Sharon Marcus, Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University December 3, 2012 (Monday) Butler Library, Room 523 from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Theatrical scrapbooks are some of the least utilized documents in theater history archives, yet also among the most useful, replete with cast lists, advertising imagery, ticket […]
“Processing the Andrew Sarris Papers or ‘Is Harry Too Dirty?'”
Megan Darlington, RBML Intern (summer, 2012) As an intern at RBML this past summer, I had the pleasure of processing the papers of prominent film critic and Columbia professor, the late Andrew Sarris (1928-2012). The papers reveal a rare glimpse into Sarris’s life and work, and document major trends in theory and criticism during a […]
Floral-strewn mathematics
Printers’ flowers, pieces of type bearing designs (generally floral and arabesque) rather than letterforms, are a convenient and traditional way for a printer to pretty-up a text, as the ornaments combine easily within the page of type for printing. The samples above and below, both from Agostino dal Pozzo’s Gnomonices biformis, Venice 1679 (Plimpton 513 1679 […]
Pretty Mathematics
We have restarted a project to finish cataloging the Plimpton Collection. George Arthur Plimpton (1855-1936) collected “our tools of learning,” pretty broadly described, and gave the collection to Columbia shortly before his death. I’ve been enjoying reviewing the early books — though I’ve been a little surprised by how many books printed before 1800 remain […]
Naughtiness
Forgive me, reader; it’s been a very long time since my last post. Why? Because every time I find something interesting to write about it gets… complicated, and I get distracted. For example: A comics class came for a hands-on session, and in addition to the comics the professor picked out, I showed them […]