Category: Announcement

Announcement

Many Times Tried

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In-Person Event in Haddonfield, New Jersey
June 23, 2023 | 6-8 PM

History Is Not Always a Straight Line

The reading will examine Oscar Wilde’s sonnet known as The New Remorse, and how Wilde used the poem to ornament three romances in his life. The following discussion of the poem will extend into wider themes. We will contrast the conspicuous life of Oscar Wilde with the less visible presence of Edward Carpenter, who was central to many of the works and personalities who constituted the gay subculture of the 1890s and beyond.

Speakers: John Cooper and Vignette-Noelle Lammott.

Place: Book Restoration Bindery, 8 Kings Ct, Haddonfield, New Jersey 08033

Web Site: https://www.bookrestorationbindery.com

© John Cooper, 2023.

Announcement · Article

Louvre Online

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Croquis caricatural d’une tête d’homme, coiffé d’un canotier : Oscar Wilde:
[RF 37662, Recto]

The Louvre has recently digitized 482,000 works of art, but, of course, there’s only one Oscar Wilde.

Here he is in that sole image from the Louvre collection, in a rarely seen caricature by the Italian and French poster art designer and painter, Leonetto Cappiello (1875–1942).

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Announcement · Article

Beardsley 150

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Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872 – 1898)
Aubrey Beardsley sesquicentennial

While Beardsley’s brief career was cut short aged 25 by his death from tuberculosis, he made an impact as a brilliant and daring innovator who often caused controversy by using satirical imagery to push gender and sexual boundaries.

On view at the Grolier Club in New York City from September 8 through November 12, 2022 is ‘Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young’—an exhibition drawn from materials in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection in the UD Library, Museums and Press.

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Announcement · Article · News

Sarony 3A

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Sarony 3A courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, used with permission.
New Sarony Photograph Identified

A rarely seen image of Oscar Wilde has recently been added to the series of photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony on January 5th, 1882.

Its rarity is evidenced by the fact that it does not appear to have been been published in any publicly available print medium to date, nor anywhere else previously online.

However, a proof print of it has lain dormant in the extensive Wilde holdings of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin—in the James McNeill Whistler collection to be precise—and their copy might be the only extant print.

Let us see how this photograph re-emerged and how it affects the total count of known Sarony images of Oscar Wilde

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Announcement · Article · Review

The Oscar Wilde Bar

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Aesthetic period door plaque. Oscar Wilde Bar, New York City.

There have been Oscar Wilde bars before now: in Berlin, San Diego, Chicago, and, I seem to recall, one previously in New York City. There is a Wilde Café in Minneapolis, and a bar called Oscar Wilde 9 located, both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, at #9 Oscar Wilde St. in Mexico City.

Most of these pretenders, however, merely give a nod to the old boy by borrowing his name. One or two, such as Wilde’s Restaurant in The Lodge at Ashford Castle, in Cong, Ireland, and the Oscar Wilde room at the Café Royal in Piccadilly, London, try a little harder to embody Oscar’s maxim that moderation is a fatal thing, and nothing succeeds like excess.

Raising The Bar

But believe me, none of them, past or present, comes remotely close to the lavishness to be found at the new Oscar Wilde Bar in New York City.

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Purple Prose

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deb929_e3405c70e9c14446844e70e096e89c05.png
—Book Review—
Beautiful and Impossible Things: Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde 

Notting Hill Editions, UK (2015) | New York Review Books, US (2017)”

…and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be.”

So said Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying, one of the works included in Beautiful and Impossible Things, a new collection of essays plus the odd letter and lecture by Wilde, due for its U.S. release later this year.

Gyles Brandreth, the English writer, broadcaster, actor, and former Member of Parliament, has provided a solid Introduction to the book. Mr. Brandreth continues to bolster Wilde’s popularity in the U.K. and beyond, by efforts such as this, his being Honorary President of the Oscar Wilde Society in London, and not least by his successful Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries series of novels.

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Book Mark

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lasner-collection
Materials from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. Photo: University of Delaware Library.
Exhibition and Symposium

Mark Samuels Lasner has long been recognized as an authority on the literature and art of the late Victorian era. He is also a collector, bibliographer, typographer, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library.

To those offices he can now add the honorific of benefactor.

For recently Mark donated his private library, the extensive Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, to the University of Delaware. It has been housed since 2004 in the Morris Library, and now becomes largest and most important gift of its kind in the university’s history.

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On This Day

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ethnic-aesthete2
O’Flahertie Will Get You Nowhere

I recall learning the word polyonymous from this Word-a-Day web site—it means having many names. It resonates because I always suspected Oscar of being a confirmed and secret polyonymist, freely dispensing with at least three of his five birth names which he considered too much ballast for the heights he soared, and then changing his name altogether when he came back down to earth.

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