Faber & Faber recently announced a new branding , going officially from Faber and Faber to Faber & Faber. If you collect Sylvia Plath books, this might add a new look to the spines of your collection. Faber are re-releasing/re-publishing several Sylvia Plath books this fall and in the early part of 2014. Time will tell if the new branding is on any of these titles. But, here is what we can look forward to in the near future. Published earlier this month was Sylvia Plath: Drawings , with an introduction by Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes. Also published in paperback is the Carol Ann Duffy selection of Sylvia Plath Poems . Published on 7 November 2013: The Bell Jar , Ariel , and The Journals of Sylvia Plath . For Ariel and The Bell Jar , Faber's gone retro and into their archive, choosing cover designs that match some of the editions published in the 1960s and 1970s. For a (complete?) archive of their covers, please go see the books pages on my website for Sylvia ...

Earlier this week I updated the layout of the thumbnail pages for several of the book cover galleries on A celebration, this is , my website for who? ...Sylvia Plath (aka sylviaplath.info). The galleries I updated are the poetry books , prose books , and periodical covers . For these pages, the title and other bibliographic information have been taken from kind of being hidden (you had to hover over the thumbnail image to see it) and placed it directly below the thumbnail. I hope this helps to explain what it is you are viewing. You can still click on the thumbnail to see the bigger cover image, but you loose the data about the book. So, you'll have to remember what you clicked... The other cover galleries ( Limited editions ; Books, Criticisms, Memoirs, etc. ; and Translations ) remain mostly the same. In order to see any relevant title or bibliographic information you will need to simply hover your mouse pointer over the thumbnail to see it.

Published today by Faber & Faber in England is Sylvia Plath: Drawings , edited and introduced by Frieda Hughes. The book is 72 pages and is on sale via Faber's website (and Amazon.co.uk ) for £16.99. The ISBN for the book is 978-0-571-29521-0. The book features an introduction by Frieda Hughes and also publishes for the first time ever (well, the second time ever since it first appeared in The Times Magazine on 24 August 2013) a letter from Sylvia Plath to her husband Ted Hughes written in early October 1956. The book reprints two letters from Plath to her mother, as well, from 25 August 1956 and 21 October 1956 and a journal entry from 21 August 1957. These all serve as contextual devices for the drawings. The book is divided into several sections (as seen from the proof, there might have been changes between then and now): Drawings from England; Drawings from France; Drawings from Spain; and Drawings from the USA; as well as including a short biography (chronology) an...

Associate Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Smith College and editor The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath , Karen V. Kukil, will present a lecture on Sylvia Plath titled The Bell Jar at 50 on Thursday 5 September 2013 at 4 PM in the Browsing Room of the Neilson Library, Smith College. All are welcome. The lecture is free and will certainly enrich one's understanding of the process of creating The Bell Jar and its publication history. While you are there, you should also check out some of the exhibits ( "From Petals to Paper" and " The Bell Jar at 50"  and "Sylvia Plath Reads the Wife of Bath" ) that are closing at the end of the week (8 September), too.

Last year I found, through Newspaper Archive online , more articles about Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt; the search for her; and her discovery from the week of 24 August 1953. The Google Newspaper Archive project has long since stopped (those quitters!), which is a shame, but as we all well know, the search for Sylvia Plath continues... The seven new newspaper articles that I have found brings our total known number of articles up to 183. The articles are: "Object of Search." The Charleston Gazette . August 26, 1953: 1. [photograph of SP included] "College Senior Missing." The Chester (Pa.) Times . August 26, 1953: 2. [photograph of SP included] "Searchers Comb Woods for Smith College Girl." Corpus Christi Times . August 26, 1953: 16. "Missing Student Found." The Daily News (Newport, R.I.). August 26, 1952: 8. "Missing Smith Senior Found." The Times Record (Troy, N.Y.). August 27, 1953: 15. "Second Well...

Did you know that on August 22, 1961, Sylvia Plath was efficiently busy. Plath's busyness that day is briefly discussed in " These Ghostly Archives 5: Reanimating the Past ", a paper that I co-write with Gail Crowther. But to give some additional detail... On August 22, 1961: Plath was about nine days away from moving to Court Green... On August 22, 1961: Plath sent her drafts of her poem "Insomniac" to Eric Walter White. Collected Poems generically (generally) dates the poem to "May 1961"; however, Plath dated her final typed copy "May 23, 1961". Good to know. The letter and poetry drafts are held by the British Library in the "Cheltenham Festival prize poems" (ADD MS 52617). On August 22, 1961: Plath sent her drafts of her poem "Tulips" (variant title "Sickroom Tulips") to Jack Sweeney. This poem was written on March 18, 1961, a week or so after her release from hospital from having her appendix removed....

The Wellesley Townsman (formerly The Townsman has been largely digitized which, for a fan of Sylvia Plath, is a dream come true. As of August 2012 (when I found the site and first drafted this post) the images are big and freely downloadable, and the functionality of the website is pretty easy to use. The newspaper articles themselves were OCR'd which can lead to false hits, but beggars cannot be choosers and to be too critical might make it appear that I am not grateful, which I certainly am. The majority of the articles you will find merely mention Plath, but from a biographical standpoint, one gets the sense of some of her activities as a young girl, teenager, and young woman. The date range to look for is 1943 and on; there are fewer mentions after 1955, as one might expect as that was the last time Plath truly lived in Wellesley; though she often used her 26 Elmwood Road address for submitting her work when she was transitioning between apartments, cities, etc. One inte...