Charles Dickens' Manuscript On Display At The Morgan Library. (Photo By Angel Franco for The New York Times.)The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan is offering modern readers a chance to see the creative process behind Victorian literature's most enduring holiday tale, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The library, housed in an Italian renaissance style palazzo in Murray Hill, holds the original manuscript of the story, written and rewritten in Dickens' own hand. According to Alison Leigh Cowan of The New York Times, the manuscript goes on display each year at the Morgan, but under glass, with only a single...
When Did Walt Disney Write A Christmas Carol?
Disney's A Christmas CarolWalt Disney has gotten a bad rap.We now know that “The Great Homogenizer,” who, as master of The House that Mouse Built, rose to fame by smoothing out the difficult and potentially offensive edges to any story he came into contact with lest anyone's sensibilities be injured, led a double life.Recent advances in forensic bibliography, as reported in the recent issue of the Journal of Dubious Literary Scholarship, have definitively proven that Walt Disney was an honest-to-gosh litterateur.Walt Disney's Mary PoppinsLong thought to be a mere animator (though he, in reality, didn’t do much, if any, of...
City of Brotherly Love Can You Spare A Dime? Philly Free Library to Close
In a previous article on Book Patrol, Seattle Public Library's one week closure was noted as an example of the consequences of the desperate financial straits public libraries now face. But in a much more shocking development, the Free Library of Philadelphia's website now features a pop-up window telling visitors that it will close completely, forever on October 2, 2009 unless funding is forthcoming from the Pennsylvania State Legislature.The Free Library of Philadelphia was established in 1891. By 1898 the Library had the largest circulating collection in the world, 1,778,387 volumes. The Central Library, originally housed in Philadelphia's City Hall,...