“Dear Miss Crawford,” writes D. H. Lawrence in a letter dated December 23, 1909, “I hope my verses won’t offend you. I know they are poor enough. But do you like my little card?” The “little card,” sent to Grace Crawford and today part of the D. H. Lawrence collection at the Ransom Center, is a small, handmade Christmas greeting card, its front and back covers decorated with watercolors by Lawrence. On the front, four bees surround a stock of delicately drooping bluebells; one bee has attached itself to a flower. On the back, Lawrence has finely rendered a mayfly, with elegantly arranged wings and legs. [Read more…] about Season’s greetings in the Ransom Center’s collections
Powerful currents: John Wilson’s Down by the Riverside prints
The dark male figure, head bent to the driving rain indicated by the dense lines that cover the page, lifts a slight woman into a simple rowboat. The boat’s bow is pointed through the floodwaters toward higher ground, its port side steadied by a second stooped male. [Read more…] about Powerful currents: John Wilson’s Down by the Riverside prints
Meticulous free verse: Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and Ellsworth Kelly
“The literary value, if I may say it, of this span of empty space on the page, which mentally separates groups of words or words themselves, is to periodically accelerate or slow the movement, the scansion, the sequence even, given one’s simultaneous view of the entirety of the page…” (Stéphane Mallarmé, “Observation Relative au Poème Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard,” Cosmopolis, May 1897, p. 412 [trans.]) [Read more…] about Meticulous free verse: Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and Ellsworth Kelly
George Macy’s illustrated editions of Charles Dickens’s Christmas classic
Between July 1937 and March 1938, Nonesuch Press—under the direction of George Macy—set out to publish what it billed as the most extensive collection yet made of Charles Dickens’s writings. It had already been an energetic few years. Macy founded the subscription-based Limited Editions Club in 1929, and the Heritage Press in 1935, before acquiring London-based Nonesuch Press in 1936. Nonesuch’s practice of teaming up a small hand press for design and commercial printers for production allowed for a wider circulation of its fine-press quality books. [Read more…] about George Macy’s illustrated editions of Charles Dickens’s Christmas classic
Exploring Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” in the Ransom Center’s collection
On January 6, 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a powerful State of the Union address. In it the president explained his decision to supply arms and materials to the Allied war effort. Occurring 11 months prior to U.S. entry into World War II, Roosevelt’s speech described the support as a crucial reaction against the threat of a “new order of tyranny that seeks to spread over every continent today”—one that “the American people have set their faces unalterably against.” [Read more…] about Exploring Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” in the Ransom Center’s collection
