In creating Consider the Consequences! authors Doris Webster (1885-1967) and Mary Alden Hopkins (1876-1960) were toying with a new idea: write a book that provided readers with narrative options. The result was the first choice-based novel ever printed as well as the precursor to the Choose Your Own Adventure book series that would become popular later in the 20th century.
Though ice skating has been around for centuries, it only came into its current form and fashion in the mid-19th century and was still taking shape as a professional and competitive sport when Charlotte Oelschlägel (1898 - 1984) wrote The Hippodrome Skating Book in 1916.
Mary Renault (pseudonym of Eileen Mary Challans) was a British lesbian writer best known for her widely read historical-fiction novels set in ancient Greece.
Andrew Holleran (pseud.) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer and a significant contributor to post-Stonewall literature. He was a member of the Violet Quill, a group of gay writers who assembled in the early 1980s to critique each other’s work and to develop strategies to overcome corporate publishers’ reluctance to publish gay-themed novels. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division collects the works of the Violet Quill writers, including Andrew Holleran, and holds the first editions of their works in the Gene Berry and Jeffrey Campbell Collection.
Born in Harlem on August 2nd, 1924, novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) is regarded as one of America’s greatest writers. At the time of his death on December 1st, 1987, Baldwin was working with sculptor and printmaker Leonard Baskin (1922–2000) of the Gehenna Press to publish a fine press edition of an unpublished work. Gypsy and Other Poems features six of Baldwin's poems that reveal an intimate, introspective side of the writer.
Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1932 and observed first-hand the rise of the Nazis and the damage and terror inflicted on the famously tolerant city and its inhabitants. He drew from his journals that he kept from those years to write "Mr. Norris Changes Trains" (1935) and "Goodbye to Berlin" (1939), which would later be combined into an omnibus volume entitled "The Berlin Stories" (1945). Playful and powerful, Isherwood's depiction of Berlin captured the imagination of later artists, whose work is also represented in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
Published in 1978, Paul Avrich’s "An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre" was the first substantial biography of Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912), an influential member of the American labor movement at the turn of the 20th century. Donated to the Library of Congress in 1986, the biography refers to de Cleyre as “one of the most interesting if neglected figures in the history of American radicalism.”
Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964), pioneer in environmental awareness and protection, authored her landmark work, Silent Spring, in 1962. This Earth Day post remembers her legacy as an author who wrote to inspire wonder in her readers.
May Sarton (1912 –1995) was an important and prolific American author of poetry, literature, and journals. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds several of Sarton’s first editions in the Rare Book and Gene Berry and Jeffrey Campbell Collections.
