Flash Exhibits in Library Special Collections

This guide was created in September 2015. Therefore, this page does not contain every flash exhibit that was on display in 2015 but only the ones for which a record was retained.

I Just Look Like Lou Grant

Edward Asner is probably best known for his role as the ornery news manager Lou Grant, a character he portrayed on the 1970s comedy series the Mary Tyler Moore Show and later on the television drama Lou Grant. In 2009, he voiced the curdmudgeonly but endearing balloon salesman, Carl Fredricksen, in Pixar's computer-animated comedy adventure film Up.

Jesse Helms, the five-term Republican Senator from North Carolina,

supported the contras in Nicaragua as well as the right-wing government of El Salvador.

Tribute To A Champion – letter from State Senator Diane E. Watson to Ed Asner, March 23, 1982

Beyond his acting career, Asner is a passionate social activist and has been an ardent supporter of numerous social justice and political causes. He was an outspoken critic of the Reagan administration’s policies, particularly regarding foreign affairs, and the Bush administration’s policies, especially regarding the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and American foreign policy in general. He is an advocate of labor unions, gun control, campaign finance reform, and animal rights, and an opponent of the death penalty, having made many public appearances to protest the death sentence of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The Ed Asner Papers (Collection 2177) is currently in process.

by Julie Graham, Accessioning Archivist

Afro-Mexicans in Early Los Angeles

Of the forty-four pobladores or settlers of Los Angeles (El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles ) on September 4, 1781, five of the eleven families were of African descent. The new Angelenos were farmers, artisans and stock raisers. They were recruited by the Spanish Crown from the states of Sinaloa and Sonora in towns such as Rosario (Sinaloa) with the promise of free land. The census showed that two-thirds of Rosario’s population were of African descent. The later census of 1790 would show that not only Sinaloa but the Mexican state of Sonora were majority casta or mixed-race. The settlers of Los Angeles were merely a reflection of the places from which they came. 

Descendants of the pobladores developed their own culture and sense of place and became the Californios  such as Catarina Moreno, granddaughter of pobladore José Moreno. She was married to Andrés Píco, commander-in-chief of the Mexican forces in California. Of African ancestry, Píco became state assemblyman (1851-1860) when California was ceded to the United States. Pío Píco, brother of Andrés, was the last Mexican Governor of California and served on the Los Angeles City Council.  An influential businessman, Píco built a deluxe hotel in 1869-1870. Called the Pico House, it is located in what is now downtown Los Angeles.  Pictured with Pico is his wife Ygnacia (Nachita Alvarado de Pico)

Arriving in Los Angeles shortly after the city’s settlement was Juan Francisco Reyes, a mulato soldier from Zapotlán el Grande in Jalisco.  He was both the first Black and the first Hispanic alcalde (or mayor) of Los Angeles from 1793 to 1795. Francisco  Reyes was also the Spanish Crown’s first land grantee and the original grantee of the San Fernando Rancho-now the San Fernando Valley. Pictured (from left) are his great-grandchildren: Margarita, Isidro, Jr. Francisca and María Antonia Villa de Reyes, widow of Isidro, Sr.-son of Juan Francisco.

Librarian and historian Miriam Matthews (1905-2003) proposed and fought to have a monument erected honoring the forty-four founders of the City of Los Angeles, properly listing each member of the 11 families by name, race, sex, and age from the official Spanish Census of 1781. It was erected upon the occasion of the city’s Bicentennial in 1981. The plaque is located in the El Pueblo de los Angeles State Historic Park in Downtown Los Angeles.

Alva Moore Stevenson
Program Coordinator
UCLA Library Special Collections

Celebrating James Joyce’s Ulysses:

The Odyssey of Leopold Bloom through Dublin

Bloomsday, June 16, 1904

“Bloom’s day” was first celebrated in 1924, and every year since then readers have commemorated June 16, 1904, the day on which the action of Ulysses unfolds, with readings, reenactments, pub crawls, and pilgrimages through Dublin. 

