Modern Books and Manuscripts

The collection of Modern Books and Manuscripts covers a wide range of subjects with strengthsin literature written in English outside the United States; American children's literature; the printing arts; LGBTQ writing; human sexuality and gender studies; playing cards;the history of hunting and fishing;and the history of finance.

  • Belonging at Yale – Focus on Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

    May 1, 2020

    Beinecke and other Yale Library special collections steward important collections of contemporary Asian American authors, creators, and communities. Illustrative highlights in the Yale Collection of American Literature include archives of poets such as Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (2021 winner of the Bollingen Prize) and Arthur Sze – see Contemporary Asian American Poets: A Top Ten List for links and ideas on searching the collections. Recent additions to the Yale Collection of Western Americana include Japanese American family photo albums such as those compiled by Komao and Eiko Baba that include more than 550 photographs documenting their lives, relatives, and acquaintances from 1917 into the 1990s. There are similar holdings for the Torii, Nobuyama, Matsukane, and Ichiyasu families. Several Yale records document Japanese American incarceration during World War II. The guide to those records highlights the important work by the Reparative Archival Description Working Group to provide guidance on the remediation of the description of these collections.

  • woodcut depicting a couple playing a board game

    Let's Play!

    April 23, 2020

    The parks and stadiums might be quiet for the time being, but we can have a look back at outdoor and indoor games, as seen through Beinecke's collections.

  • Page from La fin du monde filmee par l’Ange N.-D. by Blaise Cendrars; Image by Fernand Leger

    The Art and Craft of Pochoir

    March 30, 2020

    For several years, I had the pleasure of writing articles on book and print culture for Design Observer I'm taking the opportunity to flesh out some of those articles into teaching moments.

  • In Memoriam: Frederick R. Koch (New York Times obituary)

    February 13, 2020

    His most substantial gift was to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, to which he donated an exceptional collection of musical and literary manuscripts. His core collection held more than 2,000 items, including scores by Debussy, Wagner and Verdi. “These working scores are really important because they show how something evolved from its first appearance through subsequent productions,” Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, said in an interview. Mr. Koch’s literary donations to the Beinecke included Noël Coward’s diaries, page proofs of parts of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” and the corrected typescript of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” A separate donation was of 50,000 photographs, most of them of celebrities, taken by Jerome Zerbe, the photographer of mid-20th century cafe society.

  • 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.