April 2014

William Shakespeare is generally thought to have been born on April 23, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, making Wednesday, April 23, 2014 his 450th birthday! He died on the same day in 1616, so 2016 will be the quatercentenary of his death, the 400th anniversary. Shakespeare’s “First Folio,” one of the rarest items in the UCI Libraries, is housed in Special Collections and Archives on the fifth floor of Langson Library. The first collected edition of the plays of William Shakespeare, commonly known as “The First Folio,” has long ranked among the most treasured publications in the English language. A fine copy of the first edition was donated to the Libraries in 1986 by Dr. Patrick Hanratty (below), a graduate of the UCI doctoral program in Information and Computer Science. Printed in London in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the First Folio contains texts of thirty-six of the plays. Half of the plays here had never been printed before and half of the remaining plays appear here in authoritative versions. Only about 240 copies of the First Folio survive today, most held in libraries and other cultural institutions. Our collection include the first reprint of 1807, as well as other important reprints and early glossaries. Happy Birthday William!

Photo of Dr. Patrick Hanratty and the Shakespeare First Folio [AS-061, Box 144]

The idea for a national gathering of Boy Scouts was the brainchild of Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement in England, who also named the event “jamboree.” The first jamboree in the United States was held in 1937 in Washington D.C. and attracted 25,000 scouts. The first such gathering in California was at the Irvine Ranch in 1953 in what was then Santa Ana (today it is Irvine). The event brought over 50,000 Boy Scouts to Orange County, not just from most of the U.S. states, but also from other countries such as Mexico and Sweden. Below are a few photographs from the Irvine Ranch Jamboree. Myford Irvine, President of the Irvine Company at that time, made the jamboree site available and furnished much of the road equipment, personnel and facilities for the jamboree. Richard Nixon, who was Vice President of the United States, made a speech welcoming the scouts. Photographs are from the Hugh R. McMillan Photographs, 1946-1974. MS-R035. Many of the photographs are available from UCISpace here: http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/9882