Displayed here in celebration of Joyce’s masterpiece are notable editions of Ulysses from the holdings of Special Collections, as well as works inspired by the novel: an artist’s book by Margery Hellmann and a dramatic reading of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy by Siobhan McKenna.

Ulysses first appeared in print as monthly installments in issues of the American avant-garde magazine The Little Review, although the magazine succeeded in publishing only the first 14 of the 18 episodes of the novel—up through “Oxen of the Sun”--in the issues between March 1918 and Sept/Dec 1920. 

Notable editions on exhibit include the true first edition of 1922; the first American editions, both unauthorized and authorized; and the illustrated edition with etchings by Henri Matisse.   

Jacques, Raverat, Woolf

Jacques, dying (pencil, Gwen Raverat, 1925)

On the 9^th Feb, 1925, Jacques was very near the end.  He wrote a note to Gwen: “My dearest, I know I love you and I think you love me. Anyhow your love has been the best thing in my life. I send you this for you to keep and remember if you get morbid. I love you, Jacques. Keep well and remember to varnish my pictures.” In the end, Darwinian logic took over and, as Frances Spalding tactfully puts it, she “seized a pillow and terminated his sufferings”.

Soon afterwards Virginia wrote to Gwen:

Your & Jacques’ letter came yesterday, & I go about thinking of you both, in starts, & almost constantly underneath everything, & I don’t know what to say. One thing that comes over & over is the strange wish I have to go on telling Jacques things. This is for Jacques, I say to myself; I want to write to him about happiness, & about Rupert, & love. It had become to me a sort of private life, & I believe I told him more than anyone, except Leonard: I become mystical as I grow older & feel an alliance with you & Jacques which is eternal, not interrupted, or hurt by never meeting. Then, of course, I have now for you – how can I put it? – I mean the feeling that one must reverence? – is that the word – feel shy of, so tremendous an experience; for I cannot conceive what you have suffered. It seems to me that if we met, one would have to chatter about every sort of little trifle, because there is nothing to be said.

And then, being, as you know, so fundamentally an optimist, I want to make you enjoy life. Forgive me, for writing what comes into my head. I think I feel that I would give a great deal to share with you the daily happinesses. But you know that if there is anything I could ever give you, I would give it, but perhaps the only thing to give is to be oneself with people. One could say anything to Jacques. And that will always be the same with you & me. But oh, dearest Gwen, to think of you is making me cry – Why should you & Jacques have had to go through this? As I told him, it is your love that has forever been love to me – all those years ago, when you used to come to Fitzroy Square, & I was so angry: & you were so furious, & Jacques wrote me a sensible manly letter, which I answered, sitting at my table in the window. Perhaps I was frightfully jealous of you both, being at war with the whole world at the moment. Still, the vision has become to me a source of wonder – the vision of your face; which, if I were painting, I should cover with flames & put you on a hill top. Then, I don’t think you would believe how it moves me that you & Jacques should have been reading Mrs Dalloway, & liking it. I’m awfully vain I know; & I was on pins & needles about sending it to Jacques; & now I feel exquisitely relieved; not flattered; but one does want that side of one to be acceptable – I was going to have written to Jacques about his children, & about my having none – I mean, these efforts of mine to communicate with people are partly childlessness, & the horror that sometimes overcomes me.

There’s very little use in writing this. One feels so ignorant, so trivial, & like a child, just teasing you. But it is only that one keeps thinking of you, with a sort of reverence, & of that adorable man, whom I loved.

Yrs  V. W.

Gwen had once confessed that she felt “so lonely and strange… I don’t know about people – they don’t know about me”. Now a widow, she was truly alone in the world, with the added responsibility of two young children. Once again, her awkward, disconcerting courage came to her rescue and, though Virginia Woolf could brilliantly characterise her as “frozen, like an old log dried out of all sensation”, she poured her instinctive and formidable powers of observation into her work as an engraver, becoming one of the foremost miniaturists of her generation, a far greater artist than many in the overhyped Bloomsbury set she had grown up with.

