Special Collections Blog

August 04, 2008

The School for Scandal is Featured Book for August

First produced in 1777 in London's Drury Lane Theatre, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "The School for Scandal" is a rollicking British social farce filled with manners, mischief and marital mayhem. It is the story of Sir Oliver Surface and his two ne'er do well nephews Joseph and Surface joined by a cast of characters including Sir Peter Teazle and his wife, Lady Teazle and a group of gossips led by Lady Sneerwell.

The play remains a crowd pleaser and is performed to this day. Binghamton University's Special Collections holds a beautiful rendition of the play published in London by Hodder & Stoughton. Illustrated by Hugh Thomson, the text is accompanied by a number of colored plates which brilliantly illustrate the play's characters.

Posted by jgreen at 10:57 AM

July 02, 2008

The King is a Fink! is Featured Book for July

In the early 1960s Johnny Hart (1931-2007), who had been born in Endicott, NY, and had become successful among cartoonists for previously creating B.C., began collaborating with a friend who had not been published before, Brant Parker. Having already made a cartoon about the Stone Age in B.C., Hart advanced through time to the Middle Ages, taking an idea from a deck of playing cards to create the first few strips of The Wizard of Id. The strip was first syndicated on November 9, 1964, drawn by Parker and co-written by Parker and Hart.

The Wizard of Id deals with the goings-on of the run-down, oppressed Kingdom of Id. It follows people from all corners of the kingdom, but concentrates on the court of a tyrannical dwarf-sized monarch, known only as "the King". The jokes center on the idea that people are stuck with the King as their ruler, and that his administration's incompetence has led to a kingdom that is, amusingly, poorly kept. The cast is large for a daily cartoon strip, and there are recurring jokes for each character and for the kingdom itself, so that from day to day it appears as if it were several comic strips based in the same place.

Id is known as "the land of milk and honey", and while it is set a thousand years ago, the strip's humor occasionally takes the reader through satire of American culture. Technology changes to suit whatever a joke requires: a battle with spears and arrows might be followed by a peasant using an ATM. The general trend is that even though the personalities of the characters are well known, their surroundings will morph to satisfy a good joke. The aspects that stay the same, however, are that Id is in the middle of nowhere and is home to a large castle surrounded by a moat. The King and his subjects run an army that fight "the Huns", and keep guards who shout the time and "all's well" from the castle walls, while the peasants, or "Id-iots", make little money as stablehands to keep modest lifestyles.

Parker's drawing style was well suited to the humor of the strip; little background detail was given in each pane, to allow a concentration on dialogue. As the years passed, even as Parker's style became more refined (with cleaner lines and more consistent proportions) he drew still less background detail.

The Wizard of Id was named best humor strip by the American National Cartoonists Society in 1971, 1976, 1980, 1982 and 1983, and Johnny Hart received a Reuben Award for his work on it and B.C. in 1968, an award which Brant Parker later received for it in 1984. Furthermore, it has seen dozens of paperback collections published since 1965, and even now there are some still in print. The King is a Fink!, published in 1969, is one of these paperback collections and can be found in Special Collections located on the second floor of the Glenn G. Bartle Library.

Posted by jgreen at 04:42 PM

May 13, 2008

Comrade Rockstar from the Rogg Collection is Featured Book for May/June 2008

Dean Reed was one of the strangest superstars in the history of popular cluture. Failing to gain recognition in his native United States, he gained celebrity in South America in the early 1960s; following this, unbelievably, he became the biggest star in the Soviet Union, where he was awarded the Lenin Prize and his icons were sold alongside those of Joseph Stalin. His Albums went gold from Bulgaria to Berlin. He made highly successful movies and, naively earnest, was also an unwitting acolyte for socialism; everywhere he went, he was mobbed by his fans. And then, in 1986, at the height of his fame, right after 60 Minutes had devoted a segment to him finally giving him the recognition he had never attained at home, he drowned in mysterious circumstances in East Berlin.

Drawn magnetically to his story, Reggie Nadelson pursued the mystery of Dean Reed's life and death across America and Eastern Europe, her own journey mirroring his. As she traveled, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union crumbled, and Reed became an increasingly alluring figure, his life an unrepeatable tale of the Cold War world. Encountering the characters - musicians and DJs, politicians and public figures, lovers and wives - who peopled Reed's life, Nadelson was drawn further and further into a seedy, often hilarious, subculture of sex, politics, and rock 'n' roll. Part biography, part memoir and personal journey, Comrade Rockstar is an unforgettable chronicle of an utterly improbable man, who retains a cult following to this day.

Comrade rockstar : the life and mystery of Dean Reed, the all-American boy who brought rock ’n’ roll to the Soviet Union / Reggie Nadelson. Edition: Rev. ed. New York : Walker & Co. : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2006. Gift of Allan Rogg.

Special Collections Rogg Collection ML 420 .R298 N33 2006

Posted by jgreen at 02:59 PM

January 07, 2008

Featured Book

Registrum hujus operis libri cronicarum cū figuris et ijmagibus ab inicio mūdi…, is commonly known as the Nuremberg Chronicle. This book was written by Hartmann Schedel and stands as an encyclopedic history of the western world and its cities. The Nuremberg Chronicle begins with the creation story and ends with Ptolemy’s map of the known world at the close of the fifteenth century. Sebald Schreyer and Sebald Schreyer, both wealthy businessmen provided the financial support to publish the book, and in June 1493, Anton Koberger printed between 1400 – 1500 copies of the Latin edition, of which only 400 have survived. The woodblock prints were carved by the artists, Wilhelm Pleydenwurf and Michael Wohlgemut, the latter’s whose apprentice was Albrecht Durer at the time of publication.

The Nuremberg Chronicle is part of the Howard Collection which was donated to the library by Archibald Howard, a lawyer with the Binghamton law firm Hinman, Howard and Kattell, and an accomplished bibliophile. Howard’s personal library contained 3,000 volumes, and included Late Renaissance books, classic first editions, books with fine bindings, limited editions and collectors' printings. The collection is concentrated in the areas of nineteenth century English and American literature, history and scientific exploration.

To learn more about the publishing history of University Libraries’ copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, please visit this website: http://www.beloit.edu/~nurember/inside/about/index.htm

Posted by jgreen at 04:32 PM