Author/Alum Greg Bear to Speak Tomorrow at the Library

Literati: The Library is proud to present a lecture by award-winning science fiction author and alumnus Greg Bear on Wednesday, November 18th at 2pm in LL430. As part of the Library's ongoing celebration of Darwin anniversaries, Bear will give a lecture entitled, "What Would Darwin Do? Fundamentalism in Science and Religion versus the Search for Scientific Truth."

Bear is a 1973 graduate of SDSU's English Department and the author of more than 30 science fiction and fantasy novels. He is the winner of two Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards. His highly-acclaimed books Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children deal with accelerated evolution and its consequences. Bear has been widely praised for his adherence to scientific fact in his crafting of science fiction. Special Collections already holds a collection of Bear's manuscripts and papers, as well as first editions of all Bear's books in the Elizabeth Chater Science Fiction Collection. Please join us for an exciting talk! The lecture is free and open to the public.

"Edwardian" Intrigues

Literary friends, what better time than All Hallow's Eve to show you our haunted and handsome, our merry and macabre, our delightful and dark Edward Gorey Collection? Special Collections has first editions, limited editions, original drawings, manuscripts, correspondence, proofs, realia, toy books, and prints (like this aquatint called Bat in Rain) in our wonderful Gorey Collection. The collection is particularly strong in Gorey's work in children's literature, and includes items which document his collaboration with our own Peter Neumeyer. Special Collections has also very recently acquired the papers of children's author Florence Parry Heide, which show her collaboration with Gorey on the Treehorn series, as well as Gorey's entire personal library of approximately 25,000 volumes. Many items in the Gorey Collection have been donated to the institution by SDSU alum and benefactor Andreas Brown, who was also Gorey's dear friend, publisher, and promoter throughout his career. Stop by Special Collections soon for a ghoulish Gorey treat!


(Original pen-and-ink drawing of a set design for Dracula, a production which Gorey worked on in 1977 and later issued as a toy theatre.)

From the Depths of the Library Vaults....

...Well, not really, but I've got to set a tone here! October greetings, literature lovers, this is your special collections librarian Anne over in the library. To get everyone in the mood for Hallowe'en, I'll be sharing a few of our more ghoulish and garish holdings with you--and where better to start than this lovely Gothic romance by Mrs. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Abounding in all the necessary symbolic mechanisms and psychological elements of the perfect Gothic tale (drafty castles, old manuscripts, explorations of the sublime, decaying vaults, encounters with the uncanny, fainting, the terror of the other, and all that), The Mysteries of Udolpho was cited by Jane Austen in her parody of the genre, Northanger Abbey, in a list of many sensational tales recommended to the eager young heroine Catherine. Our Special Collections copy is particularly interesting because it bears the contemporary ownership signature of a Miss Juliet Georgiana Elliott--one wonders whether Miss Elliott was one of the very avid sighing readers of the genre that Austen intended to parody.

If you're writing or studying or teaching about Gothic fiction, Special Collections has several other editions of early Gothic novels, along with plenty of contemporary sources to contextualize the cultural scene of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries: tour guides for ruined castles across Europe, criticisms of certain fashions in fiction, musings on the sublime and natural beauty, evidence of religious tensions, and much much more. And don't get us started on all the cool stuff we've got for researching the later Victorian Gothic! Stop by the department to see anytime. Up next--Gorey? Poe? Spiritualist writers? Creepy Victorian photographs? We shall see.....

Before Vermicious Knids, There Were Gremlins

Happy September, English Department, from Anne in Special Collections. This weekend marked the birthday of children's author Roald Dahl, known for his beloved classics such as James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. One of Dahl's very first stories for children, called The Gremlins, was published in 1943 at the height of World War II. As a Royal Air Force pilot, Dahl became familiar with a superstition among air force men about the nasty little creatures who tinker with plane machinery to sabotage and cause all sorts of annoying mishaps. After being injured on duty and sent to Washington, D. C. as an air attaché, Dahl began writing the story and sent it to Walt Disney. And though he published as a book and made into several cartoons, Disney never made The Gremlins into the feature-length film he had originally wanted, supposedly because he decided there were too many "war films" being produced. Disney and Dahl parted ways (editorial: thank goodness!) after this effort, and The Gremlins was lost to history.

Special Collections just received a really brilliant copy of the rare first edition (published in an edition of only 5,000) from generous donor Carolyn Connor. The book would be at research home in a cultural study of later mythical figures in children's literature, or in textual/illustrative depictions of war for children, or...the list can go on and on! Stop by Special Collections to check out this gem and to see how it might contribute to your research. Tidbit: Dark Horse Comics reissued the original and did a strange tribute to this partnership in 2006.

Finally--Comics!

Hola, English Department, Anne from Special Collections here for another installment of "cool stuff in Special Collections to use in research and teaching." The Comics Collection in Special Collections is a little different from other libraries' comics collections. Though there is an emphasis on self-published and small press titles in our modest collection, there isn't really any specific focus topic or type. There's a comics something for everyone--fantasy, manga, horror, humor, romance, adventure, superhero, DIY, feminist, "grand space opera" comics, comics on phonics (yes phonics), fairy tale comics, erotica comics, robot comics, terrible mid-1990s educational comics, Japanese comics, Canadian comics, Mexican comics--you get the picture. More generally, the Comics Collection fits under our broad collecting area of "literature intersecting with art." Besides comics, this includes our delightful Edward Gorey Collection, our sexy Donna Barr Collection, and the gorgeous Janus Press Collection, just to name a few. And though we haven't been able to attend Comic-con for the past couple of years and are not currently building the collection actively, we have been able to make a couple of recent acquisitions in this area--a full run of Spiegelman's Raw, for instance.

