In the RBC’s outstanding W. B. Yeats Collection—given by the Hanes Foundation as UNC-Chapel Hill’s five millionth volume—there are extensive materials relating to the Irish playwright J. M. Synge. Among these are first, early, and theater editions of the plays he wrote for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, including the controversial Playboy of the Western World.
That drama is about one Christy Mahon, a young man who flees home after killing his father with a loy (or shovel). He finds refuge in a Mayo village, where the locals laud him as a romantic hero for the story of his patricide—until his father shows up.
Yeats PR5532.P53 A3 1907 / J. M. Synge, “I Don’t Care a Rap,” from The Abbey Row (Dublin, 1907). Hanes Foundation.
The Yeats Collection is rich in ephemeral items related to The Playboy of the Western World and the riots it inspired. The Abbey Row is one example of a satirical account that features caricatures of Synge, Yeats, and others.
This coming Sunday, June 16th, at 2 p.m, Wilson Library’s own Emily Kader will be speaking about a comedic adaptation of Synge’s acclaimed work, Tennessee Playboy, at the Triad Stage in Greensboro, North Carolina. For more information on the performances, which begin tonight, June 14th, and Ms. Kader’s talk, see the Triad’s website.
Do introduce yourself to Emily if you’ve read this blog post and are at the event!
The Rare Book Collection was delighted to receive a visit this spring from Professor Anthony George Lo Ré, UNC alumnus and retired faculty member of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Professor Lo Ré received his doctorate from Chapel Hill in 1965 with a thesis entitled The Novel of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1960. To complete his dissertation, he corresponded with forty novelists and collected first and significant editions of their books. In 2004, he honored the University Library by donating his collection of over one hundred Spanish Civil War novels to the RBC.
The Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) began when armed Nationalists rose up against the Popular Front, a coalition of Liberals, Socialists, and Communists that was elected to govern the Second Republic of Spain. Hitler supported the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, and the Republicans turned to the Soviet Union for aid. Foreigners sympathetic to the Republicans fought in the International Brigades, a phenomenon famously fictionalized by Ernest Hemingway in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).
PQ6605 .A857 V4 1956
While many in the U.S. know Hemingway’s book, few know the dozens of Spanish-language novels that appeared during the war years. Publication also flourished a decade later, as Professor Lo Ré established in his thesis. One of the most popular of the second wave of novels was El Vengador [The Avenger] (1956), by José Luis Castillo Puche, a friend of Hemingway. Castillo Puche, according to the account he gave to Professor Lo Ré, had a complex personal history that intersected with different aspects of the conflict. He served in the Red Army, while his family was persecuted and almost exterminated; he experienced a religious crisis at the end of the war and entered a Roman Catholic seminary; and he subsequently abandoned his religious vocation to study journalism. Castillo Puche wrote El Vengador out of a need for inner peace, as he noted in his letter of July 27, 1960, which is printed in the appendix of Professor Lo Ré’s thesis. Castillo Puche’s Hicieron Partes (1958) had won Spain’s National Prize of Literature. However, the author judged El Vengador to be his novel that had had the most success—a novel about the futility and sterility of vengeance. The original edition’s existentialist cover art certainly resonates with that message.
When Professor Lo Ré acquired El Vengador over half a century ago, it was a recent publication. Today, it and the other novels he donated to RBC have the patina of the past. Thanks to Professor Lo Ré’s generosity, researchers now have the opportunity to consult these evocative volumes at Wilson and examine one of the twentieth century’s most polarizing world events through the literature it engendered.
James Malcolm Rymer, String of Pearls (London, 1850) / PR5285 R99 S8 1850 / William A. Whitaker Fund
In 1846, the prolific but now-obscure Victorian writer James Malcolm Rymer introduced the notorious Sweeney Todd in the String of Pearls, or, The Barber of Fleet Street: A Domestic Romance. The story of a London barber who kills and robs his clients, and whose accomplice turns their remains into meat pies, became an immediate bestseller. Originally published serially, it appeared in 1850 as an expanded one-volume edition, which is a book of excessive rarity today.
