Tag Archives: Rare Books

You’re Probably More Like a Groundling Than You Think

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By:  Sydney Vollmer, ARB Intern

Globe TheatreI’m pretty sure that during a quiz my freshman year of high school I couldn’t remember the term for the people who stood in the pit of the Globe Theatre to save my life. I sat in my honors English course feeling very stupid, and eventually turning in my quiz knowing I had failed to comprehend even the simplest term surrounding Shakespeare.

Now I’m aware, as I’m sure you are as well, that those smelly folks who couldn’t afford more than a penny to see a show were called groundlings. A penny may seem like nothing to us now, but back then it was the equivalent to 10% of one day’s wage (Globe Theatre Groundlings, n.d.). The majority of groundlings were London apprentices who were shirking their trades to see a show. This led to disgruntled employers as well as some rowdy activity in the crowds, due to the age of most groundlings. The players were not entirely happy either. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet speaks of the groundlings in Act 3, Scene 2:

“O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.”

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More Shakespeare! 11 Recipes Sure to Surprise Your Friends

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By: Sydney Vollmer, ARB Intern

Are you a college student looking for something to serve at your party this weekend? Are you a young professional looking to impress? Are you married and have no idea what to make for that couple you hate but you’re obligated to invite to your house every now and then? Keep reading.

For you, and only you, I have found a book of Shakespearean recipes in our collection of ephemera from UC’s 1916 celebration. I’m almost positive none of your guests have ever tried any of these before!

A few parting words:

  • Always try recipes once before making for others
  • Feel free to let the people at ARB be the guinea pigs you make sample your first attempts!

Good luck! Make sure to take pictures of your creations and share your experience with us on Facebook.

Recipe Book Cover Continue reading →

Memories of Shakespeare and the Lyric Theatre

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By: Sydney Vollmer, ARB Intern

Ad for Shakespeare seriesLook what we found! CCM students of days gone by customarily made a scrapbook of their experiences while they were in school. The scrapbook of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (one half of what has become UC’s College-Conservatory of Music) student Virginia Inez Day recently came into our hands just in time for us to start our Shakespeare celebration! For those of you who have been in the cheap seats, 2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and we are commemorating it with a year of promoting our Shakespeare holdings in the Archives & Rare Books Library and documenting the history of Shakespeare productions in Cincinnati. Continue reading →

William and Me

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By: Sydney Vollmer, ARB student assistant

shakespeare2

William Shakespeare

We all know who Shakespeare is. He lived in London, wrote some plays and poetry, died and became really famous.

In the ninth grade, my English teacher at Cincinnati’s Seton High School introduced my class to Shakespeare. We all knew who he was. He wrote plays and poetry sometime around 1600. Not really understanding anything about literature, plays, or poetry at the time, all I knew was that Shakespeare was brilliant and well respected, which meant that if I wanted to be smart and scholarly, I would like and respect him the way proper people do. Then I read Shakespeare. Continue reading →

“In the Service of the Eye”: Georg Bartisch’s 16th Century Textbook On Ophthalmology

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By:  Kevin Grace

bartisach reader-smallA new exhibit has been mounted in the 8th floor hallway of Blegen Library.  Reproduced from a volume in the Archives & Rare Book Library, this exhibit features fourteen woodcuts from a 16th century science book.   One of the seminal medical texts of the Renaissance, Georg Bartisch’s volume on the eye, Ophthalmodouleia Das ist Augendienst, was a remarkably detailed guide to surgical techniques on ocular diseases.  Published in 1583, this “service of the eye” would build the foundation for ophthalmology research for the next 300 years. Continue reading →

An Irish Journalist in the Queen City: Lafcadio Hearn and the Cincinnati Demi-Monde

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By Kevin Grace

From the Cincinnati winter of 1874, over 140 years ago:

 It is in all times a rugged road to the Place of Nameless Graves – a road running over rolling ground, where vehicles rock from side to side like ships in a gale and groan in all their timbers. “Rattle his bones over the stones, He’s only a pauper whom nobody owns.”  Hundreds of paupers’ bones are rattled over that road every year: the Undertaker always sending out three or four at a time in a covered wagon, with frightfully stiff springs.  And as the dismal vehicle rolls along the coffins rattle and bump one against the other fearfully from side to side, and bump horribly against the thinly-lined walls of those long and ghastly boxes.

