Spring 2016 No. 6

Spring 2016, Issue 6

A forgotten chapter in the career of Ben Hecht returns to where it began— the stage.

Creative Engagement with the Humanities The breadth and the depth of the Newberry’s collection support a variety of research projects, for a variety of users. Our reading rooms accommodate not only academic scholars conducting inquiries into their fields of study, but also genealogists pursuing the trail of an ancestor with the aid of our local history resources; graphic designers gleaning inspiration from the Wing Collection on the history of printing and the book arts; and writers seeking new stories in the personal papers of midwestern journalists, poets, and novelists.

A recent addition to the ranks of this last category of Newberry reader, as you’ll discover in our lead story, is Chicago playwright James Sherman. Using research findings from the Ben Hecht Papers, Sherman has written (and will star in) a one-man show revisiting a mostly forgotten chapter in Hecht’s career: his sustained efforts, during World War II, to raise public awareness of the horror—and the extent—of Hitler’s “Final Solution” in Europe. In better acquainting audiences with an important writer and transporting them to a time before history had rendered judgment of the Holocaust, Sherman’s play illustrates how creative professionals can pursue humanities research whose fruits meaningfully engage the public.

Elsewhere in this issue of The Newberry Magazine, you will read about two major Newberry digital projects. The first has crafted a set of online tools that extend into the digital realm the classroom instruction in vernacular paleography provided for years by our Center for Renaissance Studies. The second offers an extensive collection of images and accompanying essays critically examining both the successes and the limitations of Daniel Burnham’s landmark Plan of Chicago.

Speaking of landmarks, 2016 commemorates the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, an occasion that has inspired celebratory events across the globe, but perhaps no more so anywhere outside England than here in our own city, where the Shakespeare 400 Chicago festival encompasses an array of performances, lectures, competitions, and other programming throughout the year. The Newberry’s most notable contribution will be Creating Shakespeare, an exhibition exploring the playwright’s life and afterlife as literary icon and cultural phenomenon. In these pages, curator Jill Gage reveals the method (as well as, to complete the Hamlet allusion, the madness) behind the process of culling an exhibition from the nearly 20,000 Shakespeare-related items in the Newberry’s collection.

This spring is also a time to celebrate the illustrious Newberry career of Paul F. Gehl, who retires after 35 years with the library, including 29 as Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing. In this role, Paul has deepened and expanded the scope of one of the premier collections relating to the history of printing and the book arts.

While curating the collection, he has also introduced countless scholars, designers, calligraphers, illustrators, and bookbinders to its treasures. We wish Paul well in retirement, which will be spent in part in the Newberry’s reading rooms as he continues to produce original scholarly work of his own.

I hope you will enjoy learning about a few of the latest developments here at the Newberry, and I thank you for your support, without which these developments would not be possible.

David Spadafora, President and Librarian

MAGAZINE STAFF EDITOR Alex Teller DESIGNER Andrea Villasenor PHOTOGRAPHER Catherine Gass The Newberry Magazine is published semiannually by the Newberry’s Office of Communications and Marketing. Articles in the magazine address major archiving projects, digital initiatives, and exhibitions; the scholarship of fellows and Newberry staff; and the signature items and hidden gems of the collection. Every other issue contains the annual report for the most recently concluded fiscal year. A subscription to The Newberry Magazine is a benefit of membership in the Newberry Associates. To become a member, contact Alexandra Katich at katicha@newberry.org.

Unless otherwise credited, all images are derived from items in the Newberry collection or from events held at the Newberry, and have been provided by the Newberry’s Digital Imaging Services Office.

Cover image: Photograph of Ben Hecht peering into a camera, ca.

1930s [?]. From the Ben Hecht Papers at the Newberry Library.

/newberrylibrary

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Contents FEATURES

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One-Man Show

By Alex Teller Chicago playwright James Sherman brings a forgotten chapter in Ben Hecht’s prolific career, his anti-Nazi activism, to the stage.

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Best Laid Plans

By Alex Teller A new Newberry digital resource explores Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago as a product of both American urban planning and visual culture.

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The Writing’s on the Web 12

By Karen Christianson French Renaissance Paleography, a collaborative digital project led by the Newberry’s Center for Renaissance Studies, guides users through the process of reading and understanding old manuscripts.

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The Right Type 16

By Andrea Villaseñor Paul F. Gehl retires from the Newberry after 29 years as Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing.

Curating Creating Shakespeare 20

By Jill Gage The Newberry will celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with an exhibition examining his life and afterlife.

DEPARTMENTS

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Dear Walter

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DONOR CORNER: Christopher McKee

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RETROSPECT: The 2016 Newberry Library Award Dinner

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RETROSPECT: Recent Events

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IN MEMORIAM: Paul T. Ruxin

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PROSPECT: Upcoming Events

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The Newberry Magazine

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Dear Walter

Walter L. Newberry exploits a rift in the space-time continuum to respond to friends of the library.

Follow the blog at www.newberry.org/dear-walter; submit a query to dearwalter@newberry.org.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

The presidential contenders seem to be making some especially crude personal attacks against one another this year. Can you provide a little historical perspective?

— Sonya Willoughby, Portage, IN

I consider it both an act of Sagacity and a performance of Civic Duty to deduce the following truth from the Election Season which we are presently in the midst of: The imprecations which our candidates for public office hurl at one another, devolve in inverse proportion to the stature of the Office in question. In other words, the more dignified the position, the more retrograde the Discourse of those in competition to accede to it. Allowing that there is no more exalted post in the Public Life of our Country than the Presidency of the United States, it follows that there is none other whose vacancy provokes the same level of vitriolic barbing, jockeying—CAMPAIGNING. As the most recent jeremiads of our Presidential Hopefuls leaden your very soul, it may come as small consolation (though consolation nonetheless) to learn that the Annals of American Politics are replete with political office-seekers affixing mean-spirited epithets to their opponents in a cyclical tango of recrimination. Human beings tend to regard their

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travails—as much as their triumphs—as having no precedent; what folly this is. The novelty of today’s Epithets derives from the manner—rather than the mere fact—of their expression.

Name-calling for Political Gain extends far into America’s past.

For an example, allow me to adduce the 1840 presidential election, wherein decorated military hero William Henry Harrison encountered the Incumbent, President Martin Van Buren. Partisan newspapers, on either side, proliferated (lest you believe the press, by necessity, must pursue its civic function in Absolute Objectivity).

One such paper, The Old Soldier, began its first issue with a defense of its candidate, in a section titled “Gen. Harrison and His Calumniators.” A rival Publication had assailed Harrison as an “old woman,” “the petticoat candidate,” and “the granny of Ohio.” The editors of The Old Soldier, having forewarned their readers of the mortifying slurs awaiting them down the page, further allayed their Editorial Consciences by asserting an obligation to reprint the nefarious ramblings of Harrison’s detractors in order to properly begin the process of Refutation and Character Rehabilitation.

In spite of the rhetorical attacks he suffered (or, perhaps, because of them), Harrison prevailed in the election against Van Buren, who had his own share of Calumniators: they called him “VAN RUIN,” for the damage they believed he had wrought upon the American economy.

One-Man

SHOW

By Alex Teller

Ben Hecht wrote screenplays for some of the most famous American movies ever made, but he also used his pen to denounce the Nazi persecution of European Jews—at a time before Hitler and his “Final Solution” were widely understood, much less universally condemned. With research using the Newberry’s Ben Hecht Papers, Chicago playwright James Sherman brings this forgotten chapter in Hecht’s career to the stage.

The Newberry Magazine

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Chicago playwright James Sherman wrote—and stars in—The Ben Hecht Show, a one-man performance devoted to Hecht’s anti-Nazi activism during World War II. Sherman appears here in a publicity photo for the world premiere of The Ben Hecht Show, directed by Dennis Zacˇek. Photo by Ed Krieger.

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en Hecht, though no longer a household name, was one of the most prolific and versatile American writers of the twentieth century: a celebrated newspaper columnist, playwright, novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, and cultural polemicist at a time when it was possible to transition from one to the other—or embody all at once—without forfeiting one’s literary stature. In our own era of niche production and consumption, a comparable career, as varied as Hecht’s, might be that of the “content creator”: a YouTube star with a podcast, Netf lix series, and perhaps even a book deal.

The quality and sheer volume of Hecht’s output are difficult to grasp, much less fully comprehend. And so today many think of him as either the bard of the everyday for the Chicago Daily News; or the Hollywood hustler who had a hand in writing Scarface, Gone with the Wind, His Girl Friday, and The Man with the Golden Arm; or the memoirist who titled his autobiography A Child of the Century, a gesture that can be construed in retrospect as a kind of proto-humblebrag.

