On May 26, 1897, visitors to bookshops in London found a new book, for just six shillings, published by Constable and Co., bound in a lurid yellow cloth cover with blood red letters announcing its strange title, Dracula. For six shillings, readers discovered a story told in letters and diary entries, about an undead Transylvanian …
April 23 marks the day that we traditionally celebrate William Shakespeare’s birth and deathday, though neither of those occasions are confirmed to have actually been on the 23rd. Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, so historians estimate his actual birth was a few days before that. The same holds true for his deathday, which …
The 2022 Rosenbacchanal (Thursday, May 12) will feature a unique harp and organ recital titled “The Muses’ Concord: Musical, Literary, and Historical Jewels from The Rosenbach’s Collection.” Each of the precious musical gems selected for performance at the event relates to one of The Rosenbach’s areas of collecting strengths. The program below presents the glittering …
Banning books, it seems to me, is a poor method for controlling language. After all, it is not books themselves that are banned but the words and ideas contained within them, and language is a very difficult thing to contain whether spoken or written. Perhaps books make language more transferable and a book a more …
February 2, 2022, will mark the centennial of the publication of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses. Constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses takes place over the course of a single day in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904. While it is regarded as one of the finest works of Irish literature, the manuscript for Ulysses has resided right here at The Rosenbach Museum …
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 …
As the new Director of The Rosenbach, and as someone who enjoys writing and thinking about history even in my spare time, I’m delighted to be sharing with you a monthly blog about my own discoveries in The Rosenbach’s collection. The Rosenbach’s collection is vast, and while I’ve worked here for seven years, I’m still …
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 …
The Board of Directors of The Rosenbach is pleased to announce the appointment of Kelsey Scouten Bates as the John C. Haas Director of The Rosenbach. Kelsey Bates has served as The Rosenbach’s Interim Executive Director since March 2021 when longtime Director Derick Dreher stepped down after a 24-year tenure. Bates has been Associate Director …
It had all started as a joke. In 2019, Hedgerow Theatre, Curio Theater, and EgoPo Theater had, by pure coincidence, all chosen Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (or a variation thereon) as part of their season. Two of the productions even overlapped. So anytime someone asked me if I had anything planned for that year’s SoLow …