Rebecca Nesvet, UNC Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature, had been able to find only one institution holding that illustrated classic, the British Library in London. She became aware, however, of another copy for sale by an antiquarian book dealer and alerted the RBC. Thanks to Ms. Nesvet’s tip and the William A. Whitaker Fund, which provides generous amounts for the purchase of English literature at Chapel Hill, that fine copy of the String of Pearls now sits on a shelf at the Rare Book Collection, next to other rare Rymer novels: Grace Rivers; or, The Merchant’s Daughter (1844) and Paul Clifford; or Hurrah for the Road (1853).
As Rebecca Nesvet notes: “Like Sweeney Todd’s Fleet Street establishment, Rymer’s String of Pearls contains intriguing mysteries. Such as, how did Rymer come up with his outrageous premise?”
Rebecca with String of Pearls open to the portrait of Sweeney Todd
On Wednesday, March 6, 2013, Ms. Nesvet answered that question for a full house in the Friends of the Library room in Wilson. She made the new and novel argument that Rymer drew inspiration from a Royal Navy initiation or hazing ritual, the Line-Crossing Ceremony. “Performed at the Equator, Tropics, and Arctic Circle from at least the early nineteenth century through the late twentieth, the Line-Crossing Ceremony features a veteran sailor masquerading as Royal Barber to King Neptune, God of the Sea,” Ms. Nesvet informed the intimate gathering. “Neptune’s Barber shaves first-time crossers of the line, often barbarously.”
Ms. Nesvet, who is writing her dissertation “The Disappearing Explorer, 1818-1900,” directed by Prof. Jeanne Moskal, further elaborated on the ritual in history. “In 1832, as the HMS Beagle approached the Equator, Charles Darwin prepared himself to endure ‘razors sharpened with a file & a lather made of paint & tar, to be used by the gentlest valet de chambre’ during ‘the disagreeable operation of being shaved.’ A certificate awarded to twentieth-century line-crossers depicts Neptune’s Barber as an amphibious monster in a hat attended by a razor-bearing penguin. Close-reading the String of Pearls with attention to this context reveals that by reinventing the Royal Navy’s demon barber as a monstrous human, Rymer created an enduring legend.”
The Sweeney Todd legend was revived in 1979 for Broadway by Stephen Sondheim in his Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: A Musical Thriller. Ms. Nesvet quotes the following verse from it:
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd
His face was pale and his eye was odd
He shaved the faces of gentlemen
Who never thereafter were heard of again.
The RBC is grateful to Ms. Nesvet for reviving the legend for the UNC community in 2013, by her apt acquisition suggestion and an afternoon of sharing her research.
Spines of the first American encyclopedia, published by Thomas Dobson (1798) / AE5 .E342 1798 v.1-18 c.2
The month of February ended with an opening for the new RBC exhibition The Encyclopedic Impulse. Last Wednesday evening, over one hundred people attended a reception and viewing and a related lecture that followed.
This year marks the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of French philosopher Denis Diderot, co-editor and visionary of the French Encyclopédie. To commemorate the occasion, the RBC decided to display multiple volumes of that work, but as with any encyclopedic endeavor, the project expanded.
Louse seen through a microscope as rendered in a plate volume of the Encyclopédie (1768) / AE25 .E53 Plates v.6
The exhibition further illuminates the encyclopedia concept by including other encyclopedias and reference works, as well as significant writings on knowledge. Pliny the Elder, Francis Bacon, Athanasius Kircher, Abraham Ortelius, H. G. Wells, and Jorge Luis Borges are all invoked in the exploration of the human impulse to collect and organize knowledge in a single bibliographic entity.
