Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities

New acquisitions, unique documents, and visual and textual curiosities from the collections.

  • Type Cast

    June 12, 2008

    Writers at their typewriters. From the Beinecke Digital Image database: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex William Carlos Williams, 1940s Eric...

  • I.I.

    June 9, 2008

    Idiot International , a counter-culture magazine focusing on politics, published out of London, England, 1970-1971 - possibly related to the longer-lived...

  • The Peculiar Fish

    June 5, 2008

    A movable scene from Dean’s Living Strewelpeter [ca. 1890]...

  • Christmas in June

    June 2, 2008

    An illustrated writing sheet, printed in London, filled out with an original Christmas poem by a young girl named Rebecca Jane Mitchell in New York, 1807.

  • Hard Time Blues

    May 28, 2008

    Photographs of dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus dancing “Hard Time Blues,” her dance based on a folk song about sharecropping by singer Josh White. Primus...

  • Eee!-vacuation

    May 24, 2008

    From the “Vacuation” card game, England, ca. 1940

  • Le Détective!

    May 19, 2008

    Issue #1 of this Paris investigative newspaper.

  • Can't We All Just Get Along?

    May 15, 2008

    Issues of a newsletter for a gay men’s community, near Amherst, Mass. in the 1970s. [Click to enlarge]...

  • Writers at Work

    May 12, 2008

    Beinecke Top Tens gather (approximately) ten related items to give an at-a-glance look at some of the Library’s interesting, important, strange, compelling, beautiful holdings.

  • The reason is . . .

    May 8, 2008

    … it is a strikingly beautiful image. Natalia Gontcharova’s cover for Lord Berners’ song, “Poisson d’Or”, 1919. http://www.nytimes.com/books/...