Encouraging new scholars in bibliography.

The New Scholars Program of the Bibliographical Society of America seeks to encourage early-career scholars, graduate students, librarians, booksellers, and collectors in bibliography (defined as any research that deals with the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, and subsequent history of textual artifacts). Each year, BSA invites three new scholars to give a 15-minute presentation on their research and offers an honorarium of $1,000. This year, the presentations will be virtual. The application deadline is September 8, 2020. Further details here.

Northern Public Radio on NIU's dime novel collection.

Northern Public Radio highlights the digitization of the Johannsen Collection of dime novels and story papers at the Northern Illinois University libraries. The NIU libraries, in partnership with Villanova University, will digitize 5400 dime novels through a grant of nearly $450,000 from the Digitizing Hidden Collections initiative of the Council on Library and Information Resources. More than 2000 works compose the library's current online offerings, including dime novels by early mystery writer-editor Metta Victoria Fuller Victor and the extensive Nick Carter series.

For GivingTuesday: Consider mystery collections.

Phoebe Atwood
Taylor. From
Barnard College's
Mortarboard, 1930

Today's Giving Tuesday focuses attention on charitable contributions, as people consider the organizations or causes to support or to make a contribution in someone's name during the holiday season.

Libraries and archives need support to acquire, preserve, catalog, and digitize their collections as well as to present exhibitions or other programs involving their holdings. Consider contributing to your alma mater's library or one of the following collections with significant mystery elements:

• Ray and Pat Browne Popular Culture Library, Bowling Green State University

• Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico (home of the papers of Tony Hillerman)

• Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University (home of manuscripts of many authors such as Harry Kemelman, Jane Langton, Elizabeth Linington, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Hillary Waugh, and Donald Westlake)

• Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington (home of the papers of author-critic Anthony Boucher and Mystery Writers of America)

• Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (home of Erle Stanley Gardner's "plot wheel")

• Rose Library, Emory University (home of one of the largest collections of Victorian yellowbacks)

• Special Collections, University of California Irvine (home of the papers of Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald, and Margaret Millar)

• Special Collections, University of South Carolina (home of the papers of James Ellroy, George V. Higgins, and John Jakes. An ongoing and major project of the USC libraries is the preservation and digitization of 2000 Fox Movietone newsreels.)

• Wisconsin Center for Film and Television Research (home of the papers of Vera Caspary, Kirk Douglas, and Dalton Trumbo. The center has recently established a portal at the Internet Archive that includes a home movie of theater legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.)

The Library of Congress offers several options for supporting its work (don't forget that it houses the papers of luminaries such as James M. Cain), including the National Book Festival.

UCLA celebrates the films of Kirk Douglas.

Kirk Douglas and Eleanor Parker
in Detective Story (1951)

The UCLA Film & Television Archive is marking Kirk Douglas's upcoming 100th birthday in December with showings of Douglas films through Sept. 30. They include Posse and Tough Guys (Aug 14), Lonely Are the Brave and Strangers When We Meet (Aug 20; the latter written by Evan Hunter), and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Out of the Past (Sept. 18).

Ernest A. Young, detective dime novelist.

Ad including books by
Harry Rockwood, pseudonym
of Ernest A. Young

Brandeis Special Collections highlights its newly acquired papers of Massachusetts resident Ernest A. Young (1858–1936), who was known for his detective dime novels under pseudonyms such as Harry Rockwood. His works include Harry Pinkurten, the King of Detectives (1882) and Clarice Dyke, the Female Detective (1883). 

Europe's public libraries and refugees.

Poster from the Austrian Library
Association "Welcome" campaign

The Public Libraries Section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions presents a roundup of ways in which public libraries in Europe are reaching out to refugees. For example, the Cologne Public Library has an intercultural library forum that offers, among other services, readings in multiple languages for refugee children.

The Cologne Public Library also has the "Krimiautomat" in the metro system, where commuting library patrons can borrow crime fiction titles.

Honey West cover art.