So if questions of visual literature, reading strategy, or linearity are nagging at you, come peruse the Comics Collection for some answers! Stop by during our open hours* to check out these fantastic resources.

*The Dreaded Furloughs (if not a comics title, at least a bad band name?) will be affecting the department's (and the library's) service schedule--but alas, we don't yet know what exactly that means. As soon as we DO know anything, it'll be posted on our website, k?

Image from The Perils of Mr. Comics, written by Liz Schiller and drawn by Donna Barr at the "San Diego Comic-Con Street Theatre," 1995.

Humorous Bits (or, Not The Comics Collection, Again)

Happy Fourth of July (almost) to all, from Librarianne in Special Collections. Independence Day makes me think of patriotism, and patriotism, for some reason, makes me think of Mark Twain. Special Collections will soon receive an outstanding small collection of rare Twain items from a generous donor, but until then, we turn to Twainish items already in the collections...

A noted rival of Mark Twain's, Bill Nye was a lecturer, essayist, and humorist from Wyoming, who wrote satire and humor pieces for the newspaper The Boomerang. Though his works are of course not as well known now as Twain's, they still provide a wonderful glimpse into popular topics of American humor and the comic style of the times. Baled Hay: A Drier Book Than Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is a compilation of Nye's comic vignettes, stories, jokes, and poems, meant at least in its title to mimic Whitman. Piece titles include "Genius and Whiskey," "Let Bald-Headed Men Rejoice," "Regarding the Nose," and the intriguingly named "The Maroon Sausage." The copy of Baled Hay located in Special Collections is extra-special, because it bears its original 1884 (!) dustjacket, an exceptionally early one. Usually, when dustjackets of this time survive at all, they are seen without illustration and with only the title and name of the author printed briefly on the front. This one, as you can seen, is a very lively example of an emerging art. Stop by Special Collections to check it out!

See Your Words in Special Collections

Hello again to all of you in Literature Land from Anne in Library Land! In response to an energetic request to "do comics soon!" I reply that I shall, soon--but until then, as a teaser, here's a neat little item from our children's literature collections. A New Hieroglyphical Bible, for the Amusement and Instruction of Children was published in New York in 1815. In this palm-sized gem, the author selected the most memorable and memorizable Bible verses for little minds, and substituted some words with pictures meant to represent the word itself. A significant break from the rote memorization methods common to the time, these "hieroglyphs" were intended to "make the lesson delightful as well as profitable to the juvenile mind" and to teach reading skills while improving recall of religious lessons. The book is unusual not only for its inventive approach to literacy, but also for the fine quality of the wood engravings themselves. Pictures appearing in children's books of the early nineteenth century, when they appeared at all, were usually very crude cuts, worn from frequent reuse in multiple titles. These are striking in their detail, and must have been great fun to see for new little learners.

Though of course these emblematic verses might not count as "comics" as we define them today, they do represent a fascinating shift in American visual culture and help set the stage for the more expansive blending of word and image that would develop continuously throughout the century and end up later with early comics like The Yellow Kid and Little Nemo. This is a great primary source for anyone studying reading in America, religion and literature, or general visual culture. (Also, there's neat pictures of dragons and unicorns, yes, unicorns!)

To see our copy, stop by Special Collections! For more about hieroglyphical Bibles, see David Morgan's awesome Protestants and Pictures published by Oxford UP, 1999.

San Diego's Very Own Little Magazine

Greetings, lovers of all things literary! I am Anne Bahde, Special Collections and University Archives Librarian over at the Library, and I'm honored to be guest-blogging here from time to time (thanks Bill!), and sharing some of the awesome primary sources in our collections with you.

First up: Troubadour: A Magazine of Verse, was published in San Diego between 1928 and 1932, and was one of hundreds of "little magazines" published all over the country in the early part of the twentieth century. The little magazine rose to popularity after Harriet Monroe began Poetry in Chicago in 1912, and this format became an essential tool for the dissemination of modernist works of literature and art during this time. Little magazines emphasized the experimental and the daring in poetry and art, and exposed little-known authors and ideas to new audiences. In many ways, the little magazine can almost be seen as a precursor to the modern zine, in that they were often produced by younger editors, generally had small print runs, and blended art with word in new and appealing ways.

Not many of the contributors’ names to Troubadour have withstood the test of time, though there are some surprises. Ansel Adams contributed three poems to the May 1929 issue featuring California poets, identifying himself there as a “photographer, poet, and mountaineer,” and Booth Tarkington guest-edited the issue devoted to Indiana poetry. Troubadour often features lovely Art Deco covers like these, though sadly the artist is not always noted within. Special Collections has most issues of Troubadour and is seeking more—stop by the Special Collections Reading Room to sample some of San Diego’s literary heritage!