James Sherman knew Ben Hecht as none of these things.

To Sherman, a founding member of the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble, Hecht was first and foremost the writer (with Charles MacArthur) of The Front Page—“one of the great plays of the twentieth century,” according to Sherman. Though he admired The Front Page, Sherman had an interest in Hecht that for many years didn’t extend much further than that.

This changed one day when Sherman came across A Guide for the Bedevilled in the Chicago History Museum. The book, published in 1943, is Hecht’s bracing account of how he came to identify in mid-life as a Jew and assume for himself the moral

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responsibility of understanding anti-Semitism and fighting its most reprehensible manifestation during World War II. Not only did such self-discovery call to mind the themes of Jewish identity and community that preoccupied Sherman in his work, but Hecht himself emerged as a subject for dramatization.

“My first play with Victory Gardens ref lected on my upbringing as an American Jew and was written in the wake of the Neo-Nazis who petitioned to march in Skokie in the late 1970s,” says Sherman. “I was amazed to learn that, a few decades earlier, Hecht had followed a similar train of thought as he confronted his own Jewish heritage—except he was writing in response to the Nazis.” It became important to Sherman to recover that moment, before history had universally condemned the Holocaust, when people like Ben Hecht were raising awareness of what was happening to the Jews in Europe.

The result is The Ben Hecht Show, a one-man performance featuring Sherman as Hecht. Based on research Sherman conducted using the Ben Hecht Papers at the Newberry, the play will make its world premiere at the Piven Theatre in Evanston on June 10.

“It’s an invitation into Hecht’s studio, where I (as Hecht) will share stories about his life, career, and activism against the Nazis,” says Sherman of the show. The dialogue consists entirely of Hecht’s own words, which Sherman wove together from A Guide for the Bedevilled and A Child of the Century. Sherman’s approach engenders an intimacy and directness allowing audiences either to expand their impressions of Hecht or get acquainted with him for the first time.

Hecht’s weapon against American indifference was the pen, which could lacerate with caustic precision when deployed in an op-ed, or bludgeon with blunt emotional appeals when placed in the service of mass spectacle.

Ironically, the scale and tone of The Ben Hecht Show contrast starkly with the nature of the wartime activism Sherman takes as his subject.

Hecht worked tirelessly to convince Americans of the gravity of Hitler’s systematic extermination of Europe’s Jewish communities. Midway through World War II, 2 million Jews had already perished as part of the “Final Solution.” News of the slaughter was delayed in reaching the U.S., and, when it finally did, the country’s response ranged from indifference to incredulity. “A Gallup poll taken then showed that less than half of the American people believed that 2 million European Jews had already been killed,” notes Lucy Dawidowicz in a Holocaust retrospective published in the New York Times Magazine in 1982.

“Most people polled thought it was ‘just a rumor,’ or they had no opinion.”

Hecht’s weapon against American indifference was the pen, which could lacerate with caustic precision when deployed as an op-ed, or bludgeon with blunt emotional appeals when placed in the service of mass spectacle. One of Hecht’s contributions in the latter category proved especially effective at garnering attention, even if the extent to which it won over public opinion was less clear. We Will Never Die—written by Hecht, scored by Kurt Weill, and produced by Billy Rose and Ernst Lubitsch—played to two sold-out crowds in Madison Square Garden in March of 1943 before storming across the rest of the country. In each city, the pageant marshaled hundreds of actors across the stage to demonstrate the breadth of Judaism’s impact on Western civilization as well as Jews’ sacrifice to the Allied war effort and their suffering in German-occupied lands.

Toward the end of We Will Never Die, the production’s two narrators make a concluding statement on the Nazi death camps that also conveys Hecht’s general thesis on the problem of antiSemitism: “This is not a Jewish problem. It is a problem that belongs to humanity. It is a challenge to the soul of man.”

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he plays of James Sherman often explore issues related to Jewish identity in America. His characters grapple with the weight of their history and the pressures of assimilation, all while countenancing the uncertainty of where, exactly, their notions of self reside—whether in their conscious beliefs, their actions, or as the sum total of how others perceive them. There’s a sense that identity is performative, an idea containing a great deal of comic potential that Sherman has tapped into again and again. In the farcical Beau Jest, for example, Bob Schroeder

escorts Sarah Goldman home for Sabbath dinner, and he manages to pass as Dr. David Steinberg thanks to the confidence that his encyclopedic knowledge of Fiddler on the Roof gives him.

He literally performs Jewishness, so as to assuage Sarah’s family’s fears that she may be dating a Gentile.

The performance-within-a-performance device has been making audiences laugh for centuries; its practitioners include Shakespeare, the playwrights of the Golden Age of Spanish drama (Tirso de Molina et al.), and other masters of the Western canon. The gags it produces are often plot-driven, advancing the schemes of a character (or characters) or creating a dramatic irony that demands resolution. When considered from a thematic point of view, however, the device can offer profound insights about the construction and expression of identity.

Like Bob Schroeder in Beau Jest, characters transform themselves with the f limsiest of disguises: a wig, a healthy application of rouge, a vocal affectation. Watching how thoroughly convinced others on the stage are of such obvious dissimulation, you’d be excused if your mind entertained thoughts of how your own identity may rest on a foundation just as feeble and superficial.

Is this foundation all that feeble, though? Can’t appearances sometimes bring into existence the very “reality” they would seem to represent? For an example of this sequential anomaly, look no further than Ben Hecht’s inquiry into the inner workings of anti-Semitism.

According to Hecht, the figure of the “Jew” is a social construct, pure artifice; and yet it has become so firmly rooted in the psychic constellation of Western culture that it actually inf luences interactions between individual Jews and nonJews and informs the ways in which political systems operate.

Significantly, Hecht uses a vocabulary of the theater to make his point. “The Jew is a fully dramatized figure,” he writes in A Guide for the Bedevilled. “The veriest ninny of a writer can present you with an arresting puppet labeled ‘Jew.’ He requires no research and less lucubration. The Jew waits in the wings, fully caparisoned and completely dialoged. Any bumpkin can whistle him on stage.”

In Hecht’s formulation, anti-Semitism is the whistling. It is a tried-and-true way of displacing frustration with one’s self with hatred of a scapegoat cast as “the Jew”: “Prejudice is our method for transferring our own sickness to others. It is our ruse for disliking others rather than ourselves.”

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Ben Hecht’s pageant We Will Never Die was a massive production involving dramatic lighting, soaring music, and hundreds of performers.

The focal point of the set design was two 40-foot tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them.

Paradoxically, as Hecht observed, various sets of contradictory prejudices swirl around in the anti-Semitic imagination. One is “the charge that the Jew is a creature interested only in the amassing of money” while also being held “responsible for a system of economics (Socialism, Communism) that seeks to undermine the whole principle of money-making.” Far from compromising the structural integrity of anti-Semitism, the contradictions ensure it. They ref lect the resilience of the ideology and the variety of its practitioners. Hecht concludes that “the Jew” is “charged with crimes so contradictory and characteristics so diverse, that it is apparent—and has been always apparent—that the only criminal involved is the accuser.”

In staging a spectacle for a mass audience, Hecht embraced a different set of objectives and tactics from that which had served his community of readers.

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A Guide for the Bedevilled is as nuanced and introspective as We Will Never Die is blunt and theatrical. Such are the aesthetics of pageantry. In staging a spectacle for a mass audience, Hecht embraced a different set of objectives and tactics from that which had served his community of readers. He oriented his production around what theater scholar Robert Skloot has described as the “color, size, and mass together with a stridency and sentiment which allows easy access to intense emotional experience.” By the standards of the genre, Hecht pulled it off. “In theatrical terms, the pageant was a complete success,” according to Skloot.

The focal point of the set design was two 40-foot tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them. The space between the tablets served as the entrance for the hundreds of performers who were summoned forward, to the accompaniment of dramatic lighting and music ranging from Yiddish folk songs to American and European marches. The actors portrayed biblical heroes, Jewish luminaries of Western Civilization, and Jewish soldiers fighting the Axis powers all across Europe.

One of the most moving moments of We Will Never Die occurred toward the end of the production. A procession of the

Holocaust’s murdered Jews would come forward, each sharing their tragic story—only, the heartbreaking accounts were delivered not by the actors portraying the dead but by speakers standing off-stage. Though the mechanics of the scene were an accident of spatial limitations (there was room on stage only for the microphones reserved for the pageant’s two main narrators), the effect was profound, emphasizing the spectral presence of those who had been killed by the Nazis.

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ress reviews were laudatory, even if they didn’t occupy much space in the newspapers in which they appeared.

“Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Voice: Jews Must Live,” the Chicago Tribune announced after a performance at Chicago Stadium on May 19, 1943. “Underlying the pageant was the prayer that the allied nations, and especially the United States, raise such an outcry at the Hitler program for the extermination of the Jews that even the Nazis themselves would be cowed by it.”

The outcry never reached critical mass; by many accounts, We Will Never Die succeeded mainly in stirring those who were already predisposed to hearing its message, and in alienating those who were already committed to a less aggressive strategy for moving American public opinion and foreign policy. The divergent responses ref lected a fundamental division within the American Jewish community. As Robert Skloot notes, “Many who saw the pageant were moved by the drama of its historical sweep, its righteous anger, and its blatant patriotism. Others, less sympathetic to Hecht’s cause or tactics, dismissed as misguided or dangerous the event Hecht hoped would break the evil conspiracy of silence and cowardice.”

Hecht had polarized his audience. It was not a role with which he was—or would become—unfamiliar.

Alexander King. As a reviewer in the New York Herald Tribune put it, “Hecht wears a fixed and immobile smile and asks the confoundedest [sic] questions in high good humor.”

Included among the Newberry’s Ben Hecht materials is a 33 1/3 rpm record of highlights from the show, and it confirms this description. Audio clips reveal Hecht goading his guests with impish bonhomie. When Hecht asks Otto Preminger what is worse, overindulgence in sex or overindulgence in liquor, he seems to know exactly how the colorful director will answer.

Hecht could also steer his show into conversational cul-du-sacs of somber ref lection. His wartime activism had effectively ended with the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, but his fierce opposition to the Nazis persisted, sometimes surfacing in moments of virulent bitterness. “I have a hatred for Germans,” Hecht says in one episode. “I’m going to have a lime kiln in my head for the word Germans.”

The task Sherman set for himself was to portray Hecht’s convictions not as an established fact so much as the result of a series of personal realizations, decisions, and actions.

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he title of James Sherman’s Hechtinspired play, The Ben Hecht Show, is a reference to Hecht’s short-lived television program of the same name. From September 1958 to January 1959 the American Broadcasting Corporation aired The Ben Hecht Show, giving Hecht seemingly free reign to prod a series of provocative guests who didn’t need much prodding to speak their minds.

Hecht discussed sexual indulgence with Otto Preminger, conceptions of love with Salvador Dalí, and politics with author and illustrator

Ben Hecht with a cigar, January 1946.

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“To dramatize historical figures is to present them as people who actively made choices to get to where they ended up,” says Sherman. From our vantage point, these choices can seem like inevitabilities, if not complete no-brainers.

Who wouldn’t protest the Holocaust? But in the crucible of the moment, before history has delivered its judgment, the courage of one’s convictions is an amalgam of intuitively felt moral outrage, personal experience, and the support of a few confidantes here and there.

The challenge for Sherman is to transport his audience to that moment and resurrect a man who cultivated an array of intellectual interests and personal predilections—a man who, after inviting you into his studio, would be just as likely to provide you with an astute diagnosis of anti-Semitism as to cajole you into telling an off-color anecdote.

For tickets to The Ben Hecht Show, visit thebenhechtshow.brownpapertickets.com.

Acquiring and Processing the Ben Hecht Papers The Newberry’s Midwest Manuscript Collection contains the personal papers of novelists, journalists, and literary critics from Chicago and across the midwestern U.S. Few are more extensive than the Ben Hecht Papers. (It’s worth noting as well that the block of Walton Street just outside the Newberry’s doors has been known as “Honorary Ben Hecht Way” since 2004). The collection’s 92 linear feet document Hecht’s various exploits as a newspaperman, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and acerbic commentator on the human condition. Included are correspondence, subject files, photographs, scrapbooks, sound recordings, and videos, as well as the odds and ends acquired over an eclectic writing career: press passes, pipes, reading glasses, and the Academy Award Hecht won in 1928 for his screenplay for Underworld.

“It’s a fascinating collection that you can approach from a number of different angles,” says Manuscripts and Archives Librarian Alison Hinderliter. “And many Newberry readers do. The Ben Hecht Papers are among our most-requested collections of personal papers.” From May 2015 (when the Aeon electronic system began processing reader requests) to February of this year, 28 readers submitted 419 requests for Ben Hecht materials; by comparison, the Sherwood Anderson Papers received 277 requests from 16 readers in the same period of time.

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The Newberry acquired the Ben Hecht Papers in 1979 as a bequest from Hecht’s wife, the novelist Rose Caylor Hecht. They did not arrive in the most organized state: “90 bulging cardboard cartons,” as one Newberry staff person described the shipment. A preliminary sorting of the collection provided users with a general overview of the kinds of items within it. By 2003, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Newberry archivists had completed a fully detailed finding aid for the collection, increasing its accessibility considerably.

BEST LAID

PLANS A new Newberry digital resource explores Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago as a product of both American urban planning and visual culture.

By Alex Teller

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“ The tendency of mankind to congregate in cities is a marked characteristic of modern times.”

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Make Big Plans is intended for academic scholars, as well o begins Edward H. Bennett and Daniel H. Burnham’s as for college and high school students (the Smith Center plans landmark Plan of Chicago, published in 1909. The opening to add guides that teachers can use to incorporate the site salvo defined a unique problem whose solution was, by into their lesson plans). For these students, the site’s images implication, the Plan itself. Attempts to manage the urban and supplementary content may provide one of the most congregating of people, so far, had been incommensurate with fundamental insights of cartographic studies and social sciences: the explosive rates at which U.S. cities were attracting industry, that maps often reveal the biases, motives, and aspirations of commerce, and aspirational transplants looking for a piece of the their creators when subjected to critical analysis.

American Dream. Chicago embodied this problem in a number For Burnham, and the City Beautiful movement he led, the of ways. On top of the usual growing pains of industrialization, physical appearance of an industrial American city was rife with Chicago owed its chaotic development to the frenzied, slapdash moral implications. Urban decay was not just bad for business; way in which it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871. The it was bad for the soul. Redesigning shabby streets, parks, and city thus became the home of the skyscraper and also of residential blocks thus assumed the same import as other projects uncoordinated urban planning. It needed a unified plan for its of Progressive reform, and the emphasis Burnham placed on future and, according to Burnham, an aesthetic overhaul that visual effects guided him as he tackled all aspects of city life, would impose order and beauty. whether they were inherently aesthetic or not. For example, A new Newberry web resource, Make Big Plans: Daniel he saw elevated train tracks as eye sores, and advocated moving Burnham’s Vision of an American Metropolis, places aesthetics at the heart of its own design and thematic organization, critically assessing the Plan of Chicago within the tradition of American urban planning as well as the broader context of American and Western European visual culture.

The website was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

With over 130 high-resolution images from the Newberry and other contributing institutions, as well as accompanying contextual essays, Make Big Plans is itself the product of ambitious planning. The site offers users an array of historical materials, from maps, views, and panoramas to photographs, postcards, and advertisements. A smaller version of the website was launched during the centennial anniversary of the Plan of Chicago, in 2009; its content was created and expanded under the editorial leadership of Jim Akerman, Director of the Newberry’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for

by Jules Guerin illustrated Edward H. Bennett and Daniel H. Burnham’s vision the History of Cartography, and Diane Dillon, Director Paintings for Chicago in the 1909 Plan of Chicago. Imagery was an intrinsic element of the Plan and of Bennett and Burnham’s strategy for delivering their ideas to the public. of Exhibitions and Major Projects.

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The standardized, interchangeable lots in Thomas Holme’s 1683 map of Philadelphia ref lected the politcal equality William Penn envisioned for the colony.

Though Burnham had the best intentions for a circumferential highway system that bypassed the urban core to better connect Chicago and its suburbs, he did not forsee that such a system would eventually effect urban decentralization and suburban sprawl.

them underground so that unobstructed views of the Chicago skyline might stir pedestrians into reveries of America’s grandeur. (Burnham didn’t succeed in this area, as the city’s El system today can attest.)

The tendency to graft American values onto landscapes extends at least as far back as the Quaker settlement of Pennsylvania. In the early 1680s, William Penn compiled reports and solicitations to encourage prospective settlers in England to join his new colony. The sales pitch included Thomas Holme’s 1683 “Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia,” a visual depiction of a city that did not yet exist—a projection of ideals rather than a representation of reality. The map called for a grid of rectangular blocks extending over a stretch of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. According to Make Big Plans, “Penn’s idea for Philadelphia exemplified his Quaker values by showing a preference for simplicity over imposing scale.” The standardized, interchangeable lots also exemplified the political equality Penn envisioned for the colony.