Hearn

This article, “Golgotha, A Pilgrimage to Potter’s Field”, was written for the Cincinnati Enquirer on November 29 that year by an odd, bulging- eyed Irishman by the name of Lafcadio Hearn.  Hearn, who would chronicle the lowlifes, ghosts, and murderers of Cincinnati for several years before moving on to New Orleans, eventually settled in Japan where even today he is revered as a major literary figure.  He made his journalistic mark in Cincinnati because he explored the alleys and tenements and riverside settlements that housed the city’s worst and most colorful citizens.  He explored the lives of criminals and addicts, of mediums and flim-flam men, and of those who dealt with the underbelly of Cincinnati society.  And he did it by letting them tell their stories, by involving himself in his own reporting, by writing in the authentic dialect of the storytellers, and by thrilling his readers nearly every day with a world in which they seldom visited. Continue reading →

Faustian Ghosts and Redemptive Masculinity in an American Baseball Story

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By:  Kevin Grace

PitcherThere’s too much snow, too much cold, and too many gray skies, so we need to refresh ourselves a bit.  After all, the Reds are in spring training out in Arizona, and Opening Day is just a month away!  So let’s talk baseball and a little Cincinnati baseball story published 130 years ago.

In 1885, a quirky little tale was published in a Cincinnati humor tabloid called Sam the Scaramouch (SpecCol RB F499.C5 S16).  The anonymously-written story is entitled “O’Toole’s Ghost” and its plot centers around a young immigrant by the name of Mickey McGonigle who dreams of becoming the best baseball player ever seen.  Late one night, he is visited by the ghost of a deceased pitcher by the name of Barney O’Toole, who offers to fulfill this dream on one small condition: never argue with the umpire.  McGonigle accepts the offer, and for a brief time he is indeed the greatest player in the land.  But during one game, he forgets that agreed upon condition with the ghost, violates it, and sees his prowess quickly and publically stripped away.  He spends the rest of his days consumed with regret and humiliation. Continue reading →

Deaf and Dumb or The Orphan Protected: A Dublin Play in the Archives & Rare Books Library

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By Sydney Vollmer, ARB student assistant

Tile Page for Deaf and DumbHere at the Archives and are Books library, we have a vast collection of 18th and 19th c. plays and I have been fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to read a play from our Irish subset of these holdings. Though we have numerous titles which grabbed my attention, I came across one that I couldn’t ignore: Deaf and Dumb, translated by Thomas Holcroft and published in Dublin in 1801.

The title struck my interest because last summer, I began watching a TV show called Switched at Birth. One of the main characters in the show is Deaf, so there is a lot of sign language as well as the juxtaposition between the hearing and deaf worlds. Before watching the show, the obstacles Deaf people face and the idea of Deaf culture had never occurred to me. Continue reading →

Joseph Alsop Papers in ARB – Part 2 – Joe Alsop's Greek Bronze Age Archive at the University of Cincinnati

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Below is the second in a series of blogs in which Jack Davis discusses Joseph Alsop and his papers in ARB.  It was originally published on From the Archivist’s Notebook, a blog of Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, head of the archives at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.  

By:  Jack Davis, Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati 

fromthesilentearthSearching library catalogues and online archival finding aids sometimes produces unexpected consequences. As I wrote in Part I of this two-part post, Joseph Alsop’s principal archive is curated in the Library of Congress. The University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Book Library, however, contains five boxes of manuscripts of From the Silent Earth and relevant correspondence between Alsop and the eminent scholars Emmett Bennett, Carl Blegen, Maurice Bowra, John Caskey, Sterling Dow, and Leonard Palmer. While writing From the Silent Earth: A Political Columnist Reports on the Greek Bronze Age (1964), Alsop solicited advice from these distinguished Aegean prehistorians and Classical philologists, all of whom were supportive of his efforts. Jack Caskey, for example, replied to an initial letter of inquiry: “I’m particularly interested in absorbing your political analysis. It sounds neither foolish nor pretentious to me in your brief summary.”

In Part I, I explored how it was that one of Washington’s foremost political analysts of the Cold War era (and for two decades a trustee of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens) came to write a book about the Greek Bronze Age. In Part II, I describe the contents of the archive in Cincinnati, discuss its academic significance, and consider what light it sheds on Alsop’s research methods. Continue reading →