“I Give These Books: The History of Yale University Library, 1656-2022”, presents a comprehensive history of one of America’s oldest university libraries from its founding through the present day. The library began with books brought over from Europe and England by Puritans seeking to found their own colony, and grew through donations from overseas donors, personal libraries of faculty members, and alumni endowments.

An entirely new version of the comedy directed and abridged by Laura Engel.

The Play:

In 1801 Anne Damer, Mary Berry, and Agnes Berry embarked on a remarkable collaboration staging a performance of Berry’s comedy Fashionable Friends as an amateur theatrical production at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Damer and Berry starred in the play as the titular fashionable friends; Damer played the seductive and sly Lady Selina and Berry the sentimental and clever Mrs. Lovell.

The 1962 book “The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things” radically altered how we now think about the history of art. Studying and traveling through Latin America, the author George Kubler (1912–1996) developed a methodology that would expand the scope of art history—moving it away from the study of great works of art and biographies of makers toward a consideration of every intentionally made object.

Author and critic Garth Greenwell and TYR senior editor Maggie Millner will read from their work and discuss writing as desire. Moderated by TYR’s Editor-in-Chief, Meghan O’Rourke.
Presented as part of The Yale Review’s Spring Festival.
Co-sponsored by the Yale English Department, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.

Scott Mandelbrote, Director of Studies in History and Perne Librarian at Peterhouse, Cambridge, will discuss the discovery of Isaac Newton’s notebook from the late 1670s, by John Wickins, Newton’s friend and contemporary at Trinity College, Cambridge. This talk will discuss how the notebook was acquired for the Cambridge University Library, its significance for their collections and the study of Newton’s career in the history of science, and how the book trade uncovers new historical knowledge and importance of collecting for institutions.