This blog post was written by Andrew White Folk horror! I think of old chestnuts like The Wicker Man, or new Ari Aster movies like Midsommar and Hereditary. But before folk horror was a genre of cinema it was a literary genre: folk horror thrives on Rosenbach library shelves in early Shakespeare printings of Macbeth and …
This blog post was written by Andrew White Leaving aside his other manifold accomplishments, let’s look at William Morris at the moment that the Renaissance man and Victorian gadfly became a printer. This was 1891, when Morris was fifty-five. Between 1891 and 1896, Morris’s press, the Kelmscott—named for his home in Oxfordshire—printed sixty-six books. The …
This blog post was written by Andrew White Sitting by the front and back door of the Rosenbach brothers’ Delancey Place home, these boots dreaded rainy days on which they suffered the discomfort of being used as umbrella stands. Phillip and A.S.W. Rosenbach—our museum’s founders—lived on Delancey Place from 1926 till their deaths in the …
This blog post was written by Andrew White That the winners of an art contest devoted to James Joyce’s Ulysses should incorporate text and collage is fitting—considering the earthiness of Joyce’s imagery and the centrality of collage to modernism in general. 2021 is the second year the Rosenbach has held a Joyce-inspired art contest as …
The following objects were selected by The Rosenbach’s Collections Department staff as examples from across our collections of women who broke barriers in their eras, cultures, and professions. They changed the world around them and became role models for those who followed in their footsteps. Amy Lowell (1874-1924), typed letter signed to A. Edward …
This blog post was written by Andrew White What would you say to a look at some tender and romantic love letters from Marlene Dietrich, the 20th century German American actress and singer whose life and art continue to inspire? It’s the 7th week of social distancing—counting from the Ides of March when the Rosenbach …
This blog post was written by Andrew White Because we don’t know when Shakespeare was born, only that he was christened on April 26, 1564, we agree to assume he was born a few days before that on April 23rd. We have a better idea of what Shakespeare looked like. Both the engraving in the First …
This blog post was written by Andrew White The lovely lady Harry Belafonte is addressing here is the modernist poet Marianne Moore, whose archive resides with us at The Rosenbach. For one week in February of 1968 Harry Belafonte hosted The Tonight Show, and Moore was one of his guests. The Rosenbach has handwritten notes of …
This blog post was written by Andrew White With letters, photographs, first editions, and manuscripts of Oscar Wilde in our collections, many facets of Wilde and his life can be glimpsed at The Rosenbach. So much so, I sometimes struggle with what exactly to foreground: his spectacular gift for words, his careening success, or his …
This blog post was written by Andrew White Alexandre Dumas’s father was one of Napoleon’s generals, nicknamed “Hercules” by the emperor, and “Black Devil” by France’s enemies; Dumas’s surname came from a paternal grandmother, Marie-Cessette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean woman held in slavery on what is now Haiti. In his career as a writer, the colossally …