One of the things I did when working on The Letters of Sylvia Plath  was to acquire copies of the Varsity Handbook  for 1955-1956 and 1956-1957. Plath herself had these and used them like a bible for learning the ins and outs of life at Cambridge. I was particularly interested in the maps as they give the flavor and feel of the town, the colleges, and the university at that time period. They were indispensable for contextualizing some of Plath's experiences as I read them in her letters and worked on writing footnotes. Here is the cover for the 1955-1956 Varsity Handbook . If I remember correctly, this Handbook lacked the maps. So that was why I bought the 1956-1957 one... because I did have the maps.

Bonhams London will offer at auction some property formerly belonging to Elizabeth Sigmund, Sylvia Plath's friend and co-dedicatee of The Bell Jar .  The auction is part of the Fine Books and Manuscript auction (25355) in London  (Knightsbridge) on 26 June 2019. Links and images to the respective lots will be added when available. All text below gratefully provided from the auction catalogue by Luke Batterham, Senior Valuer at Bonhams. LOT 238 • (24869413/1) PLATH (SYLVIA) THOMAS (DYLAN) The Collected Poems, SYLVIA PLATH'S COPY, ANNOTATED IN FIVE PLACES AND EXTENSIVELY UNDERLINED, with upwards of seventy sentences or passages underscored, marked or bracketed in the margins, in two places with Plath's distinctive "star" symbol in black ink, 13 poems in the Contents marked, photographic frontispiece, publisher's blue cloth, worn, spine soiled and split, 8vo , New York, A New Directions Book [by James Laughlin], [1953] £3,000 - 5,000 €3,400 - 5,700 ...

One of the best things one can do is read the periodicals in which Sylvia Plath's work was published. Many are held in libraries and archives, some have even been digitized. Some exist, also, on microfilm or microfiche which is not the best product but will be useful and functional for a long time to come. Several people sent me "tip" money last year for which I am grateful. I promised to use that for the benefit of my Plathing and perhaps it trickles down to you, too? With some of that money I recently acquired the 20 October 1956 issue of Granta magazine in which was printed Plath's short story "The Day Mr Prescott Died". Looking at the table of contents two names ring bells with me. One is Michael Frayn, with whom Plath was friendly. Frayn is both mentioned in Plath's letters and was sent at least one letter, too, in March of 1957. The other name is Bamber Gascoigne, who is now a British television presenter and author, best known for being th...

On 28 January 1963 Sylvia Plath was hard at work. On that day she completed her "Landscape of Childhood" (later titled "Ocean 1212-W"). She may have also recently completed "Snow Blitz" and was hard at work on poems. She revised the ending of "Sheep in Fog" first composed about eight weeks earlier, and then wrote "The Munich Mannequins", "Totem", and "Child". Did you know that "Child" was once featured at a "Poems on the Underground" in London? The program started in 1986. In addition to being readable on the Tube, once upon a time, posters were sold for these, too. 

Recently the Lilly Library has been awarded a $10.9 million grant and part of these funds, given by the Lilly Endowment, will go towards renovating the library. The Library has created a special web page that will provide news and updates on the renovation. This will have an affect on researchers going to look at the Sylvia Plath collection. And, because they do actually hold more stuff than Plath materials, it will also affect those collections, too. Chances are if you have plans to visit the library this spring and summer you will be fine and not experience and delays or disruptions. But visitors later in the year and toward the end will definitely want to double-check their plans and thus plan accordingly. Smith College is also in the midst of a several-year renovation project affecting their Sylvia Plath papers, too. (I presume they have non-Plath holdings, too, but let's be honest, they hardly matter.) Normally housed in the Neilson Library, their special col...

David Trinidad's phenomenal essay " On the Road with Sylvia and Ted: Plath and Hughes's 1959 Trip Across America " was one of the best pieces I had to pleasure to read and work on when I was co-editor of Plath Profiles . And it in part led me to start thinking about Sylvia Plath picture postcards. I got to see, as part of the Letters of Sylvia Plath project, as many postcards as was possible. And so now that her texts are available, I thought I might write a post that might become a series which looks at the picture side of the postcards Plath sent. The idea came to me in June 2012, the year after publishing David's essay, when I did a little research into the postcard Plath sent to J. Mallory Wober circa 17 November 1955 of Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy . The letter is printed in  Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1 , pp 1011-12. The original painting is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Plath visited the MoMA several times on...

The following letter was sent from Sylvia Plath to me via David Trinidad's Ouija board early this morning. It will be included in the paperback edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 3: 1963-2019 . Sylvia Plath 7 Bright Stupid Confetti Lane My Zen Heaven Peter K. Steinberg Earth 1 April 2019 RE: Cease and desist from everything Dear Peter K. Steinberg: This CEASE AND DESIST ORDER is to inform you that your persistent actions including but not limited to transcribing and annotating my letters; tweeting, blogging, websiting and otherwise attempting to represent me on the Internet (not for nothing, the wifi is awesome up here) have become unbearable. You are ORDERED TO STOP such activities immediately as they are being done in violation of the law. I have the right to remain free from these activities as they constitute [harassment/stalking/etc.], and I will pursue any legal and spirituous remedies available to me against you if these activities continue...