News

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

  • How bonds ate the entire financial system (Financial Times)

    August 3, 2023

    It was a crisp September day in 2015 when Timothy Young arrived at Houten, an unremarkable Dutch commuter town, determined to collect an almost 400-year-old debt. He carried a case containing a fragile piece of goatskin covered in dense writing and numbers. It was a bond, issued in 1648 by a group of Dutch landowners, who managed the dikes on a stretch of the river Lek. They had borrowed 1,000 guilders from a local merchant and the bond explained that, in return for the loan, the merchant would receive a 5

  • Beinecke Readings Examine Freedom From All Angles (New Haven Independentt)

    July 6, 2023

    The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds one of 26 known surviving copies of the first printing of the Declaration of Independence. The document, printed by John Dunlap in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, has a single typographical error, an indication that the founders issued it in a hurry to declare independence from England. On Wednesday, a few dozen New Haveners got to hear the words of that revolutionary broadside read aloud — along with that of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 oration ​“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” — as part of an annual primary-source-focused tradition to celebrate the 247th anniversary of Independence Day.

  • Project makes Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts accessible to scholars

    June 26, 2023

    The manuscripts range across many genres and topics, including history, poetry, literature, mysticism, Islamic law, religious sermons, medical texts, dictionaries, and account books. They include the Vankulu Lügati (The Vankulu Dictionary), a two-volume Arabic-Turkish dictionary that in 1729 became the first printed book ever published in the Ottoman Empire, as well as a biography of Alexander the Great, and Leylā vü Mecnūn, a well-known romance in Islamic literature, akin to “Romeo and Juliet,” among many other notable works.

  • Bill Lowe Keeps The Renaissance Alive (New Haven Independent)

    June 14, 2023

    The group’s first number, ​“Us,” was part of Signifyin’ Natives, a suite of searching, excoriating, and invigorating music from composer and musician Bill Lowe that uses as its text passages from a Harlem Renaissance classic that, it turns out, has as much to say about the present as it did to its own time, a century ago. Lowe’s presentation of Signifyin’ Natives — at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library on Yale’s campus Tuesday afternoon — was a collaboration between the library and the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, running now through June 25.

  • No Metal Clips! Yale Archivist Offers Tips (New Haven Independent)

    June 9, 2023

    For people who have devoted their lives to organizing, Paula and Frank Panzarella have finally been able to confess: They are quite disorganized –what with a house full of flyers, posters, political buttons, a battalion’s worth of t‑shirts, white papers, position papers, an original of the Port Huron Statement, a mantle of other manifestos, diaries, and correspondence from decades of a meaningful life of political and social activism and organizing dating back to the 1960s. So now the question arises: What in the world to do with all of it? That sometimes overwhelming dilemma – and opportunity – is what brought them and two dozen other packrats and stewards of family photos and memorabilia to the community room of the Main Ives Branch of the New Haven Public Library at 133 Elm St. on smoky Wednesday night. There Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library archivist Jennifer Coggins was on hand to offer some hope, relief, and practical suggestions for how to keep documents safe, with an hour’s introductory lecture on preserving materials in different formats for future generations.

  • Twice as old as the Gutenberg Bible

    June 1, 2023

    Only two permanent exhibits grace the Beinecke Library’s magnificent mezzanine, which is lit by the glowing veins of enormous marble windows. To the left of the main entrance, visitors can find John James Audubon’s original Birds of North America—two massive volumes of watercolors. A small bronze case to the right housed, until recently, both volumes of Johannes Gutenberg’s 1455 Bible. Today, a single volume sits across from another important document in the history of printing: an eighth-century Buddhist text, displayed along with the wooden pagoda in which it was originally enclosed.

  • Students win prizes for essays on American and Western American history and culture

    May 26, 2023

    At this year’s graduation ceremonies, three prizes were awarded to Yale College seniors whose essays explored topics in the fields of Americana or Western Americana. Unlike the library’s three other senior essay prizes—for which students submit their own work for consideration—these prizes are awarded based on recommendations from faculty members. Each prize winner received $200 and an award certificate.

  • Yale Camerata to celebrate African American history and culture

    April 27, 2023

    As they prepared for the performance, the Camerata’s members had the opportunity to view materials at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, part of the Yale University Library, which highlight Hughes’ and Bonds’ friendship and their long-running artistic collaboration. The choir members took turns leafing through seven folders of correspondence between the poet and the composer, an archive that contains engrossing evidence of their intimate friendship.

  • Library Fellows present lightning talks on paper, poetry, protest, and more

    April 26, 2023

    Fellowship Program Director Jae Rossman invited six of this season’s residential fellows to share what they had been poring over in the Beinecke Library’s reading room. In March, the scholars delivered a series of five-minute lightning talks—illustrated with slide shows—to an audience gathered in Sterling Memorial Library lecture hall. Topics ranged from nuclear poetry, sound poetry, and writing paper to abolitionists and revolutionary thought. Images included typewritten poems, historic newspaper clippings, and photographs of desert landscapes.

  • Love, Judy Blume (Slate)

    April 22, 2023

    Blume’s letters are part of the collection of Yale University’s Beinecke Library, which the film’s directors, Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, visited for research. And while it tells two correspondents’ stories, they’re clearly stand-ins for dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands more letter-writers who developed relationships with Blume over the years. Kim, who is now 54 and a writer herself, told me, “If I poured so much emotion into my letters, and she was getting 1,000 or 2,000 a month, how much collective American emotion is in that collection … is beautiful.”