Ladder of ascent and combinatory wheel in Llull, Libro del ascenso, y descenso del entendimiento (1753) / B765.L83 L57 1753
To celebrate the exhibition, Ken Hillis, professor of media and technology studies, delivered a lecture entitled “From Alexandria to Google: The Mythic Quest for Universal Libraries.” He organized his talk around four ideas/entities: the Tower of Babel; the Library at Alexandria; the art of knowing of medieval mystic Ramón Llull; and H. G. Wells’ conception of a “World Brain.” Co-author of the recent book Google and the Culture of Search (2012), Prof. Hillis ended with a discussion of Google and a reflection on the ways in which its knowledge project coincides with and differs from previous quests.
It was a thought-provoking talk, in sympathy with the Rare Book Collection exhibition, and one entirely appropriate to a university library. The show is up in Wilson Library’s Melba Remig Saltarelli exhibit room through May 26, 2013.
Peggy Myers, Director of Library Development; Florence Fearrington, UNC-Chapel Hill alumna; Sarah Michalak, Associate Provost and University Librarian
On January 9th, enthusiastic Chapel Hill alumni and friends met at the Grolier Club in New York City to enjoy the marvelous exhibition Rooms of Wonder: From Wunderkammer to Museum, 1599-1899. Curated by our gracious hostess for the evening, Florence Fearrington (UNC A.B. 1958), the show is a wondrous assemblage of books that document the cabinets of curiosities formed mainly by Europeans, as well as their descendant phenomena, which include the first natural history museums in Europe and the U.S.A.
Cuneiform tablets from the Rare Book Collection’s Cabinet of Curiosities
De rigueur for every cabinet of curiosities were a crocodile and a mummy, although cabinets might also include minerals and gems, shells, relics, tools, or other man-made objects. The UNC Rare Book Collection has a “Curiosities Cabinet,” which includes representative non-codex examples in the history of the book, such as these cuneiform tablets.
The show, which continues through February 2, has received much favorable notice in the book world and the press, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Young UNC alumni now resident in N.Y.C. enjoyed the exhibition immensely and bore witness to Chapel Hill’s bibliophilic spirit in their new hometown. It was a grand night, and we are grateful to alumna and collector Florence Fearrington for making it all possible.
Reproduction of Paris Codex in Rosny, Essai sur le déchiffrement de l’écriture hiératique de l’Amérique Centrale (1876) / Stuart F1435.3.W75 R67 1876
The end of the 13 Bak’tun, a period of 144,000 days in the Maya Long Count Calendar is a time for reflection. Listen in to Frank Stasio interviewing UNC Associate Professor Emilio del Valle Escalante and Curator of Rare Books Claudia Funke on the December 21st podcast from “The State of Things.”
Happy 13 Bak’tun!
Happy Holidays!
We’ll be writing again, in the new cycle of the 14th Bak’tun and the new year 2013.
13 Bak’tun cake of Maya chocolate by Jeremy Pinkham
December 21, 2012, is fast approaching. What better way to recognize the shortest day of the year—and the end of the current great cycle in the Maya Long Count Calendar—than to tune in at high noon (yes, 12 p.m.) to Frank Stasio’s radio program “The State of Things” on WUNC 91.5 FM?
Best wishes to all our followers for a festive holiday.
From Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of Birds: Illustrated with Two Hundred and Five Copper Plates, Curiously Engraven from the Life and Exactly Colour’d by the Author (London: 1738) / QL674 .A33 1738
Victor Montejo in North Carolina in the early 1980s. Courtesy Wallace Kaufman
Last night noted Maya scholar and writer Victor Montejo delivered the opening address of the “13 Bak’tun: New Maya Perspectives in 2012” symposium to a standing-room-only crowd in Wilson Library.
His reappearance in North Carolina, thirty years after his arrival here as an exile from Guatemala in 1982, was an emotional experience—and an apparent fulfillment of its own calendric cycle, in synchronicity with the 13 Bak’tun.
This was an exciting opportunity for the UNC community to hear from one of the most respected Maya activists writing today. His wide-ranging talk on Maya religion, self-determination, and cycles of time spoke to the renewal of Maya culture at this critical moment as the current Maya Long Count Calendar cycle comes to an end.
It was an honor and a privilege for UNC to host Prof. Montejo’s lecture, which was the perfect beginning to the symposium.