If Burnham was indebted to planning traditions of the past, he was also prescient when it came to urban development of the future. He included in the Plan a diagram for a metropolitan highway system connecting outlying suburban towns with Chicago and with one another. Make Big Plans describes it as

one of the “most far-reaching proposals of the Plan of Chicago,” a blueprint that anticipated both the importance of the car as a mode of transportation and the interconnectedness of cities and suburbs. This model for circumferential highways bypassing the city’s core was largely implemented, with the unintended consequences of hastening suburban sprawl and ensuring urban decline later in the twentieth century.

In short, the Plan of Chicago was a complex document composed of contradictions that didn’t necessarily negate one another. It reproduced long-existing strains of American idealism while offering innovative solutions for growing American cities; it foresaw the potential of automobiles while failing to calculate the threat they posed to the urban areas they could easily circumvent; it approached urban planning comprehensively while narrowing its perspective according to the objectives of the City Beautiful movement.

Make Big Plans allows users to approach the Plan of Chicago from a number of different angles and to assess for themselves the extent, as well as the limits, of its inf luence.

Visit Make Big Plans publications.newberry.org/makebigplans/

For Burnham, the physical appearance of an industrial American city was rife with moral implications.

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The Writing’s on the Web French Renaissance Paleography, a collaborative digital project led by the Newberry’s Center for Renaissance Studies, guides users through the process of reading and understanding old manuscripts.

By Karen Christianson

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More than 100 digitized manuscript documents from ven after the invention of movable-type printing in the the Newberry collection and several other North American fifteenth century, the vast majority of writing was done institutions, such as the Huntington and Morgan libraries, by hand. Until use of typewriters spread in the late nineteenth form the core of the new site. They represent a range of century, all government documents, business memoranda, genres: legal documents, financial records, letters, devotional contracts, parish registers, and letters were recorded by literature, literary texts, and poetry, from across regions someone wielding a quill dipped in ink—as were original of France and New France. The site also includes a dozen texts in all genres that eventually appeared in print. The manuscript and printed calligraphy books and writing kinds of letterforms used in old documents vary hugely by manuals from the period, as well as a number of historic time and place, often to the point of being unrecognizable maps. Selected manuscripts include partial transcriptions, as to modern eyes. In addition to variable letterforms, readers well as background essays to place them in historical context. today encounter many stock abbreviations that scribes devised Powerful browsing functions permit users to limit searches by to save time as well as space on the page. Thus, scholars who type of document, time period, geographic region, reading need to read European historical documents, especially from difficulty, and repository. Readers can use an interactive map the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, face a steep to find all documents related to specific locations, and read learning curve. about French documents and institutions, conservation of For more than 35 years the Newberry’s Center for manuscripts, and transcribing and editing conventions.

Renaissance Studies has provided in-depth, hands-on training To facilitate users’ work with the documents, the site in reading difficult early scripts in a variety of languages, includes a transcription tool that parses the manuscripts line through residential summer programs. This knowledge by line. Readers can zoom in to see letterforms and other remains critical to research in the humanities. Scholars, marks more clearly, and type their transcriptions directly archivists, and curators cannot read manuscripts or even into this tool. The site gives users access to a variety of determine their provenance and date of creation if they cannot reference support—dictionaries of Old and Middle French, decipher the handwriting. Researchers who lack the skills abbreviation guides, glossaries, information about currencies, to read original documents shy away from archival projects, dates, legal terms, and more—and lets them view these impoverishing their academic fields both substantively and resources side-by-side with the manuscript page they are methodologically. As one summer program participant put it, working on.

“Paleography is a dying but very important art. If we lose the ability to read these manuscripts f luently, the words of history will be lost.”

To expand the reach of this critical training, the center received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2013 to create a set of online digital tools to allow users to access, practice transcribing, and annotate French manuscript documents dating from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Developed over the past two years in conjunction with partners at Saint Louis University’s Center for Digital Humanities, the University of Toronto Libraries, and Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages, the French Renaissance Paleography website (paleography.library.utoronto.ca) went live on January 25, 2016. It focuses on French manuscripts, but the site has been designed so that modules for other languages—such as Italian, Spanish, and perhaps Portuguese—could be added in the future.

Students view original documents during a summer institute in vernacular paleography at the Newberry.

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“ Paleography is a dying but very important art. If we lose the ability to read these manuscripts fluently, the words of history will be lost.”

We expect the core users of the site will be graduate students, professors, and independent scholars who seek to acquire the paleographic skills necessary for archival research.

But the site will be useful also to advanced undergraduates studying French civilization; museum and library curators, archivists, and catalogers who work with French manuscripts; as well as calligraphers, design historians, and graphic designers interested in historical scripts and decorative practices. Readers can also engage in online discussions and collaborative research relating to early French manuscripts, and teachers can create closed groups to use assignments from the site in class.

Until now, the Newberry’s training in French paleography has only been offered to groups of 15 scholars at a time, people who have been able to travel to Chicago and stay for nearly a

month of onsite learning. The center has routinely received double or triple the number of applications as there are spaces available. The new French Renaissance Paleography website makes the study of early French manuscript culture accessible to a much wider range of users than can be accommodated in a classroom, with opportunities for much collaboration across disciplines.

Visit French Renaissance Paleography paleography.library.utoronto.ca Karen Christianson is Interim Director of the Newberry’s Center for Renaissance Studies.

Calligraphy as Paleographic Resource The French Renaissance Paleography website includes complete digital copies of 12 calligraphy manuals from the Newberry’s extensive collection, dated from 1568 to 1649. In response to a perceived decline in the quality of handwriting in France, writing manuals proliferated in both manuscript and printed formats during the Renaissance. For scholars acclimating themselves to manuscript documents of the past, these manuals can serve as an introduction to different scripts and also as evidence of the cultural settings in which handwriting was taught and produced. Besides offering historical value, the calligraphy books available on the website can be quite beautiful. Many include charmingly whimsical borders of animals and people constructed from pen flourishes; others feature ornate initials, often hand-colored and even

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gilded. In addition to helping scholars who need to read documents written in old scripts, we hope these books will interest modern calligraphers and students of typography and design history.

Try Your Hand at Paleography Depending on the type of document and the time it was written, handwriting from Renaissance-era France can vary from the relatively easy-to-read to the virtually illegible (at first glance, anyway). Searching French Renaissance Paleography by level of difficulty allows users to work their way through the different scripts, moving on to the more challenging levels once they have gained proficiency with simpler ones.

INTRODUCTORY LEVEL Letter: Residence de la Conception-aux-Hurons, to M. le curé de St. Martin, à Beauvais, France, 1639 Newberry VAULT box Ayer MS 507

INTERMEDIATE LEVEL De l’occasion et de la fortune/Treatise on the Government of Princes France, 1580 Newberry VAULT folio Case MS 5228

ADVANCED LEVEL Register of notary Guillaume Peytralis for 1582-1583 (part 1) Seyne, 1582-3 Newberry VAULT Case MS 5028, vol. 3

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The Right Type Paul Gehl first encountered the Newberry as a University of Chicago graduate student, making a reluctant trip from Hyde Park to use the library’s collection. This spring, he retires from the Newberry after a 35-year career, including 29 years as Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing.

Paul Gehl in the stacks, ca. 1987.

By Andrea Villaseñor

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his spring marks the retirement of Paul F. Gehl, fourth custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing, after 29 years in that role and 35 years in total at the Newberry. While such longevity in a single position is more and more uncommon in the American workplace, it is not so uncommon at the Newberry. Over the course of 20, 30, even 40 years, Newberry staff in curatorial positions can have a profound impact on extending the legacy of the library’s collections, often taking them in new directions in the process. Some of these collections originated with individuals who laid the groundwork for future acquisitions but not necessarily a detailed blueprint for defining their scope. This was the case with the Newberry’s Wing Collection, which Paul and his three predecessors have shaped since 1917, when John M. Wing endowed a foundation at the Newberry devoted to “the history and development of the arts of printing, engraving, and book-illustration from the date of the introduction into Europe of the art of printing with movable type.”

The Special Collections staff from 1991 pause for a picture on the front steps of the library. Front row left to right: Margaret Kulis, Meg Bolger, Chris Spencer, Alison Hinderliter, Michael Kaplan, Paul Gehl, Mary Wyly. Back row: Hjordis Halvorson, Bart Smith, Diana Haskell, Martha Briggs, Carol Semmes.

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Beginning with such a broad framework, it’s been up to the Wing custodians to fill in the details and determine the parameters for what Mr. Wing envisioned as his “great typographical library.” Each of them has been guided by the ambitious mandate for the collection, the subject strengths of the Newberry’s other materials, and his own personal history and intellectual inclinations. Paul has been no different.

