Morgan Library & Museum Archives - Evanston Public Library

A Perfect "Cover Up" At The Morgan Library

June 2, 2014

A new exhibit at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum features book jackets, first editions, galley proofs, and manuscripts from the Carter Burden Collection. Considered the book jackets’ golden age, the exhibition includes book covers from The Great Gatsby, Light in August, and Herzog as well as first edition copies of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus. The nearly 100 items in this literary exhibit were originally purchased by Carter Burden (a former NY City councilman) who began collecting in 1973 by acquiring Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and had “assembled the greatest collection of modern American literature in private hands.” You can read more about this “feast of first editions” in the NYTimes article here.

Laura

A Show That Lives Up To Its Poe-tential

October 3, 2013

“Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul” is a new exhibit opening Friday at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum. Drawn from holdings of the Morgan, the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, and Susan Jaffe Tane, described as “the world’s foremost private Poe collector, the exhibit brings together an amazing collection of Poe materials including manuscripts, letters, first editions, Poe daguerreotypes, and “even a fragment of Poe’s original coffin.” There are some treasures as well – “three copies of Poe’s first book, “Tamerlane and Other Poems, which is among the rarest books in American literature (only 50 copies were printed, and just 12 remain), and one of only three existing pages of “The Lighthouse,” a story left unfinished at Poe’s death.” Besides all the Poe artifacts, the show also highlights his influence on other writers such as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Vladimir Nabokov and Stephen King. Read more about the collection in this NYT article. And check the EPL catalog for works by and about this writer.

Laura

Morgan Library Celebrates Swann's Way Centennial

February 15, 2013

Just in time for Evanston Public Library’s yearlong discussion of Proust, New York’s’ Morgan Library & Museum opened a new exhibition in honor of the 100 year anniversary of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way – the first volume in his 7-volume novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). The materials, being shown for the first time outside of Paris, are on loan from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. On exhibit are notebooks , doodles and galleys, postcards and photographs, all related to the creation of Swann’s Way. It sounds like a fascinating exhibit, but as New York Times reviewer Edward Rothstein noted: “It would also help, when you visit, not only to have once read the book, but also to have it fresh in your mind. Otherwise you might pick up fragments of knowledge and see some remarkable artifacts, but will not grasp what kinds of processes are on display here.” Marcel Proust and ‘Swann’s Way’: 100th Anniversary is on view at the Morgan Library through April 28. Book your flight now – or just get in the mood with tea and madeleines. Read the entire NYT article here.

Laura