Anne Francis as Honey West

In their "Whodunit Wednesday" tumblr features, University of North Carolina Greensboro's Special Collections have been highlighting artists who designed Honey West covers that are part of their Robbie Emily Dunn Collection of American Detective Fiction. The latest is R.A. Maguire, who created three Honey West covers: Kiss for a Killer, Dig a Dead Doll, and Blood and Honey. There are previous posts on artist Harry Schaare and Honey West author G. G. Fickling (pseudonym of Gloria and Forest Fickling).

Vintage Paperback Index, BGSU.

Edgar winner
Lawrence G. Blochman
from UC-Berkeley's
The Blue and Gold (1922)

As a fan of Dell mapbacks, I'm enjoying prowls through the 1940s-70s cover art in the Vintage Paperback Index at Bowling Green State University's Browne Popular Culture Library. Mystery authors represented include Lawrence Goldtree Blochman, Robert M. Coates, George Harmon Coxe, Mignon G. Eberhart, A. A. Fair (aka Erle Stanley Gardner), Leslie Ford, Brett Halliday, Dashiell Hammett, Geoffrey Homes, Baynard Kendrick, Helen McCloy, Zelda Popkin, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Rex Stout, and Phoebe Atwood Taylor. It's also not without its pleasant surprises such as the inclusion of Lloyd C. Douglas (The Robe, Magnificent Obsession) for Doctor Hudson's Secret Journal and C. W. Grafton (father of Sue) for The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher and The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope. In addition, there are items for western fans (The Law at Randado by Elmore Leonard) and sci-fi aficionados (Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher; Invasion from Mars ed. Orson Welles).

BL's "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians."

1877 Chatto & Windus edition
of Wilkie Collins's
The Moonstone

The British Library's online exhibition on "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians" has some items of interest for mystery fans:

• Under "the Gothic" are features on "The Victorian Supernatural," "An Introduction to The Woman in White," and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• Under "The Imperial Gothic" are works by H. Rider Haggard and Richard Marsh, as well as Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone.

• Under "Crime and Crime Fiction" are "Crime in Oliver Twist," "Crime in Great Expectations," and "Juvenile Crime in the 19th Century." Also featured (by Judith Flanders, author of The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime that I reviewed) are "The Creation of the Police and the Rise of Detective Fiction" "Jack the Ripper," "Murder as Entertainment," and "Penny Dreadfuls" (including The Boy Detective, 1865).

Note that the attribution for Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) is incorrect; it is not by the pseudonymous Andrew Forrester (James Redding Ware), but rather William Stephens Hayward.

Update. The BL has corrected the attribution for Revelations of a Lady Detective.

Wellcome Library offers free historical images.

Dr. Joseph Bell, regarded
as the model for Sherlock
Holmes. Wellcome Images

The Wellcome Library, known for its medically related materials, has opened its historical images collections so that users can download high-resolution images for no charge. The only requirement is to acknowledge the library as the source. (Thanks to PhiloBiblos for the tip.)

Jan 31 app deadline, UT-Austin Ransom Center.

Baroness Orczy, from the
May 26, 1906
San Francisco Call

The application deadline for research fellowships at UT-Austin's Harry Ransom Center is Jan. 31. Fellowships range from 1 to 3 months and from $1200 to $3000 for individuals who need to consult the center's collections (including those working on dissertations). Its mystery collections include the Sherlock Holmes and Sherlockian Collection; correspondence from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Patrick Hamilton, and Edgar Allan Poe; and manuscripts of J. S. Fletcher, Dashiell Hammett, A. E. W. Mason, Beverley Nichols, and Baroness Orczy.

Mad about the boy.

Noel Coward. NYPL.

Via a Noel Coward Foundation grant, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has digitized photos from numerous Coward productions. View them in this Web exhibition. (Richard Chamberlain in Blithe Spirit? Tallulah Bankhead in Private Lives? Broderick Crawford in Point Valaine?)

Digital projects from Old Bailey records.

Author and baronet Edward
Bulwer Lytton, who was the
victim of theft, according to
this Old Bailey record. NYPL.