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aul, like so many others who have followed successive opportunities to an unexpected destination, did not foresee the turns his career would take. He did not set upon his educational path with the Wing custodianship in mind, yet his strengths, interests, and experiences made his accession to that role a fortuitous occurrence that has brought rich benefits to the Newberry community.

In revisiting his early education, Paul will mention, with a lingering sense of pride, that he was his state’s champion in Latin in high school—the National Junior Classical League State Champion for the state of Florida, to be exact. His interest in classics and background in Catholicism led him to enroll in John Carroll University, a well-respected Jesuit university, where he majored in history and classics.

He knew that he wanted to study abroad, and did so during his junior year in college. He spent that year in Italy and fell in love with the culture and the people there.

Determined to master the language, Paul tapped into his knowledge of Latin as he attempted to connect with the Italians he encountered. His efforts at communicating endeared him to the native speakers, even if his speech came out sounding rather antiquated!

When it came time to pursue graduate studies, Paul chose the University of Chicago. He thought he would only spend as much time in Chicago as it took to complete his degrees, but that would not end up being the case.

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aul had his first experience with the Newberry during the 1971-72 academic year, when he was required to do research using primary sources in the Newberry’s collection.

“In those days the U of C librarians would not do interlibrary loan for any book in the Chicago area, so like many denizens of Hyde Park, then and now, I had to make the trek to Walton Street for many Italian monographs,” Paul remembers. He was not particularly happy about having to go elsewhere to do his research, but upon discovering the richness of the Newberry’s collection in his area of interest, he became a regular at the library. His interests and expertise in medieval manuscripts and the early modern period led him to volunteer in the Renaissance Center under John Tedeschi.

When the job of Assistant Director of Research and Education opened, in 1981, Tedeschi suggested that Paul apply.

Paul held that position for six years, during which one of his responsibilities was making arrangements for public events. One of his most memorable experiences occurred when the local Latin American Studies group invited liberation theologian Ernesto Cardinale, a radical poet and the Minister of Culture under the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, to give a poetry reading at the Newberry. The event was more freedom rally than poetry reading, with a heavy security detail. Thankfully, the event unfolded without controversy; Paul, however, decided not to tempt fate, and resolved thereafter to look more closely at events proposed by outside groups.

Just at the time when Paul was looking for a new challenge and a new direction, the custodian position for the Wing Foundation on the History of Printing became available. His credentials made him a strong candidate. Focusing on the medieval period in Italy, he had immersed himself in studying the creation and dissemination of manuscripts (particularly those related to education) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Though his historical era of choice predated the printing press, he could lay claim to being an expert on the pre-history of the history of printing.

“I was looking for a new job. Humanities administration was one possible avenue, a rare book curatorship another,” says Paul. “I had some good interviews and a few offers, but I also put in my name for the Wing position, which had been vacant since Jim Wells retired in 1984. When it came down to choosing between two offers, I elected to stay in Chicago and at the Newberry.”

After a careful selection process, Paul was given the job. Richard Brown, then-Vice President for Research and Education, enjoyed introducing Paul to his colleagues as a “bona fide medievalist.” Paul shared a similar background with the first custodian of the Wing Collection, Pierce Butler, whose education had focused on the early church and led him to collect medieval manuscripts and hundreds of incunabula during his tenure as Wing custodian.

When Paul assumed the Wing custodianship, he had ahead of him the daunting task of getting to know a collection that numbered about 30,000 items, some of which had yet to be

“The Wing Collection pulled me towards the Renaissance and beyond because that’s where its strengths were.”

One of John M. Wing’s “extra-illustrated” books.

cataloged, including a large amount of ephemera as well as the personal papers of major designers such as Oswald Cooper and R.H. Middleton.

Paul’s immediate predecessor, Jim Wells, recommended that Paul begin to familiarize himself with the collection by reviewing its original materials, the items that Wing himself had donated to the library. These were the books that Wing referred to as his “Old Corner Library,” and they included biographies, histories, travel, poetry, and his “extra-illustrated” books.

With Wells’s advice in mind, Paul improved his Wing IQ by walking through the stacks in which the collection was stored, consulting with other Newberry staff, and engaging with the library’s readers. But progress came gradually. Not only was the collection large in terms of the number of items it contained; it was large in scope as well.

For a “bona fide medievalist,” the management of such a collection was both a joy and a challenge. “The Wing Collection pulled me towards the Renaissance and beyond because that’s where its strengths were,” says Paul.

Calligraphy was one area in which Paul received some welcome guidance, in the person of Bob Williams. At the time of Paul’s arrival as Wing custodian, Williams was the Assistant Director of Design at the University of Chicago Press. He had already been coming to the Newberry for some 20 years, using items from the collection to inform and inspire his own works of calligraphy. “It was amazing to have access to so many beautiful and rare examples of calligraphy right here in Chicago,” says Williams. Paul credits Williams for his deep calligraphic know-how, saying, “He has been a tremendous resource both for his knowledge of the collection and for the volunteer work he has done in helping organize designer’s papers and ephemera.” The Newberry is the kind of place that attracts scholars from all over and provides an environment The Newberry Magazine

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“I have been at this for 29 years without even beginning to exhaust the possibilities.”

Vachal’s synthesis of styles ref lects Paul’s own openness to so many different forms and styles of print and design. “Paul is our ‘Renaissance man,’” notes Jill Gage, Bibliographer of British Literature at the Newberry (and Paul’s successor as where they can share knowledge as Paul and Bob have done Wing custodian). “He is equally comfortable talking about over the years. incunabula and zines. The only thing Paul hates is eighteenthPaul would go on to work with and learn from other and nineteenth-century British literature.” They have a design practitioners, such as Bruce Beck. Beck was interested friendly rivalry in that respect, often chiding one another with in producing a publication to highlight the bookplate that the relative merits of British versus Continental materials.

Eric Gill had created for the Newberry in 1935. Paul wrote Paul has pursued a variety of other sources for growing a scholarly article on the piece and Bruce printed a limitedthe Wing Collection. One is the Newberry Book Fair. The edition booklet on his private press as well as a small run of Newberry Book Fair began in 1984, and is supported through bookplates that were customized with each of the Newberry donations by book lovers throughout the year as they make Trustees’ names. Paul used the collaboration with Beck to room for more finds or as circumstances such as moving, learn more about the design community in Chicago and to downsizing, or the passing of a bibliophile necessitates finding guide his decisions on what to acquire for the Wing Collection a new home for their books. Revenue from Book Fair helps from contemporary designers and printers. fund the Newberry’s operations; a secondary benefit is the ability to add some of the Book Fair donations directly to earning about the collection continues to occupy Paul’s the Wing holdings. Sometimes these are rare, old books, and The book that represents his oeuvre most broadly is J o s e f Va c h a l (1884– time.

“I have been at this for 29 years without even 1969) was a visionary Czech Váchalova roc ˇ enka na rok 1927.

The titletimes means “yearbook” other they are examples of design or illustration that fit Josef Váchal author, painter, designer, or “specimen book” for 1927. Czech artists used the term beginning to exhaust the possibilities,” he comments.

It has in well with other items already in the Newberry’s collection. roc ˇ enka for an anthology of recent work in a miscellany and printer whose career Váchalova rocˇenka na rok spanned two world wars united onlyand by the creativity of the compiler.

This volume been his1927 task to find the main threads in the collection The Newberry holds the professional papers of George Salter, and the repressive Com- includes both writings and woodcuts by Vachal. It displays expand upon them. including the orginal art for most of the book jackets that he munist rule of his country. the full range of his woodcut work, including virtuosic Ve Vrsˇovicích, Czechoslovakia, 1926 He witnessed and particicolor images ExpressionistMany styles; faux Book we collect is probably “What more international in in romantic anddesigned. of these books turn up in the Book Fair. pated in (though always folk-art decorations and lettering; calligraphy and type in 13 1/2 × 12 7/8 in. scopeWing than in the many U.S.,forms; except withcollection considerable ironic charming, ironic comic strips; and bitterly Fund,any 1997 other printing detachment) avant-garde satirical caricatures. There are nine self-portraits and four VaultHarvard’s,” Wing Folio ZP 958 says .V336 Paul. Contributing for to this international movements in art and lit- images of Vachal’s dog, Tarzan.

