December’s Item of the Month looks at the origins of the teddy bear. Printed copies are available in Special Collections and at the Main Library’s north circulation desk. A pdf download is available below, and high-resolution versions of the images used this month are accessible through the Iowa Digital Library.
Download PDF of Item of the Month, December 2007
November’s Item of the Month features one of our many books detailing 19th century expeditions to discover the Northwest Passage through the arctic. A pdf version can be downloaded here, and printed copies are available in Special Collections and at the north circulation desk of the Main Library.
Download PDF copy of Item of the Month, November 2007
Another donation to our growing science fiction collections has arrived in the form of dozens of programs and status reports from science fiction conventions, including several World Cons. The programs were collected by Ron Taylor, and focus primarily on conventions from the 1980s and 1990s. They add still more depth to the convention materials already present in the Horvat collection.
This month’s item is a scrapbook assembled by William H. Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century containing many pieces related to his forgery of Shakespeare’s writing. Ireland managed to fool much of London’s literary elite with his hoax, which is documented in an extensive collection held by Special Collections. To find out more, download the PDF at the link below, or pick up a printed copy of the brochure in Special Collections, at the North circulation desk of the Main Library, or at Prairie Lights Bookstore in downtown Iowa City.
Download Item of the Month, October 2007 - William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare Forgery Scrapbook
A new exhibition in the third floor display cases outside Special Collections looks at changes in fashion illustration and printing technology. The Color of Fashion: Advances in Printing and Fashion Plates, 1770s-1930s will be on display throughout the fall semester.
An excerpt from the introduction to the exhibition:
For more than 200 years, fashion has been “plated” in books and magazines with illustrations that trace styles, trends, and fads in costume. Hence the “fashion plate” – a person who tries to measure up to the illustrations of the day.
Changes in fashion often reflect and react directly to changes occurring in society. The way they have been portrayed in print has also responded to changes in printing technology: fashion “plating” has always been on the leading edge of graphic design and press development and has helped drive innovation in color printing.
This post introduces a new feature here in Special Collections, a monthly look at an item in our collections. This month we feature a concept painting created in 1964 to visualize a scene from the film The Great Race. The movie, by the creator of the Pink Panther franchise, Blake Edwards, was released in 1965.
Item of the Month features will be posted here as a downloadable pdf file. Printed copies of the brochure are also available in Special Collections as well as the first floor of the Library.
Download Item of the Month, September 2007 - Concept Paintings from The Great Race
Special Collections has just received a nice collection of Star Trek fanzines, which complement the Star Trek materials already in the M. Horvat Science Fiction Fanzine collection. Included in this donation are copies of some of the more prominent Trek titles, such as Spockanalia, Masiform-D and T-Negative. There is good coverage of fan activities throughout much of Trek’s history, from the original series in the late 1960s through the revival of the concept in the late 1980s with Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This collection of Star Trek fanzines was originally assembled by an Australian fan, but we have another source to thank for their donation to the UI Libraries - the Save Farscape team. Farscape was a ground-breaking science fiction television series that ran for four seasons on the SciFi network before it was cancelled in 2003. Like the early Star Trek fans who mobilized to save the show, Farscape fans came together to lobby for the future of the series, often in creative ways. The effort was successful enough to convince network executives to finance a mini-series to wrap-up loose ends in the plot, and this past month it was announced that Farscape will return as a series of online “webisodes.” In addition to the Star Trek fanzines that came her way during the campaign, one of the organizers has also donated some material from the Save Farscape effort. The grassroots campaign organized a variety of fundraisers, including a cookbook with recipies contributed by fans entitled Foodscape. The cookbook mixes earth-bound cooking with recipies for delicacies referenced in the series, resulting in an intriguing document of fan culture and the creativity science fiction ideas can generate. Also included in the donation are promotional items and copies of scripts, most signed by one of the show’s producers and writers, Ricky Manning. Efforts to sustain or revive a series are increasingly one of the staples of media science fiction fandom, and the materials from the Save Farscape campaign provide a glimpse into how one such organization pursued its goal.
