In the Margins: Related Events, 18-26 October

• Thursday, 18 October

"Emily Dickinson's Reading: 'The Long Foreground'"
7:30 p.m.
Amherst Woman's Club, 35 Triangle Street
(corner of Triangle and Main, east of the Homestead)

Emily Dickinson's reading, broad and deep, was vital to her existence. It offered a circumference within which she dwelled and outside of which she imagined possibilities. Dickinson scholar Jack Capps will offer his perspective on "The Long Foreground" that helped to shape Dickinson's development as a poet. A reception will follow the talk.

Capps retired in 1988 as professor of English at the United States Military Academy. Author of the pioneering study Emily Dickinson's Reading (1966), Capps earned his Ph. D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with editor Thomas Johnson who produced the first complete collection of Dickinson's poetry.

Replenishing the Shelves

Jack Capps's lecture inaugurates a special project at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Replenishing the Shelves, to recreate the libraries of the Homestead and The Evergreens as accurately as possible. The effort is dedicated to and led by Polly Longsworth, a longtime Dickinson scholar and the first chair of the Emily Dickinson Museum's Board of Governors.

Through the three decades that Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry, ample, eclectic libraries-containing those treasures the poet called "The strongest Friends of the Soul" -stood open to her perusal in the Homestead and The Evergreens. Today, the shelves of both dwellings are bare. The project to recreate the family libraries relies upon the collections as they now exist at Harvard University's Houghton Library, where several hundred Dickinson family volumes have resided since 1950, and Brown University, which has housed the remainder of the family libraries since the early 1990s.

The Emily Dickinson Museum is looking for clean, tight books in good condition and in the exact editions known to have been in the Dickinson family libraries. Once acquired, the books will be displayed as they were when the Dickinson family occupied their homes. Full information about the project, guidelines for acquisition, and the initial booklist is available at the Museum's website.



• Friday, 19 October

"Writing for Children: From Leo Tolstoy to Hampshire," with book artists Paul DuBois Jacobs, Jennifer Swender, and David Costello

5:30-7:00 p.m.
Hampshire College, Franklin Patterson Hall 108


• Thursday, 25 October

Professor Kathy Peiss, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania (formerly of UMass-Amherst), will present a lecture entitled, "Weapons in the War of Ideas: Preserving Culture in World War II". Her current research is a study of librarians, books, intelligence gathering, and cultural reconstruction in the World War II era. This is the Franks and Lois Green Schwoerer 49 Annual History Lecture at Smith College.

The lecture will take place at 4:30 p.m. on , in the Neilson Library Browsing Room. For more information, contact Lyn Minnich, Smith College History Department, 585-3702.