Six Degrees of Rosenbach

No, that isn’t a reference to the temperature outside, but to the familiar six-degrees of separation game, in which you try to link disparate people through a chain of acquaintances, relations, influences, etc. (By the way, Truman Capote had a racier version he called the International Daisy Chain, which involved linking folks via sex partners–he claimed Mercedes de Acosta was great for this since “You could get to anyone, from Cardinal Spellman to the Duchess of Windsor”) Anyway, the six-degrees game comes to mind frequently at the Rosenbach because of all the unusual connections that we keep turning up between people and objects in our collection.

So for this week’s post I thought I’d throw a few questions out there to see if you can link some famous folks who are represented in the Rosenbach collections. For each pair I’ll let you know how many intermediate people I needed to make the link, but you may well come up with a more elegant solution. Intermediate links do not need to be from the Rosenbach collection, although you can award yourself bonus Rosenbach-nerd points if you can do an all-Rosenbach chain. Please feel free to share your answers with the class by commenting on the blog or Facebook. I’ll do an answer round-up in next week’s post.

James Joyce to Marianne Moore (1 intermediate link)
The Comte de Buffon to Charles Dickens (4 intermediate links)
Rebecca Gratz to Lewis Carroll (3 intermediate links)
Abraham Lincoln to Maurice Sendak (3 intermediate links)
Jane Austen to Bram Stoker (3 intermediate links)

Bonus points if you can connect any of these folks to Kevin Bacon!

If you like this you might also enjoy the PBS version for their American Masters series. Maurice Sendak is one of their Masters, so it even has a Rosenbach connection. Happy puzzling!