An audio recording of a speech given by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., has been donated to the University Libraries, further documenting the civil rights leader’s 1959 visit to the UI campus.
The speech, entitled “The Future of Race Relations,” was presented by Dr. King at the Iowa Memorial Union on November 11, 1959. The 42-minute recording includes an introduction by Prof. Robert Michaelson of the UI School of Religion. King’s appearance was co-sponsored by the School and by the University Lectures Committee.
Charles Silliman, a Coralville resident, donated the recording to the University Archives earlier this year. Silliman had purchased it from the University’s audiovisual service, which recorded the speech, less than a week after the event. A circulating copy on CD will be available in Media Services, and a digital copy has also been preserved, with the original tape, in the University Archives.
The image at left of King on campus is taken from the 1960 Hawkeye yearbook.
The exhibition From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book is now open at the University of Iowa Musem of Art. The exhibition is a collaboration of UI Libraries Special Collections, the Hardin Library’s Martin Rare Book Room and the UIMA. It was organized by David Schoonover and Greg Prickman of Special Collections & University Archives, and Kathleen Kamerick of the UI Department of History.The exhibition of more than 50 objects explores the transition from a time when books were hand copied by a select group of literate and often religious scribes to the era of mass-produced books created by master printers using the latest 15th-century technology — the hand-operated wooden printing press.
Among the books and manuscripts on display are beautiful illuminated manuscripts and many examples of incunabula (books printed before 1500). Together, these books illustrate a pivotal moment in history and demonstrate the relevance of historical materials to modern times.
Individual objects in the exhibition include a 15th-century “Book of Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” a homily of Pope Gregory the Great from around 1450 and two copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
In addition, the Museum will host an extensive series of gallery talks featuring UI faculty and staff. All talks begin at 7:30 pm in the UIMA Carver Gallery. The schedule is as follows:
June 28: Kathleen C. Kamerick - Changing the Hours: Praying in Manuscript & Print
July 26: Gary Frost - Medieval Bookbinding
August 2: Raymond A. Mentzer - Medieval Religious Texts
August 9: Edwin A. Holtum - Breaking With Galen: Anatomy and Medicine in the Early Days of Printing
August 16: Cheryl D. Jacobsen - They Did That All by Hand? The Dedicated Task of the Medieval Scribe
August 23: Timothy D. Barrett - On the Invention of Imitation Parchment: Papermaking in Europe 1300-1500
August 30: Sara T. Sauers - Early Modern Typography
September 6: Elizabeth Aubrey - From Singer’s Lips to Scribe’s Pen: Music in Medieval Manuscripts
September 13: Denise Filios - Constructing Power: Illuminated Manuscripts in Medieval and Golden Age Spain
September 20: Jonathan Wilcox - Questions of Authenticity: Medieval Charters, Medieval Manuscripts, and Modern Facsimiles
September 27: Glenn Ehrstine - Medieval Studies at Iowa, the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), and the Business of Early Books
October 4: Matthew P. Brown - The Persistence of the Medieval in Early American Book Culture
The exhibition is open to the public free of charge. The UI Museum of Art, located on North Riverside Drive in Iowa City, is open noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, and noon to 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Admission is free. Public metered parking is available in UI parking lots west and north of the museum.
What can you learn from a theatre program? Of course we can learn the name of the production and the people who are in it. But that’s just the beginning of what you can learn from these colorful and enchanting bits of ephemeral art. Local history, theatre layout, design, following the careers of certain persons, and changes in fashion and advertising through the decades are just some of the research possibilities arising from these collections, which are highlighted in a new exhibition in Special Collections & University Archives.
The exhibit will be on display through September, offering visitors a glimpse of this unique form of cultural ephemera. Did you know that you could eat oysters and ice cream in the same establishment after the show? That one could obtain telephone service for $1 a month? That Oscar Wilde appeared at the Iowa City Opera House? And from announcements printed in the eighteen-nineties by the newspaper printers to the colorful artworks of the teens; from the swirling forms of Art Nouveau in the nineteen-twenties to the streamlined angularity of Art Deco in the early nineteen thirties, these programs record changes in art, architecture, and design.
