Huntington Library

Abraham Lincoln is much with us these days -- our new president reveres him and at times talks in his cadences. A raft of new books seeks to get at his mysterious power. And next week will be the 200th anniversary of his birth in a Kentucky cabin. To celebrate the anniversary, the Huntington Library has assembled an unusual show of Lincoln memorabilia -- objects that capture the man and the public's long fascination with him.

As a young man, Roger Medearis had a dream - to be an artist. Studying under the noted Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute, his prospects seemed good. Then came World War II, and he served on the home front for the Navy, then the Army. When the war was over, he found to his disappointment that the folksy nostalgia of Regionalism had fallen out of favor, replaced in large part by the brash brush strokes of Abstract Expressionism. In 1950 Medearis gave up art and became a salesman, and in 1958 he moved to California.

Deep behind the locked doors of the Huntington Library's rare book collection, two Bibles tell a remarkable story. One is the Gundulf Bible, a 1,000-year-old tome originally owned by an English bishop and written in Latin, a language that most of his flock did not understand. The other is a version of the New Testament published this year that looks like a teen magazine featuring splashy art design and such articles as: "Are You Dating a Godly Guy?"

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced $2 million in grants to Southern California arts and cultural institutions. Among other things, the money will enable USC librarians to bring 34,000 historic photos of 1920s and '30s Los Angeles into public view via the Internet and help the Pacific Symphony press forward with its "Music Unwound" series, a bid to enhance the concertgoing experience by adding visual projections and slices of...

The time was 1946. Dancer Joseph Rickard saw an African American child turned away from classes at a Los Angeles dance studio just because she was black. That didn't seem right to him. Rickard, who was white, decided to do something about it. Opening a studio himself in the black community, he trained that child-- and her mother--and sought other black students who wanted to learn classic dance.

Forget about the 15th century edition of "Canterbury Tales." Don't set foot near "Blue Boy" and other masterpiece paintings of Gainsborough. Skip right by one of the few surviving Gutenberg Bibles, a mere 544 years old. The crowds Monday at the Huntington Library, the largest one-day tally in the San Marino institution's 71-year history, came on a strikingly less cultured mission: They wanted to see and sniff a massive flower that smells like road kill.

Photographers for pioneering electric companies documented a sweeping visual history of Southern California, from its 19th century farm days to the suburban sprawl after World War II. When giant hydroelectric dams were built on formerly wild rivers, they shot. When cocktail lounges added air conditioning in formerly sweltering digs, they shot. When floods and earthquakes ravaged the region, they shot.

Wally G. Shidler is a connoisseur of Southern California ephemera. He owns thousands of schedules for the old Red Car transit system, old tour books and pamphlets, faded histories of Los Angeles-area cities. The retired film engineer from Walnut Park was in his element Saturday, caught up in a sea of more than 1,000 other collectors and would-be collectors at the Huntington Library in San Marino as part of "Bazaar Fever," the second annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar.

In the 16th century, the Spanish came to the New World in search of fabled riches. They were lured by embroidered tales of the Seven Cities, where chiefs speckled with gold dust rode through streets in silver chariots. In 1540, Spaniard Francisco Coronado and his army marched north from Mexico and bullied their way across what is now the American Southwest, descending upon one Indian tribe after the next, in search of those cities. Two years later he returned in disgrace, having found no gold.

The Huntington is one of those fabulous places that illustrate both the glories and limits of acquisition. The legendary library, art collections and botanical gardens in San Marino were once the private playground of one of America's wealthiest men--Henry E. Huntington--who inherited millions and amassed a fortune of his own as head of the Southern Pacific Railroad and Pacific Electric and as a speculator in real estate.