Tag Archives: Shakespeare

Following on from our recent article on book binding in Barcelona, we seem unable to escape our thematic journey on-line towards the bound artefact.

As booksellers and literacy project specialists we are especially interested in the concept of the book as a seasonal highlight, as to be expected at this time of year. The conversationsEast team were very pleased to see book-binding as part of the programme of the recent Chelmsford Ideas Festival for instance.

This month we were pleased to discover the web pages of the refreshed and rebuilt Yale Center for British Art. Remarkable in that such a concentration of artefacts, academic depth and insight into our native art history should exist in Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut.

The opening lecture for the Centre, post-renovation, was Artistic Bookbinding in the Twenty-First Century, delivered by the American book historian and conservator James Reid-Cunningham. See more below…

The lecture, The Poet of Them All, concentrates on a remarkable collection of Shakespeare editions in miniature from the holdings of the Yale Centre and in concert with collectors Neale and Margaret Albert.

The richness, skill and indeed, even fun, of such collections is beautifully captured in the Reid-Cunningham lecture. The expressive art and craft skill of the binder in the twenty first century is also visually well expressed in the discourse. In an age of electronics it is sometimes easy to forget the power, even magic, generated by the carefully crafted, masterfully bound book. Whatever its size.

There is much to enjoy across the whole of the Yale Center for British Art. Research at the Yale Center benefits from concurrent funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, encouraging a wide programme of lectures, study and talks to disseminate the findings of the Center. As you would expect from such a world centre of excellence.

We particularly liked the Center’s new education programme Visual Literacy: Rethinking the Role of the Arts in Education. Using the great visual resources the Center holds to create interest in and higher utility in reading. Art becomes the book, becomes the writer!

See the trailer for the work below…

Visual Literacy: Rethinking the Role of Arts in Education from cyra levenson on Vimeo.

Giving  books is a great idea over the festive holidays, getting the family into an art gallery or museum is even better. We visited Seven Stories in Newcastle earlier in 2016, so we know you can achieve the same ‘Yale’ effect without a visit to Connecticut.

Unless you travel on-line that is? Happy Christmas to our readers.

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The Globe Theatre in London has just launched a new electronic service. The Globe Player.

It is part subscription service, partly an encyclopedia of reflection about Shakespeare and his work, but mainly it is a delight to discover the Bard whilst seated at your own screen and keyboard.

The service enables you, after registration, to rent or buy over 50 films of Shakespeare productions at The Globe Theatre.

You can also explore the Muse of Fire resource. This is a film in itself, but is made up of extracts from a wide variety of interviews with major Shakesperean actors of our day.

The interviews are available on the globeplayer.tv web site and offer fascinating insights into both the deep knowledge of the actors, but also their subtle and insightful take on the works they interpret.

One interesting part of the site content is access to performances of The Sonnets, but set in contemporary New York settings…

The project piece above is an interpretation of Sonnet 3, set in Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn. A great way to listen to the language of Shakespeare, but framed by immediately recognisable modern contexts.

This service is truly ‘…a window of thine age…’.

Whether you are a long time resident in the world of Shakespeare, or just beginning to explore the universe of love, loss, drama and comedy that The Globe creates, then we think this is a wonderful resource.

William and the Web. Perfect partners in the 21st Century?

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News Desk image by Markus Winkler, Creative Commons, Unsplash...

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