Exhibits - University Libraries

     Graniteville Room - Thomas Cooper Library (October 23 - November 2006)
     Evans Carlson in China: Symposium and Exhibit

     Brigadier General Evans F. Carlson (1896-1947) will be the subject
     of a symposium and exhibit at TCL on October 23 from 3:00-5:30 p.m.
     in the Graniteville Room.

     The exhibit will feature photographs Carlson took while traveling with
     members of the Chinese 8th Route Army as a military observer in 1937
     including photos of Mao Tse Tung, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and
     Zhu Deh in Lin Feng and Yenan. Other items on display will be some of
     Carlson’s journals, letters, and other personal effects from the
     Carlson family’s papers as well as an exhibit of rare books on China
     from the library’s holdings.

     The symposium will include papers by Patrick Maney, Chair of USC’s
     Department of History, on “What was Evans Carlson Doing in China?
     FDR and the Coming War with Japan;” Professor Robert E. Herzstein
     of USC’s Department of History on “Final Battle: Evans Carlson and
     the Debate over U.S. Policy in China, 1945-1947;” and Karen
     Carlson-Loving, Carlson’s granddaughter, on “Gung Ho! A Marine in
     China - The Legacy of Evans F. Carlson.”

     Carlson accompanied Chinese Communist guerrillas in their operations
     against the Japanese in 1937. He was impressed with Chinese tactics and
     used this knowledge to form a Marine Raider battalion during the Second
     World War. “Carlson’s Raiders” completed several successful missions
     behind enemy lines on Guadalcanal and Makin Island during the war.

     During his military career, Carlson received a total of three Navy Crosses
     for “extraordinary heroism and distinguished servis buried in
     Arlington Cemetery.

     South Caroliniana Library (October 5 - November 30, 2006)

     “Evolution of a Campus: Expansion and Demolition at the University of South Carolina" is on
     display in the SCL lobby through November 20, 2006.

Produced by the University Archives, the exhibit uses historical photographs, maps, and drawings to illustrate how the USC campus has grown and changed over 200 years. Highlights include aerial photographs, images of University buildings that have been demolished, and rejected design proposals that would have given areas of the campus a different style.

Robert J. Wickenheiser Collection of John Milton

The John Milton Exhibit opening, presentation and reception will be held in the Graniteville Room in the Thomas Cooper Library on September 21, 2006 at 4:00pm.

The Robert J. Wickenheiser Collection of the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton
(1608-1674) brings the library its first major seventeenth-century research collection, to join the earlier acquisition of major collections from subsequent periods. It was acquired for Thomas Cooper Library in 2006 with leading support from William L. Richter and The William L. Richter Family Foundation.

Main Floor Lobby - Thomas Cooper Library (August 14 - October 15, 2006)

Mountains Beyond Mountains: Research Materials in the University Libraries An Exhibit for the First-Year Reading Experience, 2006

Tracy Kidder's 2004 book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World will be read by all 3600 incoming First-Year students this August as part of the First-Year Reading Experience Program. This exhibition has been created to complement the series of activities taking place this semester for new students. Using elements and themes found in the book, this exhibition will introduce students to the wide variety of sources and formats of information that can be found in the University of South Carolina library system. Investigating the issues raised by Dr. Paul Farmer and his work in this way can lead one to useful information within the library system from many varied sources and disciplinary perspectives.

The novelist James Ellroy’s spiral-bound notebook for The Black Dahlia, opening as a new film on September 15, is in Columbia, SC, at the University of South Carolina's Thomas Cooper Library. This and other manuscripts, typescripts, and photographs about The Black Dahlia will be on display in the main lobby of the library from September 15 through the end of the month.

The library's James Ellroy Archive has Ellroy's outlines and distinctive two-color longhand
manuscript drafts for such well-known novels as The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988),
L.A. Confidential (1990), American Tabloid (1995), and his crime-memoir My Dark Places (1996).

Mezzanine Exhibit Gallery (May-August 2005)
TENNIS
An exhibition from the William D. Haggard III Tennis Collection
The William D. Haggard III Collection of Tennis Books includes the very first book about tennis, by Antonio Scaino, published in 1555, and over 100 other volumes charting the development and history of court (or ‘royal’ or 'real') tennis, the ancestor of the modern game.

Main Floor Lobby (July-August 2005)
The End of World War II – A Commemorative Exhibit
This exhibit documents the end of the war in Europe and Asia using resources in Rare Books and Special Collections. It includes items related to Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, and William Westmoreland, in addition to printed books such as the Armed Services Editions collection and books from the Gilbert S. Guinn Collection of Military Aviation and History.

Graniteville Room (July-August 2005)
FINE BINDINGS
selected bindings from the fifteenth through the 20th century

Main Floor Lobby (August-September 2005)
Investigating The Curious Incident in Thomas Cooper Library:
An Exhibition for the First-Year Reading Experience, 2005
Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the subject of a new collaborative exhibition in Thomas Cooper Library created for USC’s First-Year Reading Experience. Using elements and themes found in the book, the exhibit introduces students to the wide variety of sources and formats of information that can be found in the University of South Carolina library system.

Mezzanine Exhibit Gallery (August-October 2005)
LEAVES OF GRASS AT 150
An exhibit chiefly from The Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
This exhibit, celebrates the 150th anniversary of the publication of Whitman’s major work, Leaves of Grass, arguably the most important and well-known book of verse in American literary history. Items on display have been drawn both from earlier holdings in Special Collections, and, more extensively, from the library’s Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, transferred to the University under a generous gift-purchase agreement in 2001.