The book opens a “What wewith collect is probably more internastrain in the collection became more cost-effective erature from the Vienna ratherwith formal,the four-color woodcut self-portrait facing an Secession through Dada, exuberant title page. It ends tional with a caricature Vachal in ofscope than any other collection in openingExpressionism, up of theConstructivism, book market in Eastern Europe following and Art Deco. At the end in the guise of Johnny Appleseed sowing the seeds of the U.S., except for Harvard’s.” of his life, was aSoviet tolerated but largely neglected imagination across a sunny landscape, accompanied by the breakup ofhethe Union in the elder earlyon 1990s.

Books the design scene in Prague. a frisky Tarzan. Among the most biting of the caricatures that had previously been unavailable were now are onimages the market Vachal’s most important graphic work appeared in small of art dealers and collectors—apparently coleditions of books, booklets, andtook broadsheets on his luding and enjoying the poverty and despair of the and were well-priced.

Paul thisprinted opportunity to inacquire Gifts are another source of collection growth. Among own press and illustrated with his own remarkable wood- modern creative artist. artist’s books by printers whose work is now highly soughtbeautiful cuts. Even now this body of work is less well known than it This copy is bound in full,the brightmost pink leather with yet donations Paul has welcomed into the deserves to be because it is such rare andartist. thus difficult tohighly study. another largework self-portrait of Vachal, Cubist in style this after. Josef Vachal is one His creative Newberry are the marbled papers of Norma Rubovits (1918Vachal gained belated critical appreciation in the 1990s as his time, stamped from a woodblock onto the front cover. showcases Austrian Secessionism booksthe camestyles onto theof post-Communist collectors’ market. through The coarseDada, paper inside was2016). made by Vachal, who also Rubovits spent a lifetime studying the book arts, in Today his work is avidly sought after and has been shown added touches of color by hand to many of the images.

Expressionism, Cubism, and Art Deco. particular paper marbling.

Her introduction to the Newberry in many exhibitions. The Newberry acquired a few small This volume was owned by his student and companion,

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examples in the 1930s. Larger and more significant works have come into the collection in recent years.

Anna Macková (1887–1969); it contains the bookplate he designed for her. p. f. g.

One of the many examples of book cover design by George Salter.

An artist’s book by Josef Vachal.

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128 The Newberry 125, Stories of Our Collection

“Paul is equally comfortable talking about incunabula and zines. He is our ‘Renaissance man.’”

The bookplate from the Norma Rubovits collection showing an example of one of her beautiful marbled paper “vignettes.”

came through Jim Wells, who bought some of her marbled papers for use in the Newberry bindery. As Wells neared retirement, he suggested to Rubovits that she donate her papers to the Newberry. Jim told her that she should talk to “the new guy,” referring to Paul. Over the course of the next 10 years, she developed a good relationship with the new guy, and donated over 4,000 of her beautiful papers, as well as those of artists that she had collected, to the Newberry. She was a creative pioneer in developing a new approach to marbling, devising small, stand-alone works she called “vignettes.”

In addition to building the collection, Paul’s duties as Wing custodian have included giving lectures and presentations and publishing articles about the collection. He has recently published A Meditation in Rome, about modern revivals of Renaissance types, and also contributed many essays to The Newberry 125, the Newberry’s monograph in celebration of its 125th anniversary, in 2012.

He has regularly given presentations to undergraduate students participating in immersive semester-long programs at the Newberry. He introduces them to the physical elements of the book, inviting them to examine about a dozen books and using physical clues (without opening up the book and looking inside) to determine the relative ages of the books. He suggests they consider appearance, touch, smell, and, just to guage students’ reactions, taste.

Paul has met with and presented to many bibliophilic groups located here in Chicago, and groups that are national and even international, including the American Printing History Association, the Society of Typographic Arts, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He is a longtime

Paul discusses the impact of print on the Chicago cultural scene during a showand-tell for a group of Newberry visitors.

member of the Caxton Club, and has given many presentations there, as well as to various donor groups here at the library, including the Society of Collectors, President’s Fellows, and Newberry Associates. “He is not only interested in collections but is genuinely interested in the people behind the books,” notes Gage. He enjoys fostering relationships, helping people grow their own collections and, in some cases, ultimately bequeath those collections to the Newberry.

He also meets with individual researchers and with contemporary designers, assisting them in finding and using collection items relevant to their work. Designers and typographers around the globe testify to the creative possibilities they have unlocked through the Wing Collection and Paul’s help. Recently, Jean-Baptiste Levée, from Production Type in Paris, gave a lecture in Chicago about his work that was inspired by a visit to the Newberry.

Another designer, Tokyo-based Ian Lynam, also gave a recent presentation to Chicago Design Museum members about his study of Oswald Cooper’s papers at the Newberry and how Paul guided him in his research as he sought to develop his own typefaces inspired by Cooper’s work.

Many people with various areas of interest have benefited from the scholarship and expertise that Paul has brought to the role of Wing custodian. As he enters a new chapter in his career, he looks forward to having time to pursue his own research, which will keep him at the Newberry, making ever new forays into the very collection he has helped build and make available to others.

Paul meeting with well-known type designer Herman Zapf and his wife, Gudrun, in 2003.

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Curating Creating Shakespeare The Newberry will celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death—and the beginning of his illustrious afterlife as literary icon and cultural phenomenon—with an exhibition examining the playwright’s work as well as the countless editions, adaptations, and reinterpretations that his work has spawned over the centuries.

By Jill Gage

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illiam Shakespeare spent most of his adult life creating: on page and on stage, he created work both on his own as well as with his fellow actors and playwrights. It’s safe to say that Shakespeare did not stop creating work until his death the week of April 23, 1616. Others have been creating him ever since.

This September 23 – December 31, the Newberry takes its turn, with Creating Shakespeare, an exhibition which begins by examining how Shakespeare (contrary to Ben Jonson’s famous phrase memorializing his friend as being “not of an age but for all time”) drew inspiration from the books, manuscripts, maps, objects, and people he encountered in his daily life.

After establishing Shakespeare’s milieu and his response to it, the exhibition moves on to the myriad and complex ways in which, over the last 400 years, writers, printers, actors, artists, musicians, audiences, readers, and scholars have printed, performed, adapted, appropriated, and transformed Shakespeare.

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urating an exhibition on Shakespeare’s beginnings to the present is a rather overwhelming task in that it requires the elucidation of 400 years of history, literature, and culture— and the presentation of all that cultural output in just 100 or so items. Much of the process focuses on rejection rather than selection: typing Shakespeare into the Newberry’s online catalog turns up about 7,000 records. Of course, this number is a bit misleading because some of these records are for modern books about Shakespeare rather than by Shakespeare. But 7,000 is still a big number, and one that increases when you consider all the Shakespeare-related items that are not specifically cataloged as such—source texts, artifacts, pamphlets, satirical prints, periodicals, novels, sheet music, theater programs, and photographs. Accounting for these materials, that number of

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7,000 at least doubles, and more likely comes closer to 20,000.

So, part of my job as curator has been to decide which 19,900 items will not be in the show.

Also factoring into the selection process is the fact that the Newberry’s exhibition will feature material from the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Art Institute of Chicago, and four private donors. This has required extensive research to ensure the contributions from these other collections complement the Newberry’s own holdings.

Unlike other forms of scholarship, curating an exhibition challenges you to think visually, to strike a balance between books that are incredibly rare, interesting, or important, and those that are aesthetically appealing. Books on display—even incredibly inf luential books—can be rendered static and dull when put under glass. This is especially true of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century quarto editions (small copies of individual plays). These editions exist in only a handful of copies, a level of rarity exceeding even the First Folio, which survives in over 200 copies. Despite their rarity and importance, these books appear lackluster in display cases (and I say that as someone keenly interested in the printing of the quartos!). To bring these early printed books to life, I’ve tried to pair them with other sources that help open up ways for modern audiences to understand the material culture from which Shakespeare drew his inspiration, as well as illuminate how his contemporary audiences and readers would have first experienced and understood his plays.

A case in point is our copy of Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of only 12 recorded copies (and the only one in the Midwest).

This is the earliest quarto owned by the Newberry, and it is the first play published with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.

Though published in 1598, it was probably written and first

This 1598 printing of Love’s Labour’s Lost marked the first time Shakespeare’s name appeared on the title page of one of his plays.

performed around 1594-95. Its style (partially in verse) links it with Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which are also dated to this period. Love’s Labour’s Lost did not gain much popularity from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries (and after the 1685 folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays it was not reprinted until the nineteenth century). It is also one of the few Shakespeare plays that have no identifiable sources: the story follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to forswear the company of women for three years of study and fasting, and subsequently develop an infatuation with the Princess of Aquitaine and her ladies. In an untraditional ending for a comedy, the play closes with the death of the Princess’s father, and all weddings are delayed for a year.

