News

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

  • The Forever Bond (99 per cent invisible)

    January 7, 2020

    Rouwenhurst, on behalf of Yale’s Center for International Finance, actually purchased one of the oldest active bonds to date — a 1648 corporate Dutch water authority bond written on goatskin that was originally issued to raise money for the construction of a pier. Most of the oldest active perpetual bonds are from this very same Dutch water board, because this board has been in charge of maintaining all of the dams and levees and dikes in a given corner of the Netherlands for hundreds of years and is very stable. You don’t need a record of ownership to keep the bond active, but the catch is that the bearer of the bond needs to travel to the water board’s registrar’s office to have it notated, meaning the staff at Yale needs to travel all the way to Holland to maintain it.

  • Searching for La Belle Dame (WSU Insider)

    December 18, 2019

    Where in the world had the Clumber Park Chartier disappeared to? Joan Grenier-Winther, the Marianna M. and Donald S. Matteson Distinguished Professor of French at Washington State University Vancouver, really needed to examine the fifteenth-century collection of poems by Alain Chartier and others.

  • The Polymathic Mind of John Ruskin (Hyperallergic)

    November 30, 2019

    If Walt Whitman, whose bicentenary all New York has been celebrating, can come across as absolutely contemporary — a big-bearded hipster tipping back Pabst Blue Ribbons and spouting poetry in some Brooklyn dive bar — John Ruskin, also 200 this year, seems stubbornly and remotely Victorian. The Yale Center for British Art’s Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin aims to assert Ruskin’s contemporary relevance while firmly retaining his 19th-century context.

  • ‘Pass the pickled eel’: a guide to an 18th-century Thanksgiving

    November 25, 2019

    Don’t want to bother with brines, barbecues, glazes, or boiling oil? Consider turning back the clock to simpler times when dining occurred over candlelight, ovens were wood fired, and it was a safe bet that nobody around the table had recently bathed. That’s right: Transport your friends and family to the 18th century for a truly memorable Thanksgiving feast. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has resources to guide your gastronomic time travel.

  • Happiness Lab Episode 10: Making the Grade (Podcast)

    November 20, 2019

    From school grades to fitness trackers, we're all being ranked and rated on a daily basis. This is having a huge impact on our happiness and preventing us from living our lives to the fullest. Can giving up on grades radically improve our well-being? This episode includes Laurie Santos' visit to the Beinecke Library to read the diaries of Ezra Stiles from 1785.

  • Listening to Will Wilson’s Portraits (Yale Herald)

    November 18, 2019

    Today wet-plate collodion photography is, unsurprisingly, scarce, enabling the materialization of Wilson’s three figures in PNGB to serve as a bait-and-switch: their initial perceived age soon deteriorates into their present reality. Unlike in Curtis’s images, each subject has chosen their own pose and clothing, has written their own caption, and has been gifted the aluminum plate — the reproductions we see in the YUAG exhibition are archival pigment prints from a high-resolution scan of the original, on loan from the Beinecke. The photographic exchange is literal, as is Wilson’s reinscription of Indigenous culture, both shifting the seat of influence towards equality.

  • How one man’s family photo archive led to a global ‘family’ album

    November 15, 2019

    "Yale has some of the most amazing archival collections in the world, along with outstanding librarians and archivists,” said Harris. “I want my students to see the relationship between their own family narratives and the public record. I love being a conduit so that people can see the potentiality of themselves as architects of the future, and we begin by valuing the past.”

  • ‘Shape, contour, and respect’ — 200 years of indigenous art on view at Yale

    November 11, 2019

    It is the first exhibition to display indigenous works from the Yale Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The show features basketry, beadwork, drawings, photographs, pottery, textiles, and wooden carvings from the early 19th century to the present day, representing more than 40 indigenous nations. It presents the objects as works of art, not historical artifacts.

  • Ray Clemens and Diane Ducharme on the greatest book collector of all time (The Biblio File podcast)

    November 10, 2019

    Earlier this year the Beinecke Library hosted an exhibition entitled Bibliomania; or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance. It takes its name from the history of “arrant book-lovers” written by Thomas Frognall Dibdin. "It follows these lovers of the book through four case studies, observing the powerful and often unexpected relationships of books with their readers, owners, authors, collectors, and creators."