Childe Rowland (color wood engraving, Gwen Raverat)

Gwen Raverat

Gwendolen Mary Darwin was born in Cambridge in 1885, she was the daughter of Sir George Howard Darwin and his wife Lady Maud Darwin, née Maud du Puy. She was the granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin and first cousin of the poet Frances Cornford, née Darwin.

She married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1911. They were active in the Bloomsbury Group and Rupert Brooke's Neo-Pagan group until they moved to the south of France, where they lived in Venice, near Nice, until his death from multiple sclerosis in 1925. They had two daughters: Elisabeth (1916-2014), who married the Norwegian politician Edvard Hambro, and Sophie Jane (1919-2011), who married the Cambridge scholar M.G.M. Pryor and later Charles Gurney.

Raverat was one of the very first wood engravers recognized as modern. She went to the Slade School in 1908, but stood outside the groups growing up at the time, the group that gathered around Eric Gill at Ditchling and the group that grew up at the Central School of Arts and Crafts around Noel Rooke. She was influenced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and developed her own painterly style of engraving. There was some similarity between her early engravings and those of Gill, and she did know Gill, but the similarity was based mostly on her black line style at the time, influenced by Lucien Pissarro, and the semi-religious themes that she then chose.

Les amours pastorales de Daphnis et Chloe

Published/Distributed: Chelsea [England]: Ashendene Press, 1933.

PAPER VERSION - One of 290 unnumbered copies printed on Batchelor hand-made paper, of which 250 for sale. Printed in red and black in Ptolemy type. Initials hand-colored in blue by Graily Hewitt, wood-engravings throughout by Gwendolen Raverat. This edition was initially printed in 1931, the ink used was very slow to dry, the sheets packed before the ink dried. When discovered at the binder Hornsby decided to destroy the entire edition. Original vellum-backed green boards with vellum corners, gilt device front cover bound by W. H. Smith & Sons LTD. in rust and cream slipcase. Gift of the Estate of James Davis, 2000.

VELLUM VERSION. One of 20 in vellum. Olive green calf cover bound by W. H. Smith & Sons LTD., stamped in gilt; all edges gilt; in dark greenish black slipcase. Initials hand-colored in blue and gold leaf by Graily Hewitt, wood-engravings throughout by Gwendolen Raverat.  Gift of the Estate of James Davis, 2000.

The Ashendene Press was a small private press founded by St John Hornby. It operated from 1895 to 1915 in Chelsea, and was revived after the war in 1920. The press closed in 1935. Most Ashendene editions used one of two fonts which were specially cast for the Press: Subiaco, which was based on a fifteenth-century Italian type cast by Sweynheim and Pannartz in Subiaco, Italy, and to a lesser extent Ptolemy. Some Ashendene books were illustrated with wood-engravings, but the majority were printed solely using type. Hornby moved with the times, and by the 1930s was employing popular young illustrators like Gwen Raverat to illustrate his Daphnis and Chloe.

Ashendene Press

‘I have worked for my own pleasure and amusement without having to keep too strict an eye upon the cost.’

The Ashendene Press was founded by C H St. John Hornby.

Black-and-White in Color:  Early Color Engravings in Italy

Ambrogio Leone.  De Nola. Venice: Giovanni Rosso, 1514

Library Special Collections recently acquired an important and rare first edition of one of the earliest illustrated works of archaeology, the first to deal with antiquities outside of Rome, and containing plates by Girolamo Mocetto that represent one of the earliest efforts of color printed engravings in Italy.  The text by Ambrogio Leone describes the ancient and medieval city of Nola, the seat of the Neapolitan branch of the Orsini family, and in fact is dedicated to Enrico Orsini, who, not improbably, may have underwritten the cost of its production.  

