The National Library of Ireland's Digital Collections

They say that repeating the same action and expecting different results is a sign of insanity (the saying's often attributed to Einstein, for no apparent reason). But that's not the case with searching the web for subjects of interest. As long as you leave a decent interval—how long will vary depending upon the topicality—you can certainly expect new things all the time, so that repeating the same search now as a few years, months, or even days ago may very well turn up quite a lot that was not available before.

This is certainly true of libraries and what they offer, but most of this is not easily accessible through a universal search-engine search. The proportion of web material that can be found through a search engine, the so-called "surface web", is generally given as about 4% of the total resources that exist online. The rest is the invisible or deep web, which includes the deliberately hidden and usually nefarious "dark web" but also plenty of perfectly normal stuff that just can't be retrieved by the search engines' crawlers. 

For many pages you simply have to know the address you are aiming for—for instance, to get the results of a medical test or the reading for an academic course—and there's generally some kind of gate-keeping with passwords and user identification. Many university libraries have this type of barrier to general users, but with national libraries there is usually only free registration and it is often possible to search and interrogate the the site without even registering. Each one is different and very few of them have brilliant functionality or intuitive interfaces, but it is definitely worth exploring what's there, trying out different routes, and being patient with less-than-clear design. 

If you're looking for digital material that you can see on your own screen, you can usually restrict your search to digital resources, and this can include the library's catalogues and listings, as well as books, periodicals, posters and playbills, manuscripts, artwork, audio recordings, official registers, parish records, "realia" (i.e., objects), and many more distinctive categories depending upon the library in question or your interest.

The National Library of Ireland, like many national and academic libraries, is giving ever-greater access to its collections by digitizing special material that it holds. This is particularly important in the realm of rare and unique items, such as scarce editions, some ephemera, and, of course, manuscripts.

The National Library of Ireland catalogue and home page

For Yeatsians, probably the most significant recent addition has been the letters and other material acquired recently. These include letters from James Joyce, purchased by the Irish Government in early 2017,

Two letters from the Letters from James Joyce to W. B. Yeats

and also correspondence with Olivia Shakespear bought in September 2017, ahead of an auction at Sotheby's. 

Two letters from Correspondence between W. B. Yeats and Olivia Shakespear

 

Also online is W. B. Yeats's correspondence with his wife, George (also prior to the Sotheby's sale, though they never made the catalogue), though her side of the correspondence is not available outside the library itself because it is still in copyright (she died in 1968). So for her side of the exchange, we'll have to rely on Ann Saddlemyer's W. B. Yeats & George Yeats: The Letters. In fact, given Yeats's handwriting, most people will need to rely on Saddlemyer's book, or the InteLex Collected Letters, if they are lucky enough to have access through their library.

 

The Yeats marital letters, in "Context" view

If you just want to see what's available, probably the best way to explore the selection is simply to put "Yeats" into the search, with "Search Digitised Content Only". And I'd personally filter by "Oldest First"—even though it will throw up a few anomalies, it has some logic, unlike supposed "Relevance".

 

One word of warning: if you arrive at the library's website via the glossy front page, it may take a few clicks and some lateral thinking to get to the catalogue and collections. In general, you just need to do a search and it will take you to the catalogues, where you can then start to read letters and broadsides.

 Just for reference, the most useful starting point is probably https://catalogue.nli.ie/ .

Astrological maps drawn out on Jan 30
with Dionertes comment.
question. "Life in Ireland if I return".
WBY.
             Feb 2.
                           1922

( link )

These six pages from the "Yeats marital correspondence" include a progressed
chart for WBY himself, a horary chart for the question, and some commentary
from the "Instructor" Dionertes, channelled by George.
Though civil war had broken out in January (hence the doubt), George Yeats
went to Dublin to look for a house on 12 February 1922, taking out a lease on
82 Merrion Square two days later.

Illustrating A Vision 

When we were thinking about a cover image for the book of essays Yeats's "A Vision": Explications and Contexts, the editors were casting around for a suitable picture that would not incur too much copyright payment. Though the obvious image would be Dulac's illustration of the Great Wheel, it has been used quite a few times already and probably appeals more to the symbolically minded—one of the editors found that type of image off-putting, though I recognize that I myself am a sucker for a mandala! However, there is separate problem here, that Dulac's estate, handled through a publishing company, has been slow to process requests for other writers, and of course we had left the matter slightly late... There is also the Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) plate of hawk, unicorn, fountain and moon that was used for the pastedown on the inside boards of Macmillan editions during the 1920s.

