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 Newsletter Spring 1997Edward Lear's Disciples Edward Lear's DisciplesLate one Sunday afternoon in January, the scholarly hush of Firestone Library was broken by the sound of laughter. It was coming from the Leonard L. Milberg '53 Gallery for the Graphic Arts, where winners of the limerick contest sponsored by the Friends of the Library were reading their work to an appreciative crowd attending the opening of the exhibition "Art and Nonsense: The Work and Play of Edward Lear (18121888)."The exhibition celebrates the gift to the Library of drawings, watercolors, and books from the limerick collection of Dr. Richard E. Buenger, Class of 1944. Dr. Buenger, a devotee of Lear's art and verse, served as one of the judges of the limerick contest. The other judges were Professor Val Fitch, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics; Professor Anthony Grafton, who teaches Princeton's courses in European Renaissance history; and Professor of Sociology Suzanne Keller, whose course on "Elites, Leadership, and Society" is a popular undergraduate offering. Most of the 105 contestants, who came from all over the country, submitted more than one limerick. The judges, of course, had no idea who they were: each entry was assigned a number. Frank E. Taplin, Jr., who won third prize, was known only as "No. 169," and noted on his entry that "Edward Lear was one of the first Europeans (1858) to explore the ancient town of Petra in southern Jordan, but (so far as we know) never wrote a limerick about that occasion." Mr. Taplin has supplied the missing verse: Leering at Lear There was an old poet from Petra Second prize went to Mary Ann Jensen (No. 197), curator of the William Seymour Theatre Collection, who says that the Nishnabotna is the real name of a real river near Council Bluffs, Iowa: By the shores of the West Nishnabotna, Anthropologist Ashley Montagu (No. 111), author of The Natural Superiority of Women and The Prevalence of Nonsense, won first prize for a limerick which, he cautions, must be read with "BBC pronunciation": Idealism A philosopher, one Bishop Berkeley, Once the laughter died down, the crowd began to appreciate the lesser-known talent of Edward Lear: Curator Dale Roylance included in the exhibition examples of the remarkably beautiful landscape watercolors and natural-history drawings of a man who has given generations of his followers so many occasions for merriment.
Miss Mitford is best known for her novels, including Love in a Cold Climate, though she is also the author of historical biographies and the editor of two volumes of her family's papers, The Ladies of Alderley and The Stanleys of Alderley. The Viscountess Eccles has given the collection of Mitford letters and notes to the Library in honor of Richard M. Ludwig, Professor of English, Emeritus, and for many years Associate University Librarian for Rare Books and Special Collections and editor of the Princeton University Library Chronicle. Professor Ludwig was also honored by the Viscountess' gift of the Raymond Mortimer Collection some years ago.
Among recent visitors to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections were Tibetan monks from the Sera Je monastery in exile in South India. They were on a tour of Europe and the United States to introduce Tibetan Buddhism to a wider public and to raise funds for the support of their community. They visited the Library after spending the day in the old Chancellor Green Library creating a puja, a sand mandala designed to obliterate mistakes made during meditations on Hayagriga, one of the demonic forms of a Buddhist adept. Being scholarly by nature and training, the monks delighted in this break from their public performances. They were surprised to find examples of their religious texts at Princeton. They not only examined them; they rearranged ancient texts that had been scrambled in the palm leaf books in which they are found, and suggested corrections to the cataloging. They also sent up rousing chants as they read aloud the various texts in unison. Victor Montejo, a Maya from the Guatemalan highlands, was the guest of the Department of Anthropology. He is shown here with that department's chair, Professor Kay Warren, working with some of the more than 200 post-contact manuscripts in the Maya languages (written in the Latin alphabet) in the Garrett Collection. Montejo, a speaker of Jakaltek Maya and a political exile, is a professor of anthropology at the University of Montana. He is author of an eyewitness account of the massacre of his entire Maya village, and of admired volumes of poetry and Maya fables.
