News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • Windham-Campbell literary festival moves online with nine-episode salon

    September 14, 2021

    Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes have transformed their flagship fall literary festival into a virtual salon series showcasing the creativity of its 2021 recipients over the course of nine episodes streaming every Wednesday from Sept. 15 to Nov. 10. Each episode will highlight one of the eight prize recipients with the final episode featuring a keynote address by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo based on the theme “Why I Write.” One-time registration for all nine episodes is free and open to the public. The series will take its audience on an international literary tour of words, music, performance, and art.

  • The Classroom in Crisis (Boston Review)

    September 13, 2021

    Following Brooks’s papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the authors trace how the formalist emphasis of mid-twentieth-century New Criticism emerged less from first principles than from the realities of the classroom, where a text might be understood as a se

  • Bright Young Librarians: Eric Ensley (Fine Books)

    September 9, 2021

    I’m eternally grateful that I was able to receive a PhD in English from Yale University, where I worked all five years in the Beinecke Library alongside librarians and curators like Ray Clemens and Diane Ducharme, who taught me so much of what I know about early books.

  • Analysis unlocks secret of the Vinland Map – it’s a fake

    September 1, 2021

    The Vinland Map, once hailed as the earliest depiction of the New World, is awash in 20th-century ink. A team of conservators and conservation scientists at Yale has found compelling new evidence for this conclusion through the most thorough analysis yet performed on the infamous parchment map. Acquired by Yale in the mid-1960s, the purported 15th-century map depicts a pre-Columbian “Vinlanda Insula,” a section of North America’s coastline southwest of Greenland. While earlier studies had detected evidence of modern inks at various points on the map, the new Yale analysis examined the entire document’s elemental composition using state-of-the-art tools and techniques that were previously unavailable. The analysis revealed that a titanium compound used in inks first produced in the 1920s pervades the map’s lines and text.

  • Barbara Shailor pictured seating in Beinecke Plaza with her donation in front of her.

    Fragment Donated in Honor of Toshiyuki Takamiya

    August 30, 2021

    Barbara Shailor, former director of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, donated a fragment in honor of Toshiyuki Takamiya. The fragment is from the same manuscript as Takamiya MS 91, a twelfth-century manuscript of Rufinus.

  • In Memoriam: Stephen R. Parks, acclaimed curator and bibliophile

    July 26, 2021

    Stephen R. Parks, curator of the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for nearly 40 years until his retirement in 2004, died on July 22 at Yale New Haven Hospital after battling Parkinson’s Disease for several years. He was 81.

  • Michelle Light appointed Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and Beinecke Library Director

    July 15, 2021

    Michelle Light has been appointed as the new Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and Director of the Beinecke Library, effective October 1, 2021. The appointment was announced today by Barbara Rockenbach, Stephen F. Gates University Librarian. Light comes to Yale University Library from current service as the director of special collections at the Library of Congress. “Michelle brings great experience to build a more unified vision for Yale Library special collections and the Beinecke Library and to sustain and strengthen collections, access, user experience, and a work environment that attracts and retains the best staff,” Rockenbach said.

  • Juneteenth 2021 and the work still to do

    June 18, 2021

    Yale’s libraries and collections are another important source of educational enrichment and inspiration in the spirit of Juneteenth. For example, the Beinecke Library has a pair of films by Solomon Sir Jones that show Juneteenth celebrations in Texas and Oklahoma in the 1920s. The Beinecke’s collections also include an address by Frederick Douglass delivered on April 16, 1883 in the Congregational Church in Washington, D.C. for the 21st anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia; and the gold pen used by President Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

  • Beinecke Library finds online success in a largely remote school year (Yale Daily News)

    May 28, 2021

    Beinecke Library produced 30 online installments of Mondays at Beinecke gallery talks this year, which have averaged more than 130 viewers live online. The online programming proved so popular that the library will continue to produce more live episodes this June. Morand said the library “expects that total attendance this year will approach 10,000 views, live and later online, across the year since September.” This year, the Mondays at Beinecke talks showcased and celebrated Black authors, artists, activists and collections. 17 of the 30 talks focused on work in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters and seven others focused on other creators of color and their collections.

  • Preservationists want to breathe new life into the former Vermont Marble Company headquarters (The Architect's Newspaper)

    May 26, 2021

    At the height of its productivity, the VMC was considered the largest U.S. corporation in the world, according to the Vermont Marble Museum website, and held exclusive mining rights to all marble deposits in the states of Vermont, Colorado, and Alaska. Using this broad network of quarrying facilities, VMC would provide building materials for prestigious building projects, including the Oregon State Capitol, the Arlington National Cemetery, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  • Queer Shoulders at the Wheel (Boston Review)

    May 21, 2021

    A lot of Wieners’s later writing is lost: much was never published, and though his papers are spread across several university collections, from which the letters in Yours Presently are drawn, many later manuscripts were in all likelihood lost after his death. But we know that Wieners continued producing elusive, obscure, often waspishly humorous texts for his own pleasure and sometimes for that of others. Some of these late poems appeared in o·blēk, The East Village, and Big Bridge, and others were mailed to his younger friend and last devoted Occult School member Lansing, and are therefore deposited in Lansing’s archives at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. When Wieners died in 2002, at his side were his longtime supporters Shively and Jim Dunn.

  • Restored Richard Wright novel hits bestseller lists (AP via The Oakland Press)

    May 13, 2021

    In 2010, Julia Wright was seated in "the comfortable, secluded, air-conditioned calm of the Beinecke Archives where my father's manuscripts are housed at Yale University." She told the AP that she "came across a long version of the short story I knew so well but augmented by the 50 pages on police brutality. Bringing the whole work to light was not only timely, it was a cure against the physical dismemberment suffered by the James Byrds of our dark history."