It has been quite some time since a "Sylvia Plath: Did you know…" appeared on this blog so I thought I should remedy this unintended gap. Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar (1963) is a fun book to read for its hidden messages and allusions. Plath carefully and consciously manipulated time and people to construct a work based off of many experiences in her own life, but undoubtedly also added fictional color. One scene in the novel in particular that always makes me chuckle is Esther's motivation for wanting to spend her summer writing a novel. She writes: Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people. (1963:126) After this, Esther drafts a first paragraph, Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother's waiting for something to happen. It was a sweltering morning in July, and drops of sweat crawled down her back one by one, like slow insects. I leaned back and read what I had written. I...

Sylvia Plath wrote "The Bed Book" in the spring of 1959. By June of that year she was actively marketing it; but in her lifetime it never came to be printed. In 1976, both Faber and Harper & Row brought out editions in the UK , illustrated by Quentin Blake and in the US , with illustrations by Emily Arnold McCully. While not included in any bibliography to date, excerpts of "The Bed Book" were printed in two American periodicals in 1976. In October 1976, Woman's Day published it. Though excerpted, there are some textual variations, mostly to do with stanza structure, capitalization, etc. This publications includes beautiful color illustrations by Sal Murdocca. It appears on pages 98-99. In December, Cricket , a magazine for children, printed 'Beds'. Like the above, it is excerpted and there are textual variations. This publication includes black and white illustrations by Emily McCully, on pages 32-38. The illustrations are the same as...

The Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis holds a Children's Literature Research Collection. The collection holds the papers of children's book illustrator Emily Arnold McCully. Plath book collectors will know her as the illustrator of the US edition of The Bed Book (published 1976). The British edition was illustrated by Quentin Blake. This collection of Plath related materials is small, and is listed as being production materials: 40 p. ink, pencil, and watercolor dummy with holograph and typescript text pasted in. The call number is M.C. 618. This would be an interesting collection to see as the drawings and illustrations are a visual interpretations of Plath's book. The finding aid for the collection is online here . The University of Minnesota Libraries homepage is here .