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Exciting Plans for Society's
2010 Annual Meeting in Los Angeles
By Beverly Hill
LA Meeting Chair
World-class manuscripts, congenial and stimulating events, good food and fun, breath-taking views of the Pacific--these are just some of the delights awaiting Manuscript Society members and their guests at the Society's annual meeting May 26-29 in Los Angeles.
Add to that an optional trip May 30 to Santa Barbara, California, and you have a complete package of events designed to amaze and inspire members of the manuscript collecting world.
Guests will stay at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, 1150 South Beverly Drive, in Beverly Hills. For those who would like to come early or stay a couple of days extra to view some of the sites we are unable to incorporate into our visit, the Crowne Plaza Hotel is extending its $179 per night rate to our members from May 23-June 1. The hotel can be contacted directly at 310-553-6561. Just identify yourself as a member of the Manuscript Society to receive the special rate.
On Wednesday, May 26th, Manuscript Society members will check into the hotel, register and pick up their welcome bags. On Wednesday evening, Patricia Mock will welcome us to her beautiful home in Beverly Hills for a Mexican fiesta with, of course, a margarita bar and plenty of cerveza. If the weather is beautiful as expected, we will be able to eat outside around the pool.
On Thursday, May 27th, we will travel by bus to Pasadena to visit the Huntington Library, one of the world's great cultural, research, and educational centers, as well as the home of a state-of-the-art conservation lab, all in a beautiful garden setting. After a Continental breakfast at the Library, we will spend the morning looking at a variety of manuscripts, such as the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, letters and documents by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Thoreau's autograph manuscript of Walden, and manuscripts by Jack London, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, and Charles Bukowski.
We will also visit the Huntington's conservation lab, as well as the new Dibner Hall of the History of Science, which showcases some of science's greatest achievements, from Ptolemy to Copernicus, Newton to Einstein. During lunch at the Huntington, we will hear from a panel of scholars who are working from original material.
When we leave the Huntington, we will take the bus to The Autry National Center of the American West, which focuses on Indians, cowboys, pioneers, ranchers, outlaws, and movie-makers. They will also have a special exhibit on "Home Lands: How Women Made the West."
After a couple of hours there, we will get back on the bus for a short trip to the Warner Brothers Museum in Burbank, which is chock full of movie memorabilia. A special exhibit of letters by literary figures who wrote for the movies--William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Lillian Hellman, and others--will be mounted for us. Members will be on their own for dinner. On Friday, May 28, we will travel to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, where we will have a Continental breakfast while the Executive Director, Duke Blackwell, speaks to us before we visit the archives, tour the library and check out Air Force One. Some of the items we will see in the archives are handwritten correspondence between President Reagan and Russian leaders, Reagan's touching letter to President Sadat's wife after Sadat's assassination, advice from Richard Nixon to Reagan on choosing a cabinet, and Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate when he asked Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall.
While we have lunch in a private room at the library, Kathy Osborne, who was President Reagan's secretary when he was governor and through both presidential terms, will talk to us about what it was like to work at the White House and give some personal reminiscences from Reagan's White House years.
After we leave the Reagan Library, we will go to the Getty Research Institute where we will see an exhibit of letters by artists and architects, such as correspondence between French neo-impressionist Paul Signac and artists such as Pissarro and Monet, and a collection of letters exchanged by Frank Lloyd Wright and R.M. Schindler. Members will be on their own for dinner.
On Saturday, May 29th, we start out at the Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Studio Barn) where Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker will take us on a tour and talk to us about original manuscript materials regarding the film industry.
We will then go to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, where we will hold our business meeting and fun auction while we have lunch on the lawn. After lunch, we will see a smorgasbord of manuscripts, including Oscar Wilde, Dryden, and Pope, plus music manuscripts by Purcell and Handel.
In the afternoon, we will head over to the University of California Los Angeles and see a wide spectrum from their special collections--they call it "From Machiavelli to Mackie"--and hear from archivists of the various collections.
Saturday evening we will enjoy a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean as we dine on a terrace at the Bel-Air Bay Club, a private club on the Pacific Coast Highway. Our dinner speaker will be Judith Freeman, an author whose most recent book, The Long Embrace, is about the personal life of Raymond Chandler, the iconic crime novelist who used Los Angeles as the backdrop for many of his novels and whose most famous character was hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe. The Long Embrace has been described as "part biography, part detective story, part love story, and part sﾎance."
On Sunday, May 30th - Our extra day will be spent in beautiful Santa Barbara, just one and a half hours up the coast from Los Angeles. At the Karpeles Museum, the world's largest private holding of important original manuscripts and documents open to the public, Dave Karpeles will share some of his treasures with us, such as the original draft of the Bill of Rights and Einstein's notebooks with the mathematical calculations for the theory of relativity. We will have lunch at the Paradise Cafﾎ, then visit the Santa Barbara Mission, called "The Queen of the Missions" because of its beauty. We'll also get a tour of the city by a Santa Barbara historian before boarding the bus for our return trip to Beverly Hills.
Note for Music Lovers: On Friday, May 28th, at 8:00 PM, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will have a "Casual Friday" concert. The Philharmonic will perform two pieces (Sibelius' Violin Concerto, played by Julian Rachlin, and Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy), then musicians will mingle with audience members at the cafﾎ in Walt Disney Hall afterwards. Tickets can be purchased at 323-850-2000. For groups of ten or more, discounted tickets may be obtained by calling 323-850-2050. This is not part of the Manuscript Society itinerary but is too wonderful an opportunity not to mention.
