Romance? Yes? No? Either way: Criterion!

Plough and the Stars

To Valentine or not to Valentine? Either way it’s freakin’ cold! Just in time for these freezing days and nights when watching a great movie indoors sounds like a fine plan, the Vassar Library is taking two streaming platforms for the Criterion Collection of films out for a test drive.  Criterion offers many of the greatest films from around the world and remains committed to publishing the defining moments of cinema by building a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films including the work of such masters as Renoir, Godard, Kurosawa, Cocteau, Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Fuller, Lean, Lang, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Ozu, Buñuel and Powell.  Recently, they have begun to offer their collection of films on streaming platforms, including HuluPlus for individuals, and Alexander Street and Kanopy for colleges and other institutions.  We’re running a simultaneous trial of the two platforms so that we can compare their features and decide which one we like best.  So watch a great movie this weekend – with a loved one, a pal, your dog, just you… whatever! Did we mention it’s freakin’ cold??

http://library.vassar.edu/search/databases/databasetrials.html

 

Yay for Valentine’s Day!

love

Not so much…

no love

If you have comments or questions, or a platform opinion, please get in touch with Gretchen Lieb, Film and Video Librarian.

 

 

The Age of Alice

A rabbit hole. Bizarre physical transformations. Riddles. These are some of the elements of fantasy that define Lewis Carroll’s classic story Alice in Wonderland, which turns 150 this year.

Cover of Andrew Lang's The Violet Fairy Book

Cover of Andrew Lang’s The Violet Fairy Book

To commemorate this anniversary and participate in worldwide celebrations of the book, the Vassar College Archives and Special Collections Library is launching an exhibition, The Age of Alice: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Nonsense in Victorian England. The show features an early printing of Alice as well as an exploration of other works of fantasy from the same period. All of the pieces on display are from Vassar’s extensive children’s book collection.

First published in 1865, Alice in Wonderland remains one of the world’s most famous and influential works of fantasy. “The story is very much a part of the popular culture,” said Ron Patkus, head of special collections at Vassar’s library. “There have been numerous film, television, and dramatic adaptations of the novel since the early twentieth century.” However, several works of fantasy preceded it and Patkus noted, “We should take care not to let Alice obscure our appreciation of similar works composed by other authors during the same period.”

Henry Holiday's illustration for Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark".

Henry Holiday’s illustration for Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”. (Engraved by Joseph Swain.)

The Victorian era witnessed the publication of a great number of fairy tales, and works of fantasy and nonsense. Many, though not all, of these titles were aimed at young audiences. The first such novel is generally considered to be Sara Coleridge’s Phantasmion, which appeared in 1837. Later, more established authors such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and John Ruskin all produced works with fantastical elements. An especially important title was Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, which appeared in 1846, filled with limericks and playful illustrations. Some writers established themselves as authors of children’s books, among them George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, and Mary Molesworth. The trend continued in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of twentieth, when collections such as the fairy tale books of Andrew Lang and the Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling were published. Many of these books featured illustrations by major artists, including John Tenniel, Arthur Hughes, Walter Crane, and others.

Nearly 40 books are on display in this show, written by a variety of authors. “They are arranged chronologically, so that visitors to the exhibition can gain a sense of how this literary genre developed over the course of the nineteenth century,” said Patkus.

Age of Alice includes both famous and lesser-known titles. Wherever possible, first editions are shown. “Viewers will see stories and novels as they appeared not just in book form, but also in periodicals of the time,” said Patkus. “The exhibition provides a strong sense of what a major genre this was during that time period.”

The Age of Alice opens on February 12. The exhibition will be on view through mid-June and is free and open to the public.

More from the Laura Benet Papers

Posted on behalf of Janine St. Germaine, Consulting Archivist

The methodical unfolding, flattening, cleaning and sorting of the Laura Benet Papers continues to reveal an abundance of correspondence with aesthetic merit (marginalia sketches and doodles), as well as valuable historical content.  Letters comprise approximately half of the collection. There are letters between Benet family members, from Laura Benet’s collaborators and comrades, as well as a smaller volume of business letters. One of those business letters, dated 1940, requested Ms. Benet’s support of the World Center for Women’s Archives (WCWA) located in New York City.  The letter asked Ms. Benet to consider gifting her manuscripts – “to be permanently preserved and saved from destruction…” Unfortunately, the WCWA, which had a number of notable supporters, including Mary Beard and Eleanor Roosevelt, lost most of their expected funding to the war effort and disbanded later that year. The silver lining is that a few decades later, Vassar’s Special Collections was offered the collection, which we are obviously pleased about; however, if she had gifted the material earlier, to any reputable repository, perhaps some of it would be a bit less charred…

As with many collections of personal papers, along with correspondence, there are also a subset of less expected documents. A few such oddities recently found in the Benet collection are worthy of note:

A list of 1894 New Year’s resolutions conjured up by the wife of William Rose Benet.  Resolution Number 10 – I am going to be silent – rounds out the list following on the heals of an effort to avoid say[ing] darn or dash any more.

New Year's list

An note from a friend charting out a train trip to Paris. The writer appears to have either allotted for several hours of sleep… or several visits with sheep.

Paris trip itinerary

And lastly, an undated Christmas list penned by William Rose Benet.  The document is ultimately a reading list, accompanied by a request for a cigarette case and (forgive the product placement) a Gillette Safety Razor.

Christmas list

Stayed tuned for more updates from the wacky world of archival work!