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 thanks from Belafonte to Moore, a rough draft …
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 tragic fall. Though we can’t visit The Rosenbach …
The Rosenbach’s mission is to foster inquiry, learning, and creativity inspired by our collections. Although our doors are temporarily closed, our books, manuscripts, and art are still ready to be discovered. Read on to explore The Rosenbach’s holdings and stay tuned for additional content in the coming weeks. Please consider a donation to The Rosenbach to help us continue offering …
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 prolific Dumas used different colored paper for each …
Every year, the world celebrates James Joyce’s epic Ulysses on June 16th to commemorate Leopold Bloom’s fictional journey through the streets of Dublin. Over the past 25+ years, The Rosenbach’s Bloomsday Festival has grown into a lively, day-long celebration that draws literature lovers from around the country at the beginning of each summer. In 2018 …
Finding a letter in The Rosenbach archive written in the hand of the great Alain LeRoy Locke was quite an event here on Delancey Place. The letter came to light while we were looking through Rosenbach Company files for information on our manuscript of Batuala, a novel by the French Guianese writer René Maran. Poet Yolanda Wisher had …
“‘Exhibit’ is a noun, but it is also a verb, meaning to show or display. Show or display what? Stuff. Not pictures of stuff or descriptions of stuff, but stuff. And the use of real, physical stuff…is what sets exhibits apart from books, TV, the Internet, etc.” – Eugene Dillenburg, “What, if Anything, is a Museum?” In Exhibitionist, spring, 2011. …
In 2019 we welcomed three new members to our board, including a new representative of the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation Board of Directors. Emily Cavanagh, Lisa Washington, and Gene LeFevre each bring their own expertise and passion for our mission. We hope you’ll join us in welcoming them to the board and The Rosenbach community. …
Could a poem inspired by an obscure folly, no matter how beautiful, hope to be anything but an obscure folly itself? Case in point: the masterful sonnet written by Robert Browning in honor of Helen’s Tower, a 19th century architectural folly built by an Anglo-Irish aristocrat in honor of his mum. The question springs to …
This post has been adapted from the Free Library of Philadelphia’s blog. See original post here. Two months ago, I spent an evening in a dimly lit room scrutinizing the handwriting of a long-dead person with a group of mostly strangers. Scraps of 150-year-old paper were passed around for us to hold in our own …