Among the hundreds of researchers who will visit the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections this academic year are six who were awarded Short-Term Visiting Fellowships funded by the Friends of the Princeton University Library. Each fellow is given a stipend of $1,500 to support travel, living, and research expenses while working in Princeton. Proposed to the Friends' Council in 1993 by Scheide Librarian William P. Stoneman, the fellowships are intended to increase awareness of the resources of the Library and promote their use by scholars from other institutions in the United States and abroad. The academic papers and published articles that result from their work serve to publicize the Library's holdings and to foster additional gifts of books and manuscripts. Since its inception in 19941995, the fellowship program has been a resounding success. Last year alone, it attracted more than 200 letters of inquiry and 121 applications, up from 62 in the program's first year. Mere numbers do not tell the whole story; more important is the quality of the projects proposed by the applicants. The fellowship committee, composed of representatives of the faculty, the Department, and the Council of the Friends, has the difficult task of selecting only six fellows from among the many highly qualified candidates. Still, according to University Archivist Ben Primer, chairman of the committee, the process of selecting the 19961997 fellows went smoothly because "the committee achieved a great deal of consensus on who the top candidates were." The winners' projects make use of strong collections in the Library: Christine Alexander, Associate Professor of English at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has been using material in the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists and the Robert H. Taylor Collection for her studies of the Brontës. Julia Ehrhardt, a graduate student in the Department of American Studies at Yale, is working on "Women, Regionalism, and the Profession of Authorship in America, 18901950," an investigation into the literary careers of six women writers, including Caroline Gordon, whose papers are at Princeton. Xiaoyuan Liu, Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York College at Potsdam, entitles his project "Reins of Liberation: The Cold War, the Chinese Civil War, and the Ethnopolitical Struggle in China's Borderlands, 19451950." Central to Liu's research is the collection of books, serials, and published archival materials in the Gest Oriental Library. Patricia Travis, a graduate student in the Department of American Studies at Yale, is exploring the role played by the Council on Books in Wartime in shaping mainstream publishing and reading patterns in the postwar era. Of particular interest to her is the explicit merger of the ideals of commerce and culture within a distinctive liberal politics. She has been using the Council's archives, which are housed at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. Edward Wakeling, School Inspector and Mathematics Advisor for the Bedfordshire County Educational Service in England, consulted the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists for his work on Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Wakeling is editing Carroll's diaries and working on an index to his photographs. He also directed special attention to Dodgson's mathematical papers in the Parrish Collection. Victoria Baker Woeste, a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, will focus on "the participation of a specific group of Jewish lawyers, bankers, and professionals in the development of agri cultural policy between 1918 and 1945." Bernard Baruch was a leading figure in this development, and Woeste plans to use his papers at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library.
During the course of his professional life Mr. Wainwright has served as curator of the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists and as Assistant Chief of Rare Books and Special Collections. He was editor of the Princeton University Library Chronicle from 1949 to 1962; recently, each year's "New and Notable" list has carried notice of generous gifts to the Library from his private collection. Mr. Wainwright is not entirely retired, however; he is still active as curator of the Parrish Collection, and is working on an illustrated bibliography of the collection. Project archivists working in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library have rehoused and described two important twentieth-century collections. Susan J. Illis has completed work on the Adlai E. Stevenson, Class of 1922, Papers. The nearly 900-linear-foot collection is one of the largest at Mudd Library. The collection documents Stevenson's early life, his service in the New Deal, his advisory role at the organizing conference of the United Nations in San Francisco, his two presidential campaigns, and his tenure as Ambassador to the United Nations. Family and friends of Stevenson provided the funds for this project. The records of the Association on American Indian Affairs document the group's efforts to maintain Native Americans' identity and culture. After receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library hired John S. Weeren to sort through the 570-linear-foot collection. Weeren had previously worked at Mudd Library; during the 19941995 academic year he processed the David A. Morse Papers. Midwinter gatherings on three Sunday afternoons: 23 February, 4 March, and 11 March 1997. John A. Pinto, Professor of the History of Architecture, William L. Howarth, Professor of English, and Beth Brombert, author of the biography of Edouard Manet, will lead the conversations. To reserve a place, telephone Jane Snedeker at (609) 258-5049. Exhibitions "Money: Whence it Came Where it's Going." The exhibition will remain on view through Sunday, 20 April 1997. Main Exhibition Gallery, Firestone Library. "Art and Nonsense: The Work and Play of Edward Lear (18121888)." The exhibition will remain on view through Sunday, 20 April 1997. The Leonard L. Milberg Gallery for the Graphic Arts. "The Art of Chess: The Chess Collections of Eugene B. Cook and William Spackman." Opening reception, Sunday, 4 May 1997, 56:30 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through Sunday, 21 September 1997. Main Exhibition Gallery, Firestone Library. Main Exhibition Gallery Hours: Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, Noon until 5 p.m. "The Princeton Cannon Song-March: The Classes of 1937, 1947, 1957, 1972, and 1977." The exhibition will open on 15 February 1997 and will remain on view through 30 June 1997. The Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. "A Voice in the Wilderness: Selections from the Archives of the Association on American Indian Affairs." The exhibition will open on 15 July 1997 and will remain on view through 1 February 1998. The Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. Mudd Library Gallery Hours: Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Events Literary Luncheon. Professor Robert Fagles will talk about his highly acclaimed translation of Homer's Odyssey at the Friends' annual fundraising event. Saturday, 15 February 1997, 12 noon, at Prospect House. "The Art and Science of Chess." A lecture by U.S. Postal Chess Champion Jon R. Edwards, Class of 1975, to open the exhibition "The Art of Chess: The Chess Collections of Eugene B. Cook and William Spackman." Sunday, 4 May 1997, 4:00 p.m., 101 McCormick Hall. Friends' Dinner and Annual Meeting. Sunday, 4 May 1997, 79 p.m., at Prospect House.
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