The four pictorial maps--two engraved in color, two in black-and-white—present views of the Bay of Naples and surrounding area, showing Nola in the center, surrounded by Vesuvius, Herculaneum, Pompei, Naples, Stabia, and Castellamare, as well as views of the antiquities and fortifications of ancient and medieval Nola.    

The UCLA copy is one of two copies known to contain two plates in color: one printed in green, the other in sanguine or reddish-brown.  The quality of the color printing is uneven, possibly because it was a new process, and possibly because Mocetto may not have had a press suitable for printing copper engravings.  Although printed in black and white, the plate tone of the second engraving has a distinct greenish tint to it, suggesting that the green ink with which the first plate was printed was insufficiently cleaned before the second plate was printed.

Harlequinades

London 1650, there was printed "by E. Alsop for T. Dunster" a little oblong pamphlet of crude woodcuts and moralistic gibberish titled The Beginning, Progress and End of MAN. It was not intended for children but it surely was addressed to simple folk and probably was sold from the chapman's pack. The book opens with Adam and ends with a skeleton and comment on the worldliness. But, in between The Beginning and the End of Man, a variety of events take place, with morals to be learn for the reader. The pamphlet is transforming the woodcuts with flaps that sometimes turn an image of a man into half-beast, and uncovering a new verse each time. These early example of the turn-up books would be later called Harlequinade. Harlequin and Columbine are the characters in many of the turn-up book. Harlequin is the comedian and romantic male lead. He is a servant and the love interest of Columbine.

During the 16th century, Commedia dell' arte spread from Italy throughout Europe, and by the 17th century adaptations of its characters were familiar in English plays. In English versions, harlequinades differed in two important respects from the Commedia original. First, instead of being a rogue, Harlequin became the central figure and romantic lead. Secondly, the characters did not speak; this was because of the large number of French performers who played in London, following the suppression of unlicensed theatres in Paris. Although this constraint was only temporary, English harlequinades remained primarily visual, though some dialogue was later admitted.

BARRY MOSER is a graphic artist and printmaker who has exhibited internationally in both one-man and group exhibits. He is on the faculty of the Illustration Department at the Rhode Island School of Design, was the 1995 Whitney J. Oates Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University, was artist and writer in residence in the Children’s Literature department at Vassar College in 1998, and is currently on the faculty of Smith College where he is Professor in Residence in the Department of Art and serves as Printer to the College.

The books Moser has illustrated and/or designed forms a list of over three hundred titles. That list includes the Arion Press Moby-Dick and the University of California Press The Divine Comedy of Dante. Moser's edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland won the National Book Award for design and illustration in 1983 and prompted the poet John Ashbery writing in NEWSWEEK (March 1, 1982), to call Moser's work “never less than dazzling.”

On display here are original drawings and woodblocks created by the artist from UCLA Library Special Collections Barry Moser Gold Rush Wood Engraving Blocks, ca. 1985.

Migration Now!

Exhibit by Octavio Olvera

"All migration starts with social relationships. When people move, they are going either towards their families or communities, or more often, away from them. They move to help their relatives, or support them by leaving. People migrate because their homes stifle them, because those homes become burdens they need to shed in order to have full lives. They move in search of opportunity, or to escape their past, or to simply survive. They move because of lies they are told and that they come to believe, and they move to fulfill the most beautiful and fragile of dreams. Migration is fundamentally about our right to move freely across Planet Earth, in search of our fullest and best selves." ̶  Migration Now organizers, Favianna Rodriguez & Roger Peet

Artists from the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative have created a portfolio of hand-printed letterpress and silkscreen broadside prints to explore the social, cultural, and emotional facets of the ever-topical issue of immigration. They draw upon a rich legacy of political posters and graphics, such as Mexico's Taller de Gráfica Popular, and the incendiary street graphics and posters of revolutionary France in 1968.