So what could I do with this play that has historical significance and is also a “first” within the Newberry’s own collection, but does not have much of a provenance or afterlife?

In pondering this problem, I thought about how Love’s Labour’s Lost might relate to other books in the Newberry’s collection—even if they were not direct sources. What books might Shakespeare have seen or thought about in writing the play? What books and objects might the play have conjured in the minds of his audience? Love’s Labour’s Lost abounds in sophisticated wordplay, puns, and literary allusions. Perhaps more than any other Shakespearean play, it explores the power and limitations of language; in fact, it contains the longest word in any of Shakespeare’s plays: honorificabilitudinitatibus (spoken by the character Costard in Act V, Scene I):

Left: A hornbook for teaching schoolchildren the alphabet, from the early eighteenth century. Right: The Wits, or, Sport upon Sport, 1672. From the genre of drolls, collections of comic adaptations of existing plays, the verso page in this image contains the first-ever illustration of the Falstaff character (lower left).

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In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shakespeare was marketed to a mass audience in a variety of different ways. Left: A Classics Illustrated edition of Hamlet, 1955. Right: A nineteenth-century trade card incorporates a scene from Hamlet into its sales pitch.

O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a f lap-dragon.

[Honorificabilitudinitatibus = technically, this is the plural of the Latin word honorificabilitudinitas, which can be translated as “the state of being able to achieve honours.”

But here it is simply a long word used to mock a pedantic schoolmaster. And in case you are interested, flap-dragon was a game in which the players caught raisins out of burning brandy and swallowed them.]

I ultimately decided to pair this book with Richard Mulcaster’s 1582 First part of the elementarie: which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung. Mulcaster’s book was an effort to collect English words. It isn’t a dictionary (just a wordlist, really), but it ref lects an interest in the expanding English language, as well as in the verbal playfulness English affords, and it makes for wonderful reading. (I have been trying to work the word flindermouse into more conversations.)

In the same scene in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a pedantic schoolmaster is mocked with an extended joke about a hornbook. A hornbook was a wooden paddle with the alphabet printed or written on paper or parchment and covered with a transparent sheet of horn. Anyone who learned to read in sixteenth-century England, including Shakespeare himself, would have used one. The first audiences of Love’s Labour’s Lost (probably the Inns of Court) would have been greatly amused by this schoolroom humor.

In pairing early quartos with sources and other texts, I hope the exhibition will open up new ways for visitors to think about both creator and audience in early modern England.

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he exhibition does not just focus on Shakespeare’s own lifetime, but explores his long and varied afterlife as well. To help keep things somewhat compact and cohesive, the exhibition focuses—although not exclusively—on a subset of plays, including Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest, and three plays featuring the character of Falstaff (Henry IV, parts 1&2; and The Merry Wives of Windsor). This selection presented other challenges and opportunities. How should we illuminate the history of Hamlet in just a few cases? How should we combine early printed editions with popular culture items like comic books and trade cards?

How might we incorporate art, music, and dance? How to weave in stories of actors and actresses, politicians, printers, readers, and theater-goers to tell the story of Shakespeare—a story that has continually changed over the last 400 years, even as Shakespeare, in the words of Samuel Johnson, “Holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life”?

This challenge, while difficult, has nonetheless opened up vast new avenues in my own thinking, not just about Shakespeare, but about the Newberry’s collections as well. The exhibition will—hopefully—offer something to everyone’s taste, and will encourage our continued creation of Shakespeare, both individually and as a culture.

Jill Gage is a Reference Librarian and Bibliographer of British History and Literature. She is curator of Creating Shakespeare, opening September 23, 2016, and running through December 31.

Creating Shakespeare is sponsored by Exelon and The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation.

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DONOR CORNER

Saving Scallawags from Oblivion Naval historian, Newberry scholar-in-residence, and Annual Fund donor Christopher McKee specializes in rediscovering the salty personal histories of forgotten American sailors.

By Sarah Alger

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n 1844, U.S. Navy seaman Thomas Dennis lost both his arms in a shipboard accident. Despite this physical handicap, Dennis persevered, leading a colorful life over the subsequent decades and into the twentieth century.

Christopher McKee, a naval historian and scholar-inresidence at the Newberry, discovered that Dennis worked as a newspaper advertising salesman and a federal security guard in Washington, DC, in addition to receiving an annuity and a pension due to his disability. Described as outgoing and goodlooking, Dennis married, had two children, and was considered a solid citizen—until financial speculations of his came to light, and he disappeared in October 1865. McKee found that, almost a year later, Dennis reappeared in Washington promising to make good on his debts, but filed for bankruptcy in 1868. He and his wife had two more children.

Christopher McKee

Then in 1879, Dennis abruptly left for Chicago with a woman 34 years his junior. Living in Chicago, they had two children before marrying quietly in Wisconsin, a year after Dennis’s wife passed away. In 1893, the couple moved back to Washington. Over the years, Dennis got a job with the federal government, dropped in at the White House to visit President Teddy Roosevelt on their shared birth date, and became something of a media personality for overcoming his disability.

The stories of Dennis and other scallawags, heroes, and hardworking sailors, would be lost and forgotten if not for the efforts of people like McKee. His interest in military history was sparked by his father, who served in the Marine Corps during both World Wars. When a summer job after his junior year of college fell through, McKee took advantage of being near a university library to learn more about Edward Preble, a hard-fighting, irascible commodore of the early U.S. Navy who inspired generations of American naval officers.

After graduating from college in 1957, McKee obtained his master’s degree in library science from the University of Michigan; for the next 12 years, he worked as a librarian at Washington and Lee University and then Southern Illinois University. Grinnell College sought a librarian who was also a scholar, and in 1972 McKee became the school’s first Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Professor and Librarian of the College. That same year, the research he began more than a decade earlier culminated in a biography of Edward Preble, published by the Naval Institute Press.

For the 1978-79 academic year, McKee took leave from Grinnell after receiving a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Newberry. “The fellowship at the Newberry was a real boost at a key time for me,” says McKee. It enabled him to research what would become his most highly acclaimed book, A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794-1815, published The Newberry Magazine

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“Veterans in the Reading Room at the Naval Asylum.” From Harper’s Weekly, February 1878. Part of McKee’s research at the Newberry consists of using the library’s genealogical archives to uncover personal histories of the sailors who lived in the U.S. Naval Asylum in Philadelphia.

in 1991. Currently, McKee is at work on a book about the lives of nineteenth-century American sailors—men like the armless Thomas Dennis—who became residents of the U.S. Naval Asylum, a retirement home established by the federal government in the 1830s for disabled and long-service members of the Navy and Marine Corps. This spring, in honor of his prestigious career in naval history, McKee was awarded the Naval Historical Foundation’s Commodore Dudley W. Knox Medal for Continuing Lifetime Achievement.

In addition to researching and writing, McKee enjoys collecting autobiographies of nineteenth-century sailors.

“There was a market for these in the 1800s, but many are fake,” he says, referring to maritime accounts purporting to be authentic. “Determining which are real becomes a detective hunt.”

McKee notes that the Newberry has strong holdings in naval history, and he is helping to strengthen them further.

“I’ve begun gradually donating my working library of books on American and British naval history to the library, along with the funds to catalog them,” says McKee. “My goal is to fill in the holes in the Newberry’s collection,” a goal he can track the progress of with each new record added to the Newberry’s online catalog. McKee and his wife, Ann, also are long-time donors to the Annual Fund and are members 24

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of the Blatchford Society, having included the Newberry in their estate plans. “The Newberry has been very important to me throughout my career,” says McKee. “It’s my scholarly home away from home.”

Sarah Alger is Director of Development, and a sailing enthusiast.

McKee recently donated nearly 100 autobiographies of U.S. enlisted sailors and marines to the Newberry. The gift has helped the Newberry bolster its rich collections related to maritime history and literature.

RETROSPECT

The 2016 Newberry Library Award Dinner

O

n April 11, 2016, more than 200 guests f locked to the Newberry to see the Newberry Library Award for outstanding contribution to the humanities presented to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the Newberry’s biggest supporters.

The Mellon Foundation’s mission is to strengthen and promote the humanities and the arts, a goal it pursues by supporting exemplary institutions of higher education and culture around the world. Since its founding, the Foundation has distributed more than $5.7 billion in grants, including $180 million to the Chicago area, and more than $12 million to the Newberry alone. Among the projects the Foundation has made possible at the Newberry are the teaching of paleography; decades’ worth of fellowships; the work of our conservation lab; the conversion of our card catalog from paper to an electronic system; and the core operations of our reading rooms.

