August 21 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of well-known British artist Aubrey Beardsley. Three days later, August 24, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Beardsley’s friend, caricaturist and essayist Max Beerbohm. As young men, both artists shocked English society with their boundary-pushing creativity, becoming celebrities in literary and artistic circles in …
From October 13-31, Special Collections reprises the “Thrills and Chills in Cloth” exhibit for Halloween. It features some particularly spooky 19th and 20th century books from our Rare American Literature and Victorian and Edwardian collections. The exhibit demonstrates how British and American book designers took advantage of new technologies to stamp full-color images into cloth …
A temporary exhibit in Special Collections’ lobby showcases creepy and mysterious book cover designs in time for Halloween. “Thrills and Chills in Cloth” features British and American cloth bookbindings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the late 1880s, book manufacturers developed a process to stamp bookcloth with colored ink. Publishers used this …
Renowned Victorian artist Sir John Tenniel was born this day 200 years ago. Tenniel was formally trained as a painter, but after accepting a job as an illustrator at the prominent English humor magazine, Punch, he found fame as a cartoonist and book illustrator. He produced thousands upon thousands of drawings for the magazine, from …
Today marks the 200th anniversary of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Consort of Queen Victoria. Albert was the younger son of Ernest, ruler of the German state of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha; Victoria was his first cousin. They married in 1840. As a foreigner, Albert was initially viewed with suspicion by the British public as well …
Special Collections recently acquired five printing proofs of wood engravings from William Morris’ masterpiece, the 1896 Works of Chaucer. The illustrations were designed by Victorian artist Edward Burne-Jones, and then would have been transferred to blocks of wood by Robert Catterson-Smith and then engraved by William Harcourt Hopper. These proofs would have been created as …
May 31 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the foremost poets in American literature, Walt Whitman. To celebrate, Special Collections is exhibiting one of its most unique items from our Walt Whitman Collection: a suite of tempera paintings by Maynard Dixon, which were intended to illustrate a never-published edition of Whitman’s …
April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we’ve created a gallery of some rather gorgeous poetry books. The bookbindings shown here were all designed in the art nouveau style, and published between 1880 and 1910. Art nouveau features long, flowing lines, inspired by organic forms. It was popular in decorative arts of the late Victorian …
Special Collections has a large collection of the work of the Grabhorn Press, a San Francisco fine printing establishment founded in 1920 by brothers Edwin and Robert Grabhorn. The Grabhorn Collection is comprised of books, broadsides, and ephemeral pieces produced by the press over several decades, including this undated Christmas card sent by Edwin and …
Special Collections is celebrating the Christmas season with a new exhibit, “From Shrieks to Shenanigans: How to Celebrate a Truly Victorian Christmas.” The Victorians loved Christmas carols and tales of Father Christmas, but their festivities also included jokes, games, and ghost stories. The exhibit, which was curated by Dr. Leslee Thorne-Murphy’s English 236 students, showcases …