Participating artists include former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party Emory Douglas, undocumented DREAM Act agitators Julio Salgado and Felipe Baeza, and Chinese-American visual artist and designer Imin Yeh. Others involved include renowned cartoonists, labor organizers, street-art provocateurs, and culture workers from across North America.

VOLVELLES:

Architectural Components of Renaissance Movable Books  

A volvelle is a parchment or paper disc, or series of superimposed discs printed with diagrams, numbers, or signs, attached to the leaf of a book with string or some other type of fastener that allows the discs to be rotated manually on a central axis.  

The term “volvelle” comes from the Latin word “volvere,” meaning “to turn.” By rotating the paper discs, and interacting dynamically with the information provided by the author to make calculations, decipher codes, navigate a route, and determine dates, the reader engages with the text in a direct and tangible way not possible with static illustrations.

The four texts displayed here are important examples of early “movable books” from Special Collections: Peter Apian’s Cosmographia—first printed in 1524—greatly contributed to the popularity of including volvelles in scientific texts. Its rotating mechanisms include a lunar clock, sundial and horizon instrument.

With the volvelles in Astronomia by Jacques Bassantin and Theatrum mundi by Giovanni Paolo Gallucci, the reader can make astrological calculations and determine time, longitude, location of the constellations, and movement of the planets. 

De furtivis literarum notis, written by Giambattista della Porta, one of the most important Renaissance cryptographers, describes the first known digraphic substitution cipher. Its volvelles, printed with secret symbols, letters, numerals, and pointing fingers, allow the reader to understand and decipher codes.

Philippine Zines

Exhibit by Giulia Rose Marinos and Octavio Olvera

The word “zine” is derived from the word "magazine" and usually refers to noncommercial, minimally circulated, and often self-published work. This exhibit features selections from Library Special Collections's recent acquisition of over 100 Philippine zines. The selections reflect the diverse content found in zines in general. In addition to standard articles, they contain comic strips, short stories, poems, collages, illustrations, and photographs. They are all relatively recent publications dating between 2006 and 2013. Some are written in Filipino, the official language of Philippines (Filipino is the standardized form of Tagalog) while others are written in English. A few are written in what locals call Taglish, which is an informal name for a mixture of Tagalog and English.

Bustamante, Chubbs and Marianne Cadiz, Kabel Mishka Ligot.

    This untitled zine consists of collages of maps and pictures of the San Francisco Bay Area. It also includes a short poem and an extraction from an explanation about plate tectonics that works as a metaphor for the constantly changing relationships in our own lives. The authors’ use of pictures of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is known for massive earthquakes, could be related to the theme of inescapable change. The zine concludes with  a small text of retractions to form a new message of the inevitable uncertainty of coming and going.

PaperMonsterPress

    These zines publish pieces by many different authors and artists and use both Filipino and English. PaperMonsterPress zines utilize a huge range of mediums such as poems, illustrations, and photographs. Unique to PaperMonsterPress, each one ends with a selection of song titles to make a musical playlist.

UP Writers Club

    These two zines, Side Effects of Radiation and untitled, are examples of the many zines made by groups of students from several universities in the Philippines. This one is from the writers  club at the University of the Philippines. The untitled zine, written in English, uses childhood as the inspiration for the short stories, poems and illustration. Side Effects of Radiation uses a collage of texts, pictures, text retractions and illustrations which come in a variety of languages such as Greek, English, Latin and Filipino. The zine touches on ideas like faith, death, pain and cancer treatment.

I Hate Mornings

    This is a comic book about an author of comic books and his struggle to write about  crime fighting heroes that are also realistic. The author thinks it is absurd to both be a superhero and be real. However, the reason he hates mornings so much is that he unknowingly turns into a crime fighting hero at night after falling asleep and wakes up not remembering it all. It is ironic because the realistic superhero he struggles to write about, is actually himself!

The Collection of Philippine Zines is currently in process.