Bill Moyers, who died yesterday at the age of 91, was at the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium one night in the fall of 2023 to mark the preservation of more than 1,000 of his public television programs in The American Archive of Public Broadcasting. a collaboration between the Library and GBH, the public media production company in Boston. It was a crowning night to one of the most influential careers in American media.
Edward Gorey, that bearded patron saint of the sad and whimsical, the strange and witty, would have turned 100 this year, and centennial celebrations are happening all year long. The Library preserves hundreds of his works, including rare and unique items, such as a tiny edition of ... "The Gashlycrumb Tinies."
“The Tale of Genji,” one of the foundational works of Japanese literature, was written 1,000 years ago and is more than 1,000 pages long. Penned over the course of a decade or so by Murasaki Shikibu, it is widely considered the world’s first novel. The Library recently added to its impressive “Genji” collections with a beautiful edition of Genji kokagami, or “A Little Mirror of the Tale of Genji,” set in wooden moveable type, from around 1625. It’s a summary of the original with excerpts and explanations, filling three slender notebook-size volumes with thin pages and delicate type. The typeface is so finely wrought that it appears at first glance to be calligraphy.
Journalist, photographer and activist Raúl Ruiz was a driving force at La Raza, the newspaper and magazine devoted to the Chicano movement in the 1960s and '70s. The Library announced today that it has acquired his collection, some 17,500 photos by Ruiz and original page layouts for La Raza. It also has nearly 10,000 pages of manuscripts, which include original correspondence, the unpublished draft of Ruiz’s book on Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar and handwritten minutes from the staff meetings of La Raza. It's a major addition to the Library's holdings in modern Hispanic culture.
U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón's final lecture last week in the Coolidge Auditorium was a love letter to poetry to libraries and librarians. Her lecture, titled “Against Breaking: On the Public and Private Power of Poetry,” framed poetry as a shared, not solitary, experience and as a celebration of humanity’s range of voices and perspectives.
Ned Rorem could never stop thinking. Or writing, composing or socializing. He kept datebooks, scrapbooks and diaries, the last of which went for thousands of pages over decades. He composed more than 500 art songs, three symphonies, four piano concertos, more than half a dozen operas and on and on. These fill volumes and folders …
Recreating Thomas Jefferson's personal library, which became the DNA of the Library of Congress, has been a fascination for antiquarians since an 1851 fire burned about two thirds of his original books. But for 27 years, one of the Library’s most ardent projects has been to examine its own stacks, other libraries, rare book dealers and antiquarians from multiple countries to replace the burned and missing volumes with exact copies — the same edition, publisher and so on — to replicate the world view that led the author of the Declaration of Independence to pen such a world-changing set of ideas. That effort is now getting as close to complete as it is ever likely to get.
At times laughing and tossing back her long sisterlocks, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson engaged in a lively discussion with U.S. District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves in the Coolidge Auditorium last week. She talked about her youth and life experiences, all included in her memoir, "Lovely One."
Mac Barnett, the bestselling author of more than 60 children's books, including “Twenty Questions,” “Sam & Dave Dig a Hole,” “A Polar Bear in the Snow” as well as the “Mac B., Kid Spy” series, will be inaugurated today as the 2025-2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.
