Special Collections and University Archives at The University of Tulsa

As author Helen Corke stated so well in this 1931 letter to Heinemann Publishers, “Nothing was more important than the book”. With most businesses closed tomorrow (including us!), we hope you have time to sprawl out and read a book from beginning to end, just as Miss Corke used to love!

TU Special Collections will be closed on Monday, June 19th in observance of Juneteenth.

Happy Pride from your friends at Special Collections! 🌈🌈 we see and love each and every one of you! Here is a small selection of q***r authors and artists in our collections:
1 and 2.) Letter from Romaine Brooks to Natalie Clifford Barney [1987.005.1.1]
3.) The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes [PS3515.U274 W4 1926 Connolly]
4.) The Picture of Dorian Gray [PR5819 A1 1890] and Oscarina [PR5812.O83 1910 RHD Undrsz] by Oscar Wilde
5 and 6.) Orlando by Virginia Woolf, which was inspired by her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West [PR6045.O72 O7 1928b]
7.) Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin [PS3552.A45 G56 1969 Undrsz]
8.) Photographs of Gertrude Stein and her friends, including Alice Toklas, Georges Hugnet, and Eugene Berman, at her summer home in Belley, France [1000.005.1.1]
9.) Meridian by Alice Walker [PS3573.A425 M47 2003]

“Call me Ishmael.” We recently rediscovered this beautiful first edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in our library 🐳 have you read this classic? [PS2384.M6 1851]

One of our librarians is currently reading Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders which made us want to showcase our framed piece of wallpaper from the theater booth where president Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April of 1865 [1000.149]. Not only that, but we also have a handwritten letter by John Wilkes Booth as well as a press notice from the U.S. War Department offering a reward for Booth and his accomplices, dated April 20, 1865 [1979.021.1.6].

Yesterday was the birthday of William Shakespeare! Here is his fourth folio from 1685 that we hold in our library. These beautiful pages include Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Troilus & Cressida, Coriolanus, and Titus Andronicus [PR2751.A4 1685 ovrsz].

Our marathon McFarlin Library Finals Hours begin this coming Tuesday, April 25th! Students looking for comfortable and quiet spaces to study will have access to the library's reading rooms and other areas from 7:30am on April 25th before we finally close at 5pm on May 4th.
By the way, you read that correctly: the library is staying open for nine days straight--that's 217.5 uninterrupted hours of study time in McFarlin Library! Time to get those finals game faces on...

Our marathon McFarlin Library Finals Hours begin this coming Tuesday, April 25th! Students looking for comfortable and quiet spaces to study will have access to the library's reading rooms and other areas from 7:30am on April 25th until we finally close at 5pm on May 4th.
By the way, you read that correctly: the library is staying open for nine days straight--that's 217.5 uninterrupted hours of study time in McFarlin Library! Time to get those finals game faces on...

Our newest exhibit in the Satin Reading Room, "Words Set Into Motion," is here and ready for you to experience! Running through the end of September, this display focuses on the performing arts adaptations of literature, history, and famous people whose lives we focus on in TU Special Collections!
Join us upstairs on the 5th floor of McFarlin Library, Monday-Friday, 8am to 4:30pm, for a look at Hollywood through the lens of archival collecting.

TU Giving Day is here! For the next 24 hours, our annual fundraising event is on. You can specify your gift to come directly to McFarlin Library, where our library staff have some exciting new projects and even building renovations in the works! Our goal this year is to see 1,000 donations come in--no matter what size! Be a part of McFarlin's exciting new chapter and head to givingday.utulsa.edu. ❤️

Happy National Film Score Day! These hand-notated copies of the score to "Free W***y" and "Free W***y 3" come to us by way of TU music professor Dr. Joseph Rivers.

Yesterday was the birthday of fairy tale extraordinaire Hans Christian Andersen, who was born in Denmark in 1805. We can almost guarantee you’ve heard one of his tales! The Little Mermaid (1837), Thumbelina (1835), The Ugly Duckling (1843), The Princess and the Pea (1835), and The Snow Queen (1844) are just some of his works. Here is a 1912 edition we hold of his fairy tales [PT8116.E5 1912 ovrsz].

We were so excited to host for a tour of McFarlin Special Collections before his lecture yesterday! He got to see some of our most cherished items from the archives, including a first edition Frankenstein, James Joyce's necktie, and our copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle. And yes--we really do handle a book from 1493 with (clean!!) bare hands. 😉

We're just one week away from TU Giving Day 2023, when The University of Tulsa will hold a 24-hour fundraising challenge! McFarlin Library has some amazing updates coming this summer and fall, and your gift can help the library staff as we work to create safe, comfortable new study spaces that everyone on campus will love.

