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.
  • 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.

  • Poet Wayne Koestenbaum’s archive ‘a memory lane of mental calories spent’

    September 11, 2019

    Over the course of a varied and prolific career, Wayne Koestenbaum has published poetry collections, volumes of cultural criticism, novels, and a libretto. Two years ago, he plunged into an entirely different sort of project, one that involved managing Excel spreadsheets and contemplating his unpublished work.