News from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection
"Dickens and the Late Victorians"
Currently on view, though 1 March 2012 (by appointment only) is the exhibition "Dickens and the Late Victorians." Curated by Petra Clark, graduate assistant in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, and by Mark Samuels Lasner, the display focuses on writers and artists who had a connection – personal or through influence or criticism – with Dickens and is works. George Eliot, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Doré, Alice Meynell, and George Gissing are among the figures represented. A highlight of the exhibition is an original miniature watercolor portrait of Dickens by his daughter, Kate Perugini.
"Beardsley and His Publishers," 29 March 2012
On Thursday, 29 March, Mark Samuels Lasner will be speaking on "Beardsley and His Publishers" at the Book Club of California in San Francisco. The talk is one of a series of events occasioned by the exhibition, "The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860-1900," at the Legion of Honor until 17 June 2012. Mills College is having a show of "Women Bookmakers of the Aesthetic Movement" and Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Carter Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Delaware, is giving a lecture there on Wednesday, 28 March – her topic, "The Aesthetic Woman."
Presentations planned for 2011-2012
Mark Samuels Lasner will be giving a number of talks during the 2011-2012 academic year. In October, Samuels Lasner is to give a presentation to library students at the University of Maryland-College Park. On November 10, 2011, he will deliver a lecture on "Aubrey Beardsley and His Publishers" at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The Washington Rare Books Group has also invited him to speak on "Collecting the Late Victorians" at the group's annual May 2012 lunch at Ft. Totten, located in Washington, D.C..
University of Delaware Library/Delaware Art Museum Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies
The University of Delaware Library and the Delaware Art Museum invite applications for the 2012 joint Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies. This one-month Fellowship is intended for scholars working on the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. Up to $2,500 is available. The recipient will be expected to be in residence during 2012 and to make use of the resources of both the University of Delaware Library and the Delaware Art Museum. By arrangement with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, scholars may apply to each institution for awards in the same year; every effort will be made to offer consecutive dates. The Delaware Art Museum is home to the most important collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in the US. Assembled largely by Samuel Bancroft, Jr., the collection includes paintings, works on paper, decorative arts, manuscripts, and letters, and is augmented by the museum’s Helen Farr Sloan art library. With comprehensive holdings in books, periodicals, electronic resources, and microforms, the University of Delaware Library is a major resource for the study of literature and art. The Special Collections Department contains material related to the Pre-Raphaelites who are also well-represented in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection of Victorian books, manuscripts, and artworks. The deadline for applications is October 15, 2011. For more information and an application form visit www.delart.org/education/fellowships.html or write to: Pre-Raphaelite Studies Fellowship Committee Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, DE 19806.
Mediamorphosis: Periodicals Across the Pond, 9 September 2011
"Mediamorphosis: Periodicals Across the Pond" is an online exhibition of magazines and print ephemera from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection and the University of Delaware Library's Department of Special Collections that was originally on display Friday, September 9, 2011, in the Mark Samuels Lasner Room, in conjunction with the University of Delaware symposium Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic Sphere(s), 1880-1940. The exhibition was curated by Mark Samuels Lasner and Timothy D. Murray.
Samuels Lasner contributes chapter to Other People's Books, February 2011
Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in Margins, appeared in the New York Times, February 20, 2011. The new book mentioned in the article, Other People's Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell (Chicago: Caxton Club, 2011), contains an introduction by G. Thomas Tanselle and a contribution by Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow, University of Delaware Library.
Samuels Lasner resources mentioned on Robert Louis Stevenson website, December 2010
The University of Delaware Library and the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection are listed under "Other Libraries" on the Robert Louis Stevenson website.
Useful & Beautiful: The Transatlantic Arts of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, 7-9 October 2010
Mark Samuels Lasner was the principal facilitator of this conference and related exhibitions, which was held 7–9 October 2010 at the University of Delaware (Newark, DE) and at the Delaware Art Museum and the Winterthur Museum & Country Estate (Wilmington, DE). Organized with the assistance of the William Morris Society in the United States, "Useful & Beautiful" highlighted the strengths of the University of Delaware’s rare books, art, and manuscripts collections; Winterthur’s important holdings in American decorative arts; and the Delaware Art Museum’s superlative Pre-Raphaelite collection (the largest outside Britain). All events focused on the multitude of transatlantic exchanges that involved Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements of the late nineteenth century.
In addition to sessions featuring internationally known scholars and experts, there was a keynote lecture by noted biographer Fred Kaplan; demonstrations by leading practitioners who make and design Arts and Crafts objects; special exhibitions; an early music recital; and a performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest by the University of Delaware’s critically acclaimed Resident Ensemble Players/Professional Theatre Training Program.
For more information, including a list of speakers, go to www.udel.edu/conferences/uandb.
The University of Delaware Library mounted two exhibitions associated with "Useful & Beautiful." "London Bound: American Writers in Britain, 1870–1916," in the Special Collections Department gallery, curated by Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Delaware, and by Mark Samuels Lasner, was open to the public 24 August–17 December 2010. A display on "The Multifaceted Mr. Morris" in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection room (Morris Library 115A) was also on view during the conference.
McNeill Whistler.
Portrait of James McNeill
Whistler. Ink, 1890.
Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the Henry B. Plant Museum, Tampa, FL, 5 March - 5 June 2010
More than fifty drawings, prints, photographs, and books from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection were on display at the Henry B. Plant Museum, Tampa, FL, in the spring of 2010. Scheduled from 5 March to 5 June 2010, Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection was curated by Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware. The show was a version of an exhibition held in 2008 at the Grolier Club in New York—recorded in a book of the same name published by the University of Delaware Press. Facing the Late Victorians was timed to coincide with the Nineteenth Century Studies Association’s 11th annual conference, Theatricality and the Performative in the Long Nineteenth Century, which took place 11-12 March 2010 at the University of Tampa. (The Plant Museum is located in the university’s glorious late-Victorian main building, originally the Tampa Bay Hotel which opened in 1891). Both Mark Samuels Lasner and Margaret D. Stetz spoke at the conference.
For an illustrated review of the Grolier Club version of this exhibition, see Maureen E. Mulvihill's essay for the Victorian Society in America's March-April 2008 e-newsletter.
Books in Hard Times Conference, 22 September 2009
Mark Samuels Lasner presented a talk, "A Collector’s View," at the Books in Hard Times conference held at the Grolier Club, New York, on 22 September 2009. The conference examined "the impact of the recession on collectors, librarians, and the antiquarian booktrade" and featured a number of well-known speakers from the "book world" including Robert H. Jackson, William S. Reese, Tom Congleton, Priscilla Juvelis, Breon Mitchell, Katherine Reagan, David Alan Richards, William Buice III, and Terry Belanger. For the text of the talk click here.
