Literary Table Napkins August 31, 2012

Enjoy the company of four of the world’s greatest writers at your dining table. This set of four cotton napkins featuring the typewritten letters of Jack London, Emily Dickinson, D.H. Lawrence, and Mark Twain will enliven any meal. Never mind that Emily Dickinson’s loveletter to Susie was written about ten years prior to the invention of the typewriter—it will melt your heart. Mark Twain’s note to a young child named Joy will make you rethink…

Joyce Carol Oates: A Love Letter to Libraries in Longhand February 26, 2010

Author Joyce Carol Oates. “I try to write in the morning very intensely,from 8:30 to 1 p.m…I hand write and then I type. I don’t have a word processor. I write slowly.”(By Landon Nordeman for Smithsonian Magazine.) Contrary to Thomas Wolfe’s dictum You Can’t Go Home Again, in an article in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine, “Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again,” the eponymous author begs to differ. Joyce Carol Oates regales readers with…

Famous Authors Drawn, Not Quartered January 25, 2010

Martin Droeshout’s 1623 Engraving Of William Shakespeare. The purpose of any portrait is to capture the essence of the subject. To somehow convey in a single image not just the outward appearance of the sitter, but his soul. But if the subject is a great writer, does that task become impossible? Poet Ben Jonson thought so, and maybe the curators at Princeton University’s Firestone Library do, too. Those curators have just opened a new exhibit…