Alice in wonderland – News & Announcements

Nov 06 2015

News and Announcements from Special Collections 11/7/2015

Posted on November 6, 2015January 14, 2019 by Colleen Theisen

New Acquisitions

Lindset, John (ed.). Alice in a World of Wonderlands. Oak Knoll Press, 2015.

This superb three volume set arrived recently from Oak Knoll Press, which published it in cooperation with the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. The first volume includes Essays on Alice, the second includes Back-Translations, and the third includes a massive checklist.

Covers of Alice in Wonderland from around the world

Exhibitions

Micrographia: Book Art Responses to Early Modern Scientific Books

November 5-December 18th, Third Floor Main Library

Participating artists were invited to create an imaginative response ‘just beyond the edge of sight’ inspired by these enduring philosophical and scientific questions. Artists were assigned selected scientific books held in the John Martin Rare Book Room or Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries. On exhibit are the art works that were created alongside a selection of the scientific books used as inspiration.

Events

1. MICROGRAPHIA EXHIBITION RECEPTION:

Friday, 11/13/15 – 3:00-5:00 pm

Special Collections Reading Room, 3rd Floor, UI Main Library

All Are Welcome

2. Iowa Bibliophiles Speaker Greg Prickman, “Three Nuremberg Chronicles”

Greg Prickman, the Head of Special Collections will present a rare opportunity to view three complete copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle, printed in 1493, one from Special Collections, one from the John Martin Rare Book Room, and one from the private collection of Arthur Bonfield. He will describe the provenance of the three copies and discuss why the copy-specific features of each book are important to our understanding of the book trade.

Wednesday, November 11th, 2015
Light refreshments at 6:30PM, Talk begins at 7:00PM
Special Collections Reading Room
3rd Floor Main Library, 125 W Washington St.

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact the sponsoring department or contact person listed in advance of the event.

News and Announcements

Google Books

The University of Iowa Libraries has been participating in the Google Books project. In the past few weeks as part of this work about 1,400 Special Collections books have been pulled, barcoded, and sent off to be scanned. Many thanks to Paula Balkenede who made this possible!

From the Web and Social Media

1. NPR Feature

Evelyn Birkby was featured in an NPR segment last week.

Food Podcasts 1.0: These Radio Pioneers Had It Down 90 Years Ago

Birkby was a radio and newspaper columnist and her papers are held in the Iowa Women’s Archives.

2. Social Media Milestone

Special Collections’ new acquisition box opening videos that Margaret Gamm and Colleen Theisen have been creating have gathered over one million views in eleven months on the social media site Vine and through the views that they attract as those posts are shared to Tumblr. Please join us in recognizing their efforts to spread the word about the materials available in the UI Libraries.

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Oct 30 2015

News and Updates from Special Collections 10/30/2015

Posted on October 30, 2015January 14, 2019 by Colleen Theisen

Publications

For a sneak preview of the new issue of Dada/Surrealism, go to http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/vol20/iss1/. Several years in the making, Dada/Surrealism no. 20 is a special issue, “From Dada to Infra-noir: Dada, Surrealism, and Romania,” and is a collaboration between general editor Tim Shipe and Monique Yaari, professor of French at Penn State. This is a “soft launch”—the articles are being published incrementally, and we will announce the “official” publication when the remaining contents have been uploaded.

New Acquisitions

Goodacre, Selwyn. All the Snarks: The Illustrated Editions of the Hunting of the Snark. Inky Parrot Press, 2006.

The first page of this book quotes Lewis Carroll’s 1896 quote regarding the meaning behind The Hunting of the Snark: “I’m very much afraid I didn’t mean anything but nonsense.” The illustrations in this book are indicative of the sentiment, though they come together nicely here. A check list near the back of the book provides numbers of Snark editions in English, French, Swedish, and other languages.

Event Recap

We are thrilled to announce that the renovation of the gallery space, made possible by a generous grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust^*, is now complete. On Sunday, October 22nd there was a sneak peek of the new gallery space for our “Friends of the Libraries” group. On display were items from throughout the University of Iowa Libraries’ collections. The UI Libraries’ Exhibition Team is now preparing the first exhibition about James Van Allen and the newly digitized space data sound recording tapes. Look for the new exhibition and Grand Opening early in the spring semester.

* A previous version of this text erroneously identified the total budget for the renovation as being $500,000, whereas $500,000 was the total of the Roy J. Carver Grant

Classes

This week, Sue Hettmansperger from the School of Art and Art History took her painting class to Special Collections to see the work of Josef Albers, from the Bauhaus School in Germany and the Black Mountain College in the United States. Together, Hettmansperger, her students, and librarian Amy Chen explored the texts Interaction of Color and Formulation, Articulation. This class became extra fun when students compared and contrasted the original plates from the Interaction of Color with how the plates were depicted on the app for this title created by Yale (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/interaction-color-by-josef/id664296461?mt=8). This photo depicts students placing the two side-by-side. Amy downloaded this app to her personal iPad to allow students to try out different color theories digitally while also critically reflecting on the way in which archival holdings can be adapted/translated into new media.

