• 6
  Rewriting the Bard

  Later printings reveal an alternate ending for “Romeo and Juliet.”

• 12
  Genius of Sondheim

  The Library acquires the papers of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

• 20
  Archives in the Spotlight

  Broadway creators find inspiration in the holdings of the Music Division.

• 
• september / october 2025
  Vol. 14 No. 5
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  ISSN 2169-0855 (print)
  ISSN 2169-0863 (online)
• Robert Randolph Newlen
  Acting Librarian of Congress
• William Ryan
  Executive Editor
• Mark Hartsell
  Editor
• Ashley Jones
  Designer
• Shawn Miller
  Photo Editor
• Contributors

  Loretta Deaver
  Kristi Finefield
  Jessica Fries-Gaither
  Elizabeth Gettins
  Kaley Harman
  Patrick Hastings
  Zoe Herrera
  Mark Horowitz
  Jane Hudiburg
  Sahar Kazmi
  Cindy Connelly Ryan
  Neely Tucker
  Raymond White

But you’d swear, looking at his comic-but-disturbing illustrated books, that the man was born into a dreary British family in a shabby village called Puddlington or something.

Happily, the instantly identifiable Gorey universe — built on “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” “The Unstrung Harp,” his Tony Award-winning costume design for “Dracula,” his animated intro for the long-running PBS show “Mystery!” — has become part of America’s background cultural fabric.

Gorey created a pen-and-ink, genteel, British-looking landscape in which bad things happened to small children, people had oddly shaped heads, the sun rarely shone and a vague air of menace hung about the tea room.

He began illustrating books for Doubleday in the early 1950s and created the covers for hundreds of books, illustrated posters and magazine articles by the score and wrote and illustrated over 100 of his own works.

Soldiers, hunters and marksmen carried a handy supply of the stuff in light, hollowed-out cow or ox horns, with a base and spout tamped in. They were ubiquitous among American colonists, so much so that they needed a way to identify their personal horns.

Which brings us to the artisans, cartographers or just bored guys with a knife who whiled and whittled away many an afternoon turning a utilitarian object into a personal work of folk art: the engraved powder horn.

To realize this “panopticon” concept, Spofford provided specifications for a “massive circular desk” that would give librarians and the Main Reading Room superintendent a view of every researcher, the card catalog and each alcove representing a major realm of knowledge.

Meanwhile, from the eye of the room’s domed ceiling, the figures in the aptly named painting “Human Understanding” could monitor the books springing forth from conveyor systems that connected the control room under the central desk to the stacks, the Capitol and eventually the John Adams Building and beyond.

But theater people were not always so precious about Shakespeare. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds no fewer than seven printings of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” that include an added deathbed conversation between Romeo and Juliet in the play’s final scene.

Born in Germany in 1647 and later a resident of the Netherlands, Merian raised the larvae of caterpillars, butterflies and moths, determined their preferred food plants and observed adults emerging from their pupal chrysalides and cocoons. Her detailed notes and sketches became the basis for several groundbreaking books on caterpillars. She pioneered scientific illustration techniques by using counterproof printing to create softer images that more closely resembled her original drawings.

In 1699, the intrepid Merian and her youngest daughter journeyed to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America to study and paint insects. Back home, she published a book in 1705 — Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (Metamorphosis of Surinamese Insects) — that featured vibrant color illustrations of exotic species.

That is exactly what journalist, photographer and activist Raul Ruiz captured for La Raza, a newspaper and magazine in East Los Angeles led by Chicano activists and creatives in the last half of the ’60s and ’70s.

Ruiz and the magazine focused on covering the struggles of Chicanos (Mexican Americans), and his photographs captured the community’s mobilization that flourished despite hardships. Ruiz and La Raza covered school walkouts, marches and other forms of protest.

The Library recently acquired the Raul Ruiz Chicano Movement Collection, some 17,500 photos by Ruiz and original page layouts for La Raza. It also acquired 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 La Raza staff meetings.

At that time, Sondheim already was considered one of the most important figures in the history of musical theater. He was the lyricist behind “West Side Story”; the creator of “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music” and “Sweeney Todd”; the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and multiple Grammys and Tonys; the man who, in receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom years later, would be credited with reinventing the American musical.

So, aiming to impress, we covered a small room with music manuscripts and other material from our collections: papers from his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, and collaborators Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rodgers; manuscripts by his private composition teacher, Milton Babbitt; works by composers and songwriters he admired, like Bartók, Berlin, Kern, Porter, Rachmaninov, Ravel.

As part of this initiative, thousands of pages have been digitized, fellows have conducted in-depth research and a range of public programs has brought the division’s collections to broader audiences. Staff members also have presented at conferences to highlight the richness of the collections. Together, these efforts showcase the depth and complexity of religious life in the region, as well as the Library’s unique holdings.

The thing is, I hadn’t realized Steve was gone until just now. Maybe that’s because he’s not gone. He’s still here. And let me say right off, he wasn’t my mentor or advisor in a consistent way. His advice was sporadic, but indelible. I think I remember everything he ever said to me about music or writing for the theater.

One of Steve’s great inventions, among many, was his phrasing. He broke from the long, lyrical lines of Kern, Rodgers, Gershwin and Porter. He divided melody into conversational clauses, as Stravinsky divided folk melodies into cells in “L’Histoire du Soldat,” “Les Noces” and “Le Sacre du Printemps.”

Fifty years apart, they shocked and insulted music and theater conservatives in Europe and New York with the same profound insight: that melody could be pixelated and recombined into something original and dynamic. What a blessing that this migration can be charted in the Sondheim Collection and the rich collection of Stravinsky manuscripts in the Library of Congress.