News

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

  • 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."

  • Fellowship winners will study next at Oxford and Cambridge

    May 11, 2021

    Emma Brodey ’21 has been awarded the King’s-Yale Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in English at Cambridge University, where she will study 18th-century and Romantic literature and the history of the book. At Yale, she is an English major focusing her studies on 19th-century English literature and creative nonfiction. Her academic thesis explored Jane Austen and George Eliot’s novels through the lens of material texts and the embodiment of the 19th-century woman reader. Her creative thesis was a memoir about the role of Austen in her own family. Brodey has also studied letterpress printing, helps lead the Yale Guild of Bookmakers, and often teaches bookbinding workshops for the Yale community. She works as a research assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her most recent curated exhibit, “Publication and Prejudice” focuses on copies of “Pride and Prejudice” in the Yale Library collections.

  • Yale poets, experts weigh in on relationship between social media, poetry (Yale Daily News)

    May 7, 2021

    Nancy Kuhl, Beinecke Curator of Poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature, said that the publishing history of American poetry is rich and fascinating. Innovation made by American poets, such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickison, provided a “fertile ground” for later writers. “Social media platforms add a new layer — allowing poets to reach new audiences around the world and providing a virtual space for the development of dynamic new poetry communities,” Kuhl said.

  • Blood, Tears and Samurai Love: A global collaboration uncovers a lost love story in a library manuscript

    April 29, 2021

    The untitled manuscript is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and is being referred to as the Shūdō tsuya monogatari, roughly meaning “male-male relationship stories.” Set in 1714 in Dewa Province in Northeastern Japan, the story features unusual full-color illustrations and is written in kuzushiji, a challenging calligraphic script commonly used in Japanese texts before 1900 but now legible only to scholars with specialized expertise.

  • The Stone Heads of 320 York

    April 12, 2021

    But the heads embedded in the entrance archway were not mentioned as part of that initial scandal. So we did some digging in the Beinecke Library’s archives and found a typewritten account by one of the workmen involved in the planning of the building, Wesley Needham. Needham was quite a character. He served as an adviser in Tibetan literature at the Yale University Library and had no training in architecture except “through the study of books on architecture borrowed from the New Haven Public Library.” Nonetheless, he served as a draftsman in the construction of 320 York Street as one of what he estimated as about eighty-five draftsmen serving under the chief architect, James Gamble Rogers. These people drew up plans and created drawings of proposed carvings, which they submitted, in the case of the Hall of Graduate Studies, to the architect John Donald Tuttle for approval. Needham recalled working on a “series of snails” to be molded over the windows in the lounge: “Tuttle didn’t mention what they symbolized (possibly the slow pace of graduate students on their way to a higher degree),” a surprisingly painstaking project that went through a number of drafts. Needham dryly comments, “Now when I look at them, I wonder if they were worth so much effort.”

  • ‘A Whole World’ is a new book of poet James Merrill’s letters (The Day)

    April 8, 2021

    The renowned Stonington poet and Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill was incredibly prolific. Not only was his most famous poem, "The Changing Light at Sandover," 560 pages long — and written with the aid of his trusted Ouija board that still exists in the poet's former house in Stonington Borough — Merrill wrote hundreds of poems and was also a novelist, playwright, and essayist.

  • Beinecke Library hosts ‘presence project’ panel discussion (Yale Daily News)

    April 1, 2021

    On March 31, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library hosted a public panel discussion on the “Yale Book History Presence Project,” a creative and critical exploration of the meanings of presence in relation to material texts. The project is an undertaking of the Yale Program in the History of the Book, which is a collaboration between the Beinecke Library and the English Department.