Watch, Read, Listen

For one hundred years The Huntington has been spreading knowledge like pollen, helping scholarship bloom into exhibitions and publications. Sometimes the right pollen is hard to get though, that’s why it’s good to have friends who can help.

James Brayton Hall, president of the Garden Conservancy, examines what America’s gardens say about our culture and how new approaches pioneered by the Conservancy are helping to protect and document these landscapes for the future. Several examples of West Coast gardens are highlighted, including remarkable successes—such as the gardens surrounding the former prison on Alcatraz Island—and one near failure.

Henry Huntington acquired one of the rarest books in the history of English literature: the so-called “bad quarto” of Hamlet. Zachary Lesser, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses how this book’s discovery in 1823 transformed our ideas about Hamlet, how it made its way to The Huntington, and what can we learn through this book’s history about modern libraries.

This interdisciplinary conference explored the subterranean world of Elizabethan Catholic print and scribal culture, set against the backdrop of press censorship, illicit printing, book smuggling, subversive scribal publication, and the uses of Catholic writing by government agents. The study of book circulation illuminated the nature and significance of the persecuted religious minority that was, by the end of the 16th century, no longer supposed to exist.