In a podcast on "Big Data and Dead Criminals" from the UK's National Archives, Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire) discusses some digital projects on crime that draw from 200,000 trial records of the Old Bailey (now online) and the London Lives project. (There's also a BBC 2 series, Tales from the Old Bailey, based on the records.)

Elmore Leonard on marketing his works.

After author Elmore Leonard died on August 20, the manuscript archivist at Indiana University's Lilly Library posted on the library blog about the small Leonard collection at the library, including an excerpt from a Leonard letter to his agent: "So what I'm going to do now is plot better stories. I'll show 'em."

Update. Here are some clips of Elmore Leonard from WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, Bly's The Mystery of Central Park (1889).

Cover of The Mystery of Central Park
by Nellie Bly (1889)

My earlier post on Nellie Bly's only mystery novel, The Mystery of Central Park, may have had some results. The Library of Congress informed me that it has digitized its copy of the novel, which is now available through the Internet Archive. This is excellent news, as there are only three copies in US libraries.

Through the lens with George Bernard Shaw.

George Bernard Shaw.
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div.

An interesting online exhibition by the London School of Economics archives looks at playwright George Bernard Shaw as a skilled photographer. Photo subjects include sci-fi and mystery author Grant Allen (I introduced the Valancourt Books edition of Allen's Miss Cayley's Adventures), writer Rebecca West, and artists Augustus John (father of Ian Fleming's half-sister Amaryllis) and Neville Stephen Bulwer Lytton (grandson of novelist Edward). Also featured are some photos by Shaw's friends such as T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) and Shaw productions such as Major Barbara with Wendy Hiller.

It came from the archives: Fitzgerald's ledger.

The Irvin Dept of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina has digitized F. Scott Fitzgerald's ledger in which he recorded his earnings from writing, as well as income by his wife, Zelda. Entries range from the listing of his first published short story ("Babes in the Woods," Smart Set, Sept. 1918) and notations on the income from his novels to the record of his appreciation of journalist and author Ring Lardner (New Republic, Oct. 1933) and the radio piece "Let's Go Out and Play" (1935).

F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div. 

The ledger also includes an autobiographical timeline. Although many may not be interested in the fact that Fitzgerald had colic when he was a baby and find his references to being drunk or "tight" repetitive, he notes in the 1909 entries, "Wrote the Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage." (This flawed mystery tale, later reprinted in EQMM, is found in The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. John Kuehl; I discuss it in my 1999 piece for Mystery Scene, "F. Scott Fitzgerald: Mystery Writer?") There is a tantalizing notation on one of the "ten years old" pages, "He began a history of the U.S. and also a detective story about a necklace that was hidden in [sic] a trapdoor under the carpet," but the latter does not seem to have come to fruition (a trap door concealed by a carpet does appear in Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby story "No Harm Trying").

There are lively bits such as the reaction of his grade school classmates to him ("Will someone poison Scotty or find some means to shut his mouth") and sadder details such as "Zelda transferred to Sheppard [psychiatric facility in Maryland] in katatonic [sic] state."

Update. Princeton has digitized the corrected galleys to The Great Gatsby. (thanks, PhiloBiblos)

It came from the archives: G. K. Chesterton.

G. K. Chesterton, NYPL

Displaying distinctive penmanship, G. K. Chesterton wrote this gracious letter to the Barcelona club Ateneu Barcelones in May 1926 (found in the Manuscrits de la Bibloteca de l'Ateneu Barcelones). Ian Ker's biography of Chesterton indicates that PEN's Catalan branch had invited Chesterton to Barcelona; his engagements included a speech on "England Seen from the Outside" at Barcelona University.

Clues today on Booklist Online.

Following up yesterday's post on The Bunburyist  I write about Clues: A Journal of Detection on Booklist's blog "Likely Stories"—part of Booklist's special focus on the mystery this month.

The Bunburyist today on Booklist Online.

I write today about The Bunburyist on the blog "Likely Stories"—part of Booklist's special focus on the mystery this month.