Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Manuscripts
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
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Manuscripts
The collection consists of official copies of plays submitted for licensing between 1737 and 1824. Most of copies were written by professional copyists. Approximately 95 of the plays submitted were printed texts, either whole or partial. These have been cataloged individually and may be searched in the online catalog.
LA 912
Manuscripts
Adaptation from the Jacobean comedy written by John Fletcher first published in 1647. This version was probably altered by Garrick although it is not on any list of works edited by him. The play is a sequel to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The gender roles are reversed and it is the husband Petruchio who is 'tamed' by his wife Maria.
mssLA 133
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Rare Books
Collins and McKechnie, special agents of the railroad police in Los Angeles, had a number of problems on their hands. There was the matter of that starving, badly beaten young Mexican whom Collins had found in the refrigerator car. He had whispered, "Joya" -- Spanish for "jewelry." And then there was the blonde who reported $75 worth of baggage stolen, undervaluing her loss by many thousands of dollars. McKechnie's case involved a shapely, violet-eyed number who demanded to know what had really happened to her father in the freight yards. And what had happened to his money. When the cases merged into one, Collins and McKechnie found that they were up against something far from routine -- large-scale racketeering, with side effects of theft, brutality, and murder--Adapted from jacket.
644094
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Rare Books
"In Ezawa, the mysterious power of photography and the compulsion to take photos can almost be likened to character traits in a person, whose biography he is writing with his digital drawings in 'The history of photography remix.' Here, the great deeds and dramas of photography are evaluated from an, if not historical, then at least medial distance: was it photography's purpose to protect spontaneous life, or did it insert difference and distance? Did it serve to keep the institutions of Meaning, Tradition, and History in place, or did the unique moment that it tore out of time's normal passage make for a revolutionary contingency? What historical signification is accumulated in photography? ... Ezawa's drawings inhabit the traditional paradoxes of photography, not least the one that his 'History of photography remix' is at the same time radically mediated and radically subjective. In his almost airtight digital drawings, no Ubenhagen der Kultur seeps in; of course there are nukes, Nazis and terrorists, but there are also flowers, surfers and Cindy Sherman. What is right or wrong is simply not the question, and aggression as well as desire is out of the picture. It is exactly this absence, not of criteria but of judgment, that reflects the attempt at inhabiting a culture whose main feature is uncertainty and the fear of it. In this way, Ezawa's remix of the history of photography is also a (self-)portrayal of the flux of contemporary life, and the attempt at inhabiting it"--From introduction.
653175
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Manuscripts
This collection consists of 35 business letters. The bulk of the letters are written from Council Bluffs, Iowa Territory to Alexander Lopez, a businessman, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The letters illustrate the difficulties of frontier business dealings, as Lopez is seeking to recover monies owed to him by merchants in Council Bluffs. The exchanges last over a decade from 1861-1872. In the first letter written on February 23, 1861 from Council Bluff, McBride and Bowen propose to trade their debt for stock in Council Bluffs & St. Joseph Railroad. McBride and Bowen clearly state they could not pay Lopez money. R.L. Douglass, the attorney representing the Lopez, writes "I have never felt myself at liberty to secure any thing but money in payment, yet Mess. McB & B seem possessed with the idea that they can pay with wild lands at high prices" (Mar. 5, 1861). Approximately three months later, payment has yet to be made by McBride and Bowen. Douglass writes to Lopez stating that McBride and Bowen have violated the agreement. "I am now well satisfied that they will never pay you one cent in cash" (May 27, 1861). Lopez finds the contents of Douglass' letter written on May 27, 1861 surprising because he was initially "favorably impressed towards him [McBride]" (June 4, 1861). A letter written on July 16, 1861 by S. Clinton to W.A. Drown reveals that the firm of McBride and Bowen paid $10,000 to "settle up their business" and creditors will now repossess the property owned by the firm "or do worse." In the same letter, the offer for railroad stock is on the table, which Lopez declines. Eventually, the matter ends up in court and Lopez settles for the only asset left in McBride's possession: stock. The remaining correspondence concerns Lopez's attempt to sell the stock and his payment of taxes owed on the lots. On the upside, Douglass reports in a letter written on March 4, 1867 that the railroad and lot stocks are improving and Lopez may realize his money out of them.
mssHM 81400-81434
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Rare Books
From 1925 until his death in 1929 the Hamburg-based art and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on his Mnemosyne Atlas, a volume of plates that has, in the meanwhile, taken on mythical status in the study of modern art and visual studies. With this project, Warburg created a visual reference system that was far ahead of its time. In cooperation with the Warburg Institute, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have now undertaken the task of finding all of the individual pictures from the atlas and displaying these reproductions of artworks from the Middle East, European antiquity, and the Renaissance in the same way that Warburg himself showed them, on panels hung with black fabric. This folio volume and the exhibition in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin succeed in restoring Warburg's vanished legacy something that researchers have long considered impossible. Aby Warburg (1866-1929), scion of a Hamburg banking family, completed his doctorate in 1892 on the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. As a result, he comprehensively studied the interplay of myths, images and rites from different cultural contexts. This lead him to his main subject matter: the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance. With his attempt to break down the rigid boundaries of art history, Warburg is regarded as one of the fathers of modern pictorial science.
653370