Main Floor Lobby (October -November 2005)
FINE PRNTING FROM THE Clyde C. Walton Collection
This exhibit of highlights from the Walton Collection shows the range and variety of contemporary American fine press printing assembled over many years by Dr. Clyde C. Walton, librarian, Civil War historian, and former Illinois State Historian. The Walton Collection, which includes over 250 limited-edition books, pamphlets, and broadsides from contemporary fine presses, together with a collection of leaves from illuminated manuscripts and early printed books and ephemera from many presses, was donated to the library by Dr. Patricia Senn Breivik.

Graniteville Room (October 2005)
ON THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION
a display from Thomas Cooper Library's Rare Books & Special Collections
including early printed records of the Continental Congress.

Mezzanine Exhibit Gallery (October 2005-January 2006)
TWENTY-TWO COLLECTIONS
selected items from the Matthew J. & Arlyn Bruccoli Collections

Graniteville Room (December 2005)
DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS
First editions of Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and other Christmas writings.

Main Floor Lobby (December-January 2006)
FREDSON BOWERS AND HIS LEGACY: A CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION
Fredson Thayer Bowers (1905-1991) was the most influential American bibliographer and textual theorist of the twentieth century. Bowers was an extremely prolific creator of the standard published editions of authors ranging from Elizabethan English literature (Dekker, Marlowe, Beaumont, and Fletcher) to nineteenth century American literature (Hawthorne and Stephen Crane). This exhibit marking the centenary of Bowers's birth was created by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jeffrey Makala.

Main Floor Lobby (February 6-March 31, 2006)
AFRICAN-AMERICANS AND ABOLITION: SOURCES AND STORIES
This exhibition documents some African-American contributions to the abolitionist movement, both formal and implicit, and draws upon original source documents from Rare Books and Special Collections. Items from the Augusta Baker Collection of African-American Children’s Literature and Folklore.

Graniteville Room (January-March 2006)
IRISH LITERATURE FROM THE 18TH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT
an exhibition for the 2006 Southern Regional Conference of the American Conference for Irish Studies, to take place in Columbia in February.

Aiken Public Library (April 2006)
THE STORY OF TENNIS
An exhibit from the William D. Haggard III Tennis Collection

Mezzanine Exhibit Gallery (January 10-April 30, 2006)
MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS
an exhibit introducing the Robert D. Middendorf Collection
Mezzanine Gallery, Thomas Cooper Library
(January 10-April 30, 2006; open all regular library hours)

The exhibit the first from the Middendorf Collection, which the library recently acquired through a generous gift-purchase agreement, using funds donated to the Treasures Acquisition Program. Along with first editions and periodical writings, the Middendorf Collection also includes letters, proofs, and movie memorabilia.

Mezzanine Exhibit Gallery - Thomas Cooper Library (April-June 30 2006)

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON & ORNITHOLOGICAL ILLUSTRATION
This exhibition features one of the library’s greatest treasures, John James Audubon’s huge double-elephant folio Birds of America, published in parts between 1827 and 1838. The exhibition also celebrates the establishment by an anonymous donor of an endowment to support the Audubon collection, honoring Davy-Jo Ridge, former Associate Director of Libraries.

Thomas Cooper Library’s set of Audubon’s Birds was purchased for the South Carolina College library by special vote of the South Carolina legislature in 1831. Only 200 sets of this work were printed, and fewer than 130 complete sets, with all 435 plates, now survive. The story of the College’s Audubons, and of Audubon’s friendship with John Bachman, was told by Mrs. Ridge in her book A Load of Gratitude: Audubon and South Carolina (1985).

That first Audubon purchase has been supplemented by many additional gifts over the years, including a set of the Audubon-Bachman Quadrupeds donated by Governor Adams in 1851 (not on display), and other illustrated bird books from Mrs. J. Henry Fair, Miss Claudia Lea Phelps, and the John Shaw Billings Endowment. Recent additions include Julia Bachman’s specially-bound set of the Octavo Birds of America, donated by Mr. & Mrs. Frank J. Dana, and manuscripts of Audubon and Bachman donated by Mr. James P. Barrow.

The exhibit is arranged chronologically, starting with European bird illustrations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and concluding near the Graniteville Room entrance with nineteenth-century American bird illustration after Audubon. The upright cases display, along with selected Audubons, a print from the Alecto Press Catesby water-colors (purchased in 1997 by the Thomas Cooper Society), a mid-18th century water-color (from the collection donated by Mrs. William Carroll Brown), and John Gould lithographs (donated by Mr. N. Heyward Clarkson, Jr.).

On display in the entrance hallway to the Graniteville Room are the three double-elephant folio versions of Audubon’s first plate, the American wild turkey (Lizars, 1827; Havell, 1828; Bien, 1859), donated by Mrs. Jennie Haddock Feagle, and additional Audubons are currently displayed inside the Graniteville Room.

Graniteville Room - Thomas Cooper Library (April - June 2006)

Selected Gifts and Acquisitions, 2005-2006
The fifty items selected for display include autograph manuscripts of J. J. Audubon, Ralph Waldo Emerson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a volume of de Bry's Voyages from the 1590's, the Articles on the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England as printed in 1706, a Haggadah from 1781, early editions of David Hume, Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, the Centennial Edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and the publisher's archive for Hemingway's The Spanish Earth, as well as representative items from collections of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, military aviation, the AIDS and Its Impact Collection Development Initiative, etc.