Building and Rebuilding 1989-1999:
Collections and Architecture for the 21st Century

 

The Stanford University Libraries celebrated the reopening of the Bing Wing of the Cecil H. Green Library with an exhibit, Building and Rebuilding 1989-1999: Collections and Architecture for the 21st Century. The exhibit was on display in the Peterson Gallery on the second floor of Green Library, and ran through Jan. 12, 2000.

Building and Rebuilding showcased Special Collections material acquired within the last decade, during which the libraries continued a program of collection development in support of teaching and research, despite temporary loss of space. A section of the exhibit focused on the restoration of the 1919 building, which was badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Highlights of the more than 100 books and manuscripts on display included:

• A rare copy of Dlia Golosa (for the voice) by Vladimir Maiakovsky, the leading poet of the Russian Revolution, designed by El Lissitzky and considered to be his most spectacular achievement in book design and construction;
• Working drafts for two movements of Robert Schumann's Sonate IV (ca. 1837), which he never completed and was long presumed lost;
• Albrecht Dürer's Underweysung der Messung, 1525, a practical manual for artists that displays Dürer's extraordinary knowledge of geometry, engineering, perspective, decoration and typography;
• Working journals and correspondence of writers Tillie Olsen, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Steinbeck, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Eigner and Robert Pinsky;
• An uncommon first edition of poet Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, Marilia de Dirceo (1792), from a collection of more than 7,000 rare Braziliana;
• Douglas Engelbart's pocket notebook containing notes on the "bug," perhaps the earliest forerunner of the computer mouse invented by Engelbart in 1965;
• An 1864 diary kept by Francis Wilbur Goodyear, a Union soldier imprisoned in Andersonville;
• Galileo Galilei's Difesa . . . contro alle calunnie & imposture di Baldessar Capra (1607), the original edition of his second publication and his first published work on astronomy;
• Sketchbook and correspondence of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne; and
• A selection of contemporary fine press books.

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