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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector
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Robert Downing Collection, Hoblitzelle Theater Arts Library, University of Texas at Austin The
bookplate presented here (reprinted courtesy of the Hoblitzelle Theater
Arts Library at the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center) comes from the 10,000-book collection of
Robert Downing (1914-1975), one of the American theater's most active and
diverse artists. More than a treader of the boards, Downing was something
of a renaissance man in twentieth-century American popular art. His
activities spanned all of the major media in vehicles of high-, middle-,
and low-brow appeal. Born
Guy Robert Downing on 26 April 1914