats, congregated around respected literary  magazines such as Coastlines and California Quarterly, read their work to jazz, collaborated with graphic artists, engaged in the civic culture, and laid the basis for L.A.’s contemporary literary environment,  many of them while fighting for their lives and careers during the height of McCarthyism, what blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo called “the time of the Toad.”

All events at UCLA libraries are free and open to the public, though several request reservations. Events off-campus may require fees. Please check at http://www.library.ucla.edu/news/kaddish-related-programs.

Contrary to the glamour and pomp associated with the Oscars, the Collection of Awards Ephemera (Collection 209) tells a different tale about the event.  Within it are mementos from ceremonies dating from  1939 to 2000 revealing that attendance could be real work. There are copies of the voting rules and eligibility criteria; a calendar guide to local theaters’ screening times of nominated pictures; innumerable press releases, as well as direct appeals to Academy voters. And although formal attire was always a requirement, ticket stubs in the collection show that seats were initially inexpensive; for example, in 1953 a seat in the 27^th row set you back just $12.00.

The glossy programs were work product for journalists who covered the event. Marginalia captures the routine listing of who-wore-what, a running score-card of the winners, as well as more critical observations.  In 1953, the journalist who used this program noted that William Holden not only didn’t make a speech after his Best Actor win but failed to even thank the Academy for his honor.

Close up of marginalia.

This collection combines keepsakes from several sources into one collection. Working or not, these items were important mementos to their former owners. These tokens speak to the extraordinary power of Oscar in our collective imagination.

By Lauren Buisson, Technical Services