New Griffon – serie

This special issue of the Gennadius Library's periodical, The New Griffon, presents six essays about the Library's map collection and its place in a larger project to bring together, in a digital repository, maps and charts of the Mediterranean held in American overseas research centers. The text is presented in both English and Greek.

Greek bibliographic resources have generally been difficult to access in North America. This volume presents revised versions of papers first given at a meeting held in December 2006 that explored the possibility of effective transnational cooperation between libraries in Greece and in North America. Five broad themes dominated the conference: collection development and acquisition; bibliographic control (including cataloguing, adherence to standards, transliteration issues, and Unicode); reformatting (i.e., microfilming and digitization); indexing the contents of periodicals; and resource sharing and document delivery. Papers are either in English or Modern Greek.

Kostas Varnalis (1884-1974) was a Bulgarian-born Greek writer and member of the demoticist movement in Greece. An important contemporary of Angelos Sikelianos and Nikos Kazantzakis, Varnalis's floruit as a poet was in the interwar period. His most important texts constitute an ingenious "distortion" of powerful precursors such as Aeschylus, Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Solomos, Rabelais, Goethe, and Flaubert. This issue of The New Griffon presents for the first time an in-depth view of this poet's literary work and life through his letters and papers, given to the Gennadius Library by the poet's daughter in 2001. Theano Michailidou provides an introductory essay on the work of Varnalis and his archives, and another (in English) on Varnalis as a poet, prose writer, and critic. The complete catalogue of the Varnalis Archives forms the core of this volume, including a useful index of personal names and a series of evocative historical photographs of Varnalis.

The New Griffon volume 12 seeks to highlight several discoveries in a variety of areas and time periods: Father Konstantinos Terzopoulos explores 16 manuscripts of Byzantine chant; Leonora Navari presents the published works of Cardinal Bessarion, one of the heroes of Joannes Gennadius because of his active role in promoting the study of Hellenism in Italy; Cristina Pallini dissects an early hand-drawn map of Smyrna; Massimo Pinto considers the works of the 19th-century forger Constantinos Simonidis, a complete set of which was eagerly sought by Gennadius; Stephen Duckworth follows Edward Lear's wanderings on Crete through a careful study of his watercolors; American School Director Jack Davis analyzes topographical drawings connected with the presence of the French in the Peloponnesus in the early 19th century; Aliki Asvesta presents a wealth of information from the archive of cartographer Barbié du Bocage; Maria-Christina Chatziioannou explores the personal archive of Joannes Gennadius to paint a portrait of the Gennadeion's founder in the context of British society; and Eleftheria Daleziou examines the archives of Greek politician Ion Dragoumis, focusing on his exile on Corsica in the early 20th century. The volume is not all-inclusive, as the unique holdings of the Gennadeion could not possibly fit within the pages of a single issue of a journal. Our hope is that readers will be tempted to browse the Library's catalogue in person or online (www.gennadius.gr) in order to find their very own hidden treasures.

This volume of essays focuses principally on the collection of books of British and Irish antiquarian scholars held in the Gennadius Library. Collectively, the essays are the product of two thematically-linked conferences: the first of these was held in Athens in June 2010, and was organised by the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin, in collaboration with the Gennadius Library, and graciously hosted by the Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies; the second, held in Dublin in June 2011, was organized by the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, and hosted by the Humanities Institute of Ireland. The major premise explored in the paper sessions of those conferences, and in this volume, concerns the work of some of the most pioneering British and Irish 18th and early 19th century antiquarians, artists, and architects who voyaged into the Mediterranean. The publication of their findings in architectural treatises, travelogues and illustrated books came, in turn, to inform international movements of art and architecture; specifically, the Neoclassical and Greek Revival styles. Collectively, these books capture the allure of the broader Mediterranean world for scholars of antiquity - ever expanding beyond the well-traveled boundaries enjoyed by Grand Tourists - exploring issues such as topography, history, cultural mores, dress and, of course, art and architecture. Print and book culture was at the core of the early modern period, not least in the world of architecture, and the conscious effort to gather and disseminate knowledge of the wider classical world through this medium is remarkable. The significant contribution of British and Irish scholarship to this broader European discourse is here viewed through the lens of the extraordinary book collection held in the Gennadius Library.