Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Marguerite Yourcenar, Alchemist, Rhoda Lerman

The Courier

Marguerite Yourcenar worked with full consciousness and deep knowledge in the language and landscape of alchemy. She was not only writing books; she was remaking her soul. In the "Reflections on the Composition of The Memoirs of Hadrian", appendixed to the novel, she notes that she writes "with one foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts, or more accurately, without metaphor, absorption in that sympathetic magic which operates when one transports one's self in thought into another's body and soul". In The Memoirs of Hadrian we enter the territory of the landscape with her. In The Abyss we read …

Memories Of Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary H. Marshall

The Courier

This paper is an amplification of Professor Marshall's introductory remarks to her lecture "Marguerite Yourcenar: Her Mythical and Historical Imagination", which was given to the Syracuse University Library Associates on 20 February 1990. At the end the reader will find responses to additional specific interview questions, as well as transcribed selections from a few Yourcenar-Marshall letters. Because of her friendship with Professor Marshall, Marguerite Yourcenar gave to the Syracuse University Library several early inscribed editions of her works.

The Huntington Mansion In New York: Economics Of Architecture And Decoration In The 1890s, Isabelle Hyman

The Courier

In 1889 railroad millionaire Collis P. Huntington (1821-1900) and his wife Arabella (d. 1924) purchased a large property on the southeast comer of New York's Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, the most fashionable residential neighborhood of the period, and undertook to build there another of the great stone piles that constituted the habitats of the very rich during the city's Gilded Age. Aspects of the history of the Fifty-seventh Street Huntington mansion have been recounted, but supplementary information about its decoration and about the artists and craftsmen who embellished it can be found in the George Arents Research Library at …

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Five), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

This, the fifth in a series on the history and ambitions of punctuation, describes the first vigorous manifestation of logical pointing. In an enlightened atmosphere of book reading and language consciousness, it was discerned that the shapes of sentences and their working parts were better delineated when punctuated syntactically.

News Of The Library And The Library Associates, Syracuse University Library Associates

The Courier

RECENT ACQUISITIONS As 1990 comes to a close, the George Arents Research Library can report a particularly exciting year in the development of its collections. As the following list of recent acquisitions shows, both the generosity of our donors and the Library's commitment to the development of its research collections continue to be strong.

Courier, Volume Xxv, Number 2, Fall 1990, Syracuse University Library Associates

The Courier

Huntington Mansion in New York: Economics of Architecture and Decoration in the 1890s / Isabelle Hyman, p. 3 -- Memories of Maruerite Yourcenar / Mary H. Marshall, p. 31 -- Margurite Yourcenar, Alchemist / Rhoda Lerman, p. 51 -- Legacy for Stephen Crane: the Princeton Writings of the Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane / Thomas A. Gullason, p. 55 -- Punctator's World: a Discursion (Part Five) / Gwen G. Robinson p. 81 -- News of the Syracuse University Library and the Library Associates, p. 123.

"I Want To Do This Job": More Margaret Bourke-White Letters To Erskine Caldwell, William L. Howard

The Courier

Eleven letters have recently been added to the George Arents Research Library's collection of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White correspondence. In the possession of Caldwell's first wife, Helen Caldwell Cushman, until her death in 1986, these letters were bought from a North Carolina bookdealer acting on behalf of Helen and Erskine's granddaughter. The entire group was written by Bourke-White in 1936, just prior to and immediately after her first tour of the South with Caldwell, during which they gathered material for You Have Seen Their Faces. A page of unsigned journal entries chronicling Bourke-White's behavior on the trip accompanies the …

Intentional Omissions From The Published Civil War Diaries Of Admiral John A. Dahlgren, Robert J. Schneller Jr.

The Courier

This article explains the events surrounding the publication of the biography of John A. Dahlgren, collected and penned by his wife Marguerite. The article was researched with the aid of the John A. Dahlgren Papers at the Syracuse University Special Collection. Marguerite had motives to exalt her husband's life: he had become an unpopular and controversial figure despite his accomplishments, and Marguerite was also in the process of petitioning Congress, seeking to receive royalties for her husband's military inventions.

The New School Of Wood Engraving, Edward A. Gokey

The Courier

This article traces the history of modern wood engraving, including the argument in the art world that took place regarding whether wood engraving could be considered "art" in the first place. As the art form gained popularity with print publishers due to its convenience and beauty, internal debates took place about which direction the art form should take, especially within the "New School" of wood engraving that had emerged. Research for the article was aided by Syracuse University's Special Collections.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Four), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

This, the fourth in a series of essays on the history of punctuation, deals with Renaissance and Jacobean England, a period of intense experiment both in language and in the bookmaking arts. Printing, now fully in action, governed the public perception of what looked best on the page and how text should be pointed and spelled. Special attention is given to authors such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

Stephen Crane's Father And The Holiness Movement, Christopher Benfey

The Courier

Stephen Crane was the son and grandson of prominent Methodist ministers, and it is often assumed that his colorful life of excess and adventure was an understandable rejection of that legacy. But his father's prominence during Crane's childhood was tinged with something close to scandal, and what the son rejected is not entirely clear. Indeed, Crane the novelist seems to have inherited certain traits of character from Crane the minister-tenacity of purpose, intellectual integrity, iconoclastic fearlessness-and adapted them to his own ends.

This article attempts to answer the question: Why did Stephen Crane's father, Jonathan Townley Crane (1819-1880), give up …

News Of The Library And The Library Associates, Syracuse University Library Associates

The Courier

From March 1944 through July 1945 Helen and Sydney Stringer found themselves on separate continents: he, a medical officer in Africa, Italy, France and Germany and she, the mother of four, living in Skaneateles, New York. They wrote almost daily-articulate, courageous, touching, often humorous letters-exchanging accounts of life in the war zone and on the home front. The letters were recently made into the book Prisms: As We Were, March 23, 1944-July 12, 1945 and privately printed by Helen Stringer (Manlius, New York: 1989). Both the book and the original letters have been donated by Helen Stringer to the George …

Courier, Volume Xxv, Number 1, Spring 1990, Syracuse University Library Associates

The Courier

Intentional Omissions from the Published Civil War Diaries of Admiral John A. Dalgren / Robert J. Schneller, Jr., p. 3 -- Stephen Crane's Father and the Holiness Movement / Christopher Benfey, p. 27 -- "I Want to Do This Job": More Margaret Bourke-White Letters to Erskine Caldwell / William L. Howard, p. 37 -- The New School of Wood Engraving / Edward A. Gokey, p. 53 -- The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Four) / Gwen G. Robinson, p. 85 -- News of the Syracuse University Library and the Library Associates, p. 127.