We can't be sure that we agree with the thesis of this pamphlet, but... everyone's entitled to their opinion. Even if that opinion is completely baffling. Enjoy your weekend, and perhaps a drink of your choice at the temperature of your choice. [AMC 000384]

Yesterday marked the 67th anniversary of My Fair Lady’s Broadway debut! Here is the Broadway script that belonged to Larry Keith, the first American actor to play Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady! The script contains Keith’s personal working notes, highlighting, and marginalia for his role in the 1961 production [ML50.L80256 M9 1961]. Did you know My Fair Lady was based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion? We have a program from early 20th century for the production of Pygmalion performed at His Majesty’s Theatre [1984.010.1.2.012].

Happy birthday to literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann! Born March 14, 1918, he studied and wrote about James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats, winning a U.S. National Book Award for his biography of Joyce in 1960.
Ellmann is one of our largest and most-requested collections, bringing Joyce scholars and biographers from around the world to visit Tulsa and see his notes and work in TU Special Collections. We're pleased to announce that a 3-year-long project to reorganize, refresh, and update the Ellmann collection and finding aid is at last coming to a close! It's been a major undertaking, but we're proud of our staff who've dedicated so much time to one of our cornerstone archival collections.

Happy Spring Break TU students! To celebrate the new season, we are looking at a botanical specimens book from the 1840s. Can you believe we can view these beautiful flowers from around 180 years ago?! They have handwritten names, dates, and the places they were picked. Unfortunately, the book is quite degraded and no longer usable. As of a few years ago, we now only have the 60 digitized scans to gaze upon such beautiful pressings.

Happy birthday to British novelist, poet, journalist, and garden designer Vita Sackville-West! Vita was the lover and friend of Virginia Woolf, and was the inspiration for the protagonist of her novel Orlando. Among her achievements includes being awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature in 1927 and 1933.

Have you received your copy of the TU Alumni Magazine from ? Our newly-appointed Director of Special Collections, Melissa Kunz, was interviewed for this feature piece on our world-class collections!

Happy International Women’s Day! To all of our friends who identify as female we appreciate you, we see you, and we love you! To celebrate, we are showing artwork by British novelist, short story writer, and painter Anna Kavan. Special Collections holds some of her one and only copies of beautiful artwork!

We are heading to Wonderland on this whimsical Wednesday! This adorable miniature artists’ book was arranged by Maryline Poole Adams and features the characters of Lewis Carroll. These tunnel books have a “peep show” style viewing hole to see a scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland including a scene from chapter 11 of Through the Looking Glass titled “The Chess Game”.

New acquisition alert! Remember our post about the autograph book including signatures from Eddie Durham’s All Star Girl Orchestra? Since then, we’ve located and acquired a beautiful handbill for the band who performed at McElroy’s Ballroom in Portland, Oregon on June 19, 1944. This all female, all Black group was formed by Eddie Durham, whose autograph is included with the handbill. As we said before, you go girls!

Beautiful captures of life in Tulsa’s Greenwood at the turn of the century. While most are unidentified Greenwood residents, slides 2 and 5 show Mr. James T. A. West.

Paperbacks from the 1960s of incredibly powerful Black voices.

A common misconception about archives is that it only accession “old” items. However, we acquire many newly published items as well! Angel of Greenwood by Randi Pink is set in Tulsa’s own Greenwood neighborhood during the events of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. The book was published in 2021, the centennial of the Race Massacre.

To celebrate Black history month, we are showcasing some of our favorite collections of Black artists, authors, and more! Today we have the autograph book of Dorothy Ogles Lockhart, a Tulsa Greenwood resident. The book contains signatures of jazz musicians performing in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Kansas City. She even has autographs from the famous Eddie Durham’s All Star Girl Orchestra! This all female, all Black group played both nationally and internationally and began in 1942 when the male musicians were abroad during WWII. The All-Stars generally had 18-22 members, you go girls!

Let’s start our week with a colorful shelfie from the Land of Oz! Have you read all 14 Oz books by L. Frank Baum? They were published between 1900 and 1920. But don’t worry, even just seeing the 1939 The Wizard of Oz with the beautiful Judy Garland is enough to experience the magic!

It’s a beautiful chilly day to stay cozy in one of our student study lounges! Check out some of the beautiful stained glass that you can gaze upon when your eyes inevitably stray from your textbooks.

Are you a historical romance reader? Don’t worry, we are too! One of our current projects is taking inventory of our Georgette Heyer letters collection. With 32 novels in the romance genre as well as around 22 more novels in detective fiction, historical, and contemporary genres, Heyer is a true literary talent! Check out these letters where she is discussing two of her novels, Envious Casca (1941) and Friday’s Child (1944), with her agent, L.P. Moore. [1988.003]