In part this appeals to my sense of the importance to Yeats of the unicorn for the symbolism of A Vision—as I noted in an earlier post, he had originally placed a unicorn at the centre of the Great Wheel.

Publishers regard the most commercial option as a portrait of W. B. Yeats himself, as a more instant form of "branding" and this has plenty of virtues, though we would have wanted a picture of both George and W. B. at the very least. In the end, there were not so many of these that appealed, and we started looking at the work of other artists who had worked with Yeats.

One was W. T. Horton (1864-1919), whose work is out of copyright, in particular his Book of Images, for which Yeats wrote the introduction, and The Way of the Soul, which echoes the fictional title of Kusta ben Luka's work, The Way of the Soul between the Sun and the Moon. A few seemed quite possible, though a little stretched perhaps.

The moon presiding over a split landscape—primary and antithetical?—seemed possible, as did the rocky path to the moon, both from The Way of the Soul, but I also have a certain reluctance to emphasize the moon's place in the system more than it already is. It is such a potent symbol that it slightly overwhelms the concepts it represents, as much for Yeats as for us readers.

Images with sun-moon imagery are visually very appealing, but they also tend to run the risk of feminizing the moon—something that Yeats certainly does in his poetry, but actually goes against to some degree in the system. (Though the Graeco-Roman imagery that dominates Western understanding makes sun masculine and moon feminine, and tends to be viewed as "natural," Germanic, Middle-Eastern, Japanese and other mythologies have a male moon and female sun, and in A Vision the antithetical lunar Tincture, is the one associated more with the masculine.)

John Trinick's designs for A. E. Waite's meditation Tarot, at the British Museum

(I realize that I am taking advantage of a kind of apophasis—including all these images by saying that I couldn't include them...). We considered other artists who had collaborated with Yeats or been associated with him such as Althea Gyles (1868-1949) whose work features in the excellent section on Crafting the Book in the National Library of Ireland's online exhibition on Yeats (and there is also a Japanese gallery featuring her work). Here, there did not seem to be an eminently suitable image, and the situation with her estate was unclear.

To get to this section of the National Library of Ireland's online exhibition,
you need to get to the appropriate part of the exhibition "floor":
probably the simplest way is by Searching on "Crafting the Book,"
then going to "view": this display is on the left-hand side.

This led to Thomas Sturge Moore (1870-1944) who created book covers, book plates and other designs for the Yeatses. His work is in copyright, but with clear family holders, and we hoped that it would not be too expensive. In this case, we ended up favouring the plate created for George Yeats, which is directly inspired by elements associated with A Vision as well as a range of other Golden Dawn associations. In many ways the slightly mandala-ish rose on the cover of Per Amica Silentia Lunae might have been the most appropriate, but it has been used by the Yeats Annual, so might have led to some confusion.

Both of the Yeatses' book plates are rather gnomic, and the big question is whether either of them would attract a browsing reader, or please a reader who had a copy of the book. Yeats's book plate is particularly cryptic, including heraldic elements (the goat's head and the gates=Yeats) as well as personal emblems such as the candle in the waves.

George's is more striking and memorable. Though it is not immediately connected with A Vision, it is relevant to anyone who is interested: I've already commented to some extent on the unicorn and I shall go into the symbolism more in the next post.

Sturge Moore's estate, two grand-daughters, was very generous in giving us permission to use the images for a small sum, and we are all very pleased with the outcome. That said, someone involved in publishing criticized it to me as confusing, for including the name of George Yeats on the cover, and as unlikely to attract any readers. I, for one, am delighted to have George's name on the cover, albeit in an odd way, and do not really think that this is the type of book someone is going to stumble upon--if you come upon it, you are probably looking for it or at least have an interest in A Vision and the Yeatses. But I may be wrong, or at least thinking rather uncommercially: I'd love to hear any comments one way or the other, for future reference, and of course I'd be delighted to hear any further suggestions that anyone might have, either for a later edition of this book, or more likely for the next one on A Vision.