We’re holding a musical vigil in the library office today in tribute to Max Roach who died yesterday at the age of 83. By any measure, Mr. Roach was one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. As others have and will eulogize him more adequately than I can, I’ll only add two things: …
Our magisterial current exhibition, Chosen: Philadelphia’s Great Hebraica, closes in a couple of weeks. I recently stumbled across the letter above. In honor of the exhibition, I thought I’d post it here. Click on the image above and read it. It was written by Morris Rosenbach (pictured left) to his younger brother A.S.W. (a.k.a. Kid, …
We’re doing some cleaning and reorganizing around here. Somebody left the head of Molly Bloom, wrapped in plastic, outside the basement bathrooms. It’s been sitting there for days. It makes me think of poor Laura Palmer. I keep expecting Bob to show up. It’s creepy. Don’t go down there.
The Dakota language primer shown above contains several woodcut illustrations. Most of them are bucolic, Currier & Ives type jobs — farmers working the fields, bonnetted little girls holding flower baskets in quaint cottage door ways, children sailing on a windy, but not threatening, lake, etc., etc. (Most of them depicting scenes not in the …
After posting about Frank Budgen (pictured above) last week, I was reminded about another important role Budgen played in the production of Ulysses. I was most certainly remiss in excluding it from the previous post. Our esteemed Associate Director, Mike Barsanti (see artist’s conception to the right), who is piled higher and deeper in these …
I’m all giddied up because the third season of Deadwood came out on DVD last week. I don’t have HBO, let alone cable, so I can’t watch the episodes as they air. I guess that makes me a cable t.v. shoobie. I’ve recently been looking through some letters that relate to Deadwood, S.D., and have …
Bloomsday is this Saturday, June 16th. See you there. I’m not privy to all of the preparations for the glorious occasion, but I sincerely hope our Bloomsday coordinator, the redoubtable Joyce scholar Janine Utell, has arranged for the above scene to be re-enacted tableau vivant-style at the conclusion of the Proteus chapter readings (around 12:45 …
When I emerge from my little hidey-hole off the reading room here at the Rosenbach, I come onto the third floor hall only to have my eyes alight upon this scene:Now, nothing against this fine piece, or more technically, this “polychrome carved and gilded lime wood figure of St. Michael slaying a demon” as our …
A colleague brought this unfortunate news item to my attention last week. It seems one of the world’s largest collections of Harry Houdini material went up in flames last December when a crack-smoking burglar set the collector’s house on fire. The smoker, Mr. Jarrod Frederick, escaped the blazing home of Dr. Randall Wolf even if …
We recently received a bulletin from Dr. Jörn Günther, rare book dealer of Hamburg, announcing that he has, among his stock of jaw-dropping medieval manuscripts, a curious little printed trifle: a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible. This leaf comes from an incomplete copy that previously belonged to Maria Elisabeth Augusta von Sulzbach. It eventually made …