Board Chair Danielle S. Allen and President Earl Lewis accepted the Newberry Library Award on behalf of the Mellon Foundation, and delivered a rousing and spirited defense of the arts and humanities. Chaired by Trustee Mark Hausberg and his wife, Meg, and Trustee Karla Scherer and Harve Ferrill, the Award Dinner raised significant funds to support the Newberry and welcomed friends of the library, as well as supporters of other Chicago cultural and educational institutions that have benefited from the Mellon Foundation’s largesse, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago.

Danielle S. Allen, Chair of the Board of Trustees of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, offers remarks.

Co-Chairs Harve Ferrill and Karla Scherer; Earl Lewis; Danielle Allen; and Co-Chairs Meg Hausberg and Mark Hausberg.

Newberry Mellon Fellows for the 2015-16 academic year Susan Gaylard, Erin-Marie Legacey, and Kelly Wisecup.

Guests enjoy cocktails in the Lobby. All photos by Jaclyn Simpson Photography.

The Newberry Magazine

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RETROSPECT

Recent Events CIVIL RIGHTS IN CHICAGO TODAY The release of the Laquan McDonald video in November 2015 brought to a boil long-simmering tensions between Chicago’s African-American communities and the Chicago Police Department. The ensuing protests targeted not only policing in predominantly black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, but elected officials at the highest levels of city government. Well-coordinated activism, on social media and in public spaces, prompted the dismissal of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, and the rejection of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in the primary election held this past March.

A day after Alvarez’s defeat, the Newberry hosted a panel discussion featuring some of Chicago’s most prominent and innovative civil rights activists. Moderated by Troy LaRaviere, then-principal of Blaine Elementary School and a vocal advocate for social justice in education, the panel included Ja’Mal Green, Aisha Truss-Miller (Metropolitan Tenants Organization), and J.R. Fleming (Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign). With the Black Lives Matter movement as a backdrop, the panelists shared their personal motivation for organizing their communities against racial inequality, as well as their different approaches to fighting that inequality.

Listen to the discussion: http://bit.ly/1UWFaQd

From left to right: Troy LaRaviere, Aisha Truss-Miller, Ja’Mal Green, and J.R. Fleming.

Exhibition curator Diane Dillon leads a group of students on a tour of Civil War to Civil Rights.

SPECIAL TOURS OF CIVIL WAR TO CIVIL RIGHTS Civil War to Civil Rights, an exhibition on display at the Newberry from January 15 through April 2, featured Newberry collection items documenting a century of African-American life in Chicago. As blacks settled in Chicago during this period, they were forced to reconcile the promise of life in a Northern metropolis with the realities of a city riven by racial discrimination in its own subtle—and, at times, not-so-subtle— ways. The quest to make a place for themselves and build a better future for their children prompted black Chicagoans to forge business networks, produce enduring works of art, and organize their communities against the systemic perpetuation of racial inequality. Young people in their teens and 20s played leading roles in these pursuits, then as they do now.

Given the contributions younger generations have made to African-American culture in Chicago, teen outreach was an important component of the exhibition’s related educational programming. Throughout the run of the show, the Newberry welcomed a number of student groups from local high schools and after-school programs for tours of Civil War to Civil Rights and, in some cases, opportunities to view additional collection items with Newberry staff. These visits provided the students with unique access to the exhibition and with a new entry point into the history of their city.

Civil War to Civil Rights and its teen programming were made possible by The Allstate Insurance Company.

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POINTS OF CONVERGENCE On April 6, the Newberry welcomed Bro Adams, Chairman improved quality of life in many parts of the world; but they of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Walter have also come with certain costs, such as social stratification, Massey, President of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, ecological destruction, and political disengagement. The for the latest in the “Conversations at the Newberry” series. humanities may help us understand these costs and, perhaps, The two exchanged ideas on how the humanities, arts, and ameliorate or even reverse them. sciences should work collaboratively, in an age when they seem Listen to the conversation: http://bit.ly/22zYeD4 to be increasingly siloed from one another. In his introductory remarks, Newberry President David Spadafora referenced the The “Conversations at the Newberry” series is generously disparities in federal funding for agencies responsible for the supported by Sue and Melvin Gray. humanities, the arts, and the sciences (in 2016, for example, the federal appropriations for the National Science Foundation outweigh by a factor of 25 the combined appropriations for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts). Massey and Adams agreed that for this funding gap to begin to close, the arts and humanities must make a case for both their economic and cultural value—on college campuses and beyond. The humanities, in particular, can play an enormous role in helping us answer the social, cultural, and ethical questions that emerge in the wake of scientific and technological advances—questions that STEM disciplines alone are not designed to answer. The sciences, after all, are concerned with expanding our range of technical capabilities across the human and natural worlds. These capabilities have dramatically Bro Adams (left) and Walter Massey

IN MEMORIAM

Paul T. Ruxin It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to Newberry Trustee Paul Ruxin, who died April 15 after sustaining injuries in a traffic accident in California. The Newberry, and many other cultural institutions across the country, benefited enormously from Paul’s leadership and his passion for—and knowledge about—a variety of subjects within the humanities.

A native of Cleveland, Paul was an alumnus of Amherst College (Class of 1965) and the Law School of the University of Virginia (Class of 1968), where he was an editor of the

law review. He had a distinguished legal career at Jones Day in Cleveland and Chicago, in the field of public utilities law.

Along the way, he cultivated an interest in collecting, literature, and the British eighteenth-century, and became a renowned collector of Boswelliana and Johnsoniana. Paul’s wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and expertise in these areas informed his volunteer leadership positions in a number of educational and cultural organizations, including chairing the Board of Governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library; heading the Friends of the Amherst College Library; and serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the Poetry Foundation.

Paul’s interest in the Newberry was both broad and deep, and he cherished the ways in which our mission distinguishes the Newberry from other great research libraries. In recent years, he had a vital role in helping us recalibrate our collecting strategies and policies, and in the development of the Society of Collectors.

The Newberry Magazine

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PROSPECT

Upcoming Events Since the Newberry’s founding in 1887, the library has provided programs in the humanities for people throughout the Chicago area and beyond. Today, you can explore history, literature, music, and the arts through public lectures, meet-the-author events, exhibitions, seminars, and other programs. Unless otherwise noted, programming is free and no reservations are required. This is a partial list of programs. Please check www.newberry.org for updates.

EXHIBITIONS Exploration 2016: The 30th Annual Juried Exhibition of the Chicago Calligraphy Collective April 4 – June 24, R.R. Donnelley Gallery Calligraphy Is Always News: Recent Newberry Acquisitions April 8 – July 1, Hermon Dunlap Smith Gallery Creating Shakespeare September 23 – December 31 Sponsored by Exelon and The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation

JUNE “The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle’s Journey across America” A Newberry Meet the Author Program with Lorraine Boissoneault and members from the 1976 expedition that followed the route of French explorer La Salle across America, in honor of America’s Bicentennial Thursday, June 2, 6 pm Genealogy and Local History Orientation Saturday, June 4, 9 am

Make Music Chicago 2016 Washington Square Park (901 N. Clark St.) Co-sponsored with the Washington Square Park Advisory Council and supported by a grant from the Chicago Free for All Fund at The Chicago Community Trust Tuesday, June 21 Musical performances and sing-alongs all day; check the Newberry’s website for details.

JULY Genealogy and Local History Orientation Saturday, July 9, 9 am The Newberry Book Fair Thursday, July 28 – Sunday, July 31 The Bughouse Square Debates Washington Square Park (901 N. Clark St.) Saturday, July 30, noon – 4 pm

AUGUST Genealogy and Local History Orientation Saturday, August 6, 9 am

Remember the Newberry Your generosity is vitally important to the Newberry Library’s ability to offer public programs that enlighten and stimulate all those with an interest in the humanities and to serve researchers from across the country and around the world.

You can continue your support of the Newberry, and perhaps make a much larger gift than you thought possible, by including a bequest to the library in your will or trust.

To explore the many ways you can remember the Newberry, visit newberry.plannedgiving.org or contact Sarah Alger, Director of Development, at (312) 255-3544.

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Spring 2016

Creating

Shakespeare September 23 – December 31, 2016

An exhibition exploring Shakespeare and his 400-year afterlife as a literary icon and cultural phenomenon.

“ One man in his time plays many parts” – As You Like It

Proud partner of

Creating Shakespeare is sponsored by Rosemary J. Schnell

and The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation.

Non-Profit Organization

U.S. POSTAGE PAID 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL 60610 www.newberry.org

The Newberry Library

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday 10 am to 6 pm Friday 10 am to 5 pm Saturday 9 am to 5 pm

60 West Walton St. • Chicago, IL 60610 • 312-255-3520