The Lewis Walpole Library

05/29/2026

Join our community of scholars as a Fellow at the Lewis Walpole Library. Applications open June 1.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Lewis Walpole Library each invite scholars to apply for two fellowships that support on-site research in Yale Library Special Collections. The application periods open in June.

05/29/2026

Little Bear paid us a visit around lunchtime a couple of weeks ago.

Happy !

Yale University Library
yalelibrary

05/25/2026

The Lewis Walpole Library is closed Monday, May 25 in observance of Memorial Day.

yalelibrary
Yale University Library

05/22/2026

We had a very hot day in the middle of the week, and Scott spotted one baby bluebird at the opening of the nesting box, mouth agape. He explained that birds don't sweat and instead thermoregulate by opening their mouths and evaporatively cooling off that way. You can see one of the bluebird nestlings doing that through the entrance hole. Either that or they're hungry and looking for food! Perhaps both.

Yesterday he took a final look into the nesting box and confirmed that all 5 hatched, and all survived the heat wave too! The babies are beginning to fledge--you can even see the start of the bright blue feathers. They should leave the nest mid- to late-next week.

05/22/2026

Happy ! The LWL has a fascinating collection of 18th-century trade cards, including this one:

Joseph Frampton, at the Tea Ware House, Wyde-Gate Street, near Bishops Gate, London, sells all sorts of fine teas, coffee & chocolate, at the lowest prices.

05/19/2026

A few spaces still available!

Graduate Student Seminar: "Street Life: The 'Cries' in British Visual Culture, 1711-1877" led by Gillian Forrester, June 9-10. Apply today!

The Lewis Walpole Library will host a collection-based seminar in connection with the current exhibition in Farmington curated by Gillian Forrester, independent art historian, curator, and writer. Dr. Forrester is the former Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art and specializes in British print culture in a transnational context.

Don't miss this amazing opportunity to explore the long-established traditions in visual culture of depicting street vendors "crying" or broadcasting their wares.

Following a curator-led tour of the exhibition, the group will continue conversation with additional materials and visits to special collections study rooms at the Lewis Walpole Library, the Beinecke Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. While the seminar will focus primarily on visual culture, it will be of interest to students of food history, social history, and musicology.

Link to application: https://walpole.library.yale.edu/webform/graduate-seminar-street-life












Yale University Library
Yale Center for British Art
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

05/18/2026

Congratulations ! Wishing all degree recipients the very best.

W.S. Lewis was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws at the 1965 . In this photo, W.S. Lewis is shown to the right of Yale President Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Other 1965 honorary degree recipients include John C. Bennett, (Doctor of Divinity); Paul Codman Cabot, (Doctor of Laws); Roland de Vaux, O.P. (Doctor of Humane Letters); Edith Starrett Green, (Doctor of Laws); Louis I. Kahn, (Doctor of Fine Arts); Claude Levi-Strauss, (Doctor of Science); Robert E. Marjolin, (Doctor of Laws); Marshall Nirenberg, (Doctor of Science); Benjamin Spock, (Doctor of Humane Letters); U Thant, (Doctor of Laws); Owen Meredith Wilson, (Doctor of Laws).

Lewis had already earned degrees at Yale in 1918 (B.A.) and 1937 (M.A.)





LWL MSS 21 Box 334 (Oversize), folder 4
LWL MSS 22 Box 2, folder 19

05/15/2026

Our first five little bluebirds of 2026 have appeared. The clutch of 5 eggs was seen April 27, the hatchlings--sleepy and hungry--were photographed on May 11, and the already-growing nestlings with their first hints of feathers were photo'd today.

Happy everyone!

💙🩵💙🩵💙

05/15/2026

"Sung and Sketched: Exploring Allegorical Nationhood Through the Maidment Collection and Nineteenth-Century Ephemera"

Read Taryn Duffy's blog post written following her fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library where she was the first researcher to work with the collection of prints, texts, and ephemera given to the LWL by the late Professor Brian Maidment.

In her post, as in her work, Duffy looks at Britain's ideas of its own nationhood as reflected in various media including songs, images found in nineteenth-century periodicals, and print culture linking the monarchy to national identity.

https://bit.ly/4dq42MG

05/14/2026

Don't "judge" us! "Master of the rolls" looks like one of the figures in the "Cries" series of prints depicting street vendors, on view in the current exhibition, but in this case the play on the term Master of the Rolls here appears to refer to the baked goods he carries on his head, while in fact referring to the Keeper or Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England, known as the Master of the Rolls, the President of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and Head of Civil Justice.

Caricature of Richard Pepper Arden, 1st Baron Alvanley, showing him dressed in a long black coat and hat, wearing a white apron and buckled shoes, carrying a basket over his left arm and balancing a large board stacked with bread rolls on his head with his right.