From the Web & Social Media

An unsettling animation

Department Liaison Lindsay Moen found an appopriately unsettling 18th century reminder of mortality to feature for the Halloween season.

Dance of Death,or Todten-Tanz, wie derselbe in … Basel als ein Spiegel menschlicher Beschaffenheit künstlich gemahlet und zu sehen ist. Published in 1744, the Minns “Dance of Death” collection is set in the famous city of Basel.

To see a collection of images from this text and to see this optical illusion animated, head over to our Tumblr.

Important Dates

November 11th, Iowa Bibliophiles Meeting, 7PM

December 9th, Iowa Bibliophiles Meeting, 7PM

If you would like to receive a monthly email with a reminder about the Iowa Bibliophiles talk/event in Special Collections please send an email to be added to the list. colleen-theisen@uiowa.edu

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Oct 23 2015

News and Updates from Special Collections 10/23/2015

Posted on October 23, 2015January 14, 2019 by Colleen Theisen

Upcoming Events

Halloween Event in the Learning Commons

This Halloween, join Special Collections and University Archives as we create a pop-up museum featuring items by American writer and artist, Edward Gorey, along with some of our more literally gory books. You’ll even be able to take a bit of our collections with you, in button form! We’ll have the library’s button maker available for you to create a gory (or Gorey) button of your very own.

We’ll be in Group Area D from 3:00-6:30pm in the Learning Commons on Tuesday, October 27th so head on over and prepare for some Gor(e)y sights.

Staff Awards and Recognition

Janet Weaver Receives League of United Latin American Citizens Builder Award

Weaver, who works as the assistant curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives, has conducted hours of interviews and research to create the Latino historical archives and the Mujeres Latinas project at the university to ensure that the history of LULAC’s Eastern Iowa councils is not lost.

Event Recap

40th anniversary ICON Science Fiction Convention

Special Collections had a large presence at the 40th anniversary ICON Science Fiction Convention that took place last weekend in Cedar Rapids. ICON was founded forty years ago by students in Joe Haldeman’s science fiction class at the University of Iowa, and Rusty Hevelin was closely tied to this convention family. Librarians from Special Collections participated in four ways:

Official presentation of a check for $1,955 at the opening ceremonies. The community raised the money last year in an auction to support digitizing Rusty Hevelin’s fanzines.
Had a table in the dealer’s room to give updates about the Hevelin Collection fanzine digitization.
Appeared on many panels throughout the convention including an update about the digitization project, educational panels about science fiction topics, and they also hosted a panel about getting the most out of the library as a writer in partnership with librarian Lisa Martincek.
Participated in a collaborative fanzine making project throughout the weekend teaching how to use traditional technologies such as typewriters and ditto machines. This project had an unexpectedly huge response from the community with contributions from multiple generations of fans ranging from children to award winning authors. A full report of this project will follow in a later blog post.

Laura and Pete presenting at a panel — Laura Hampton and Pete Balestrieri presenting

Colleen and Pete at a table in the dealer's room — Pete Balestrieri and Colleen Theisen in the dealer's room

Multiple generations of fans typing on typewriters — Multiple generations of fans typing a zine (Center is Hugo Award Winning author Joe Haldeman)

Special Collections staff with an oversized check — Special Collections staff with the donation check

Special Collections is already looking forward to ICON 41 next year!

New Acquisitions

An Alice in Wonderland Acquisition for the 150th Anniversary of its publication

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Sesquicentennial Edition. Inky Parrot Press, 2015.

This sesquicentennial edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland hosts a variety of creepy yet intriguing illustrations, juxtaposing Japanese artistic interpretations of Alice with Welsh interpretations, English, Italian, South African, Russian, Indonesian, and more.

News and Announcements

“Alt-Ac” Newsletter

Amy Chen is working with a team at the Obermann Center to set up a newsletter on alt-ac careers that will go out a few times a semester. The newsletter will link to articles on the topic and it will also cover upcoming events, speakers, and contacts that would be of interest to alt-ac inclined graduate students. To make sure this newsletter is successful, she needs to locate the students who would be interested in receiving this information.

If you want to learn more about alt-ac careers, please complete this sign-up sheet: https://goo.gl/Wg5UkH.

Upcoming Campus Events of Interest

2015 Brownell Lecture on the History of the Book | Center for the Book

Mary E. Fissell on “Making Babies: A Look at an Early Sex Manual”

Thu, 11/05/2015 – 7:30pm, W151 Papajohn Business Building (PBB)

Aristotle’s Masterpiece was the bestselling book about making babies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean from the late 17th to the early 20th century—but the book isn’t by Aristotle, and it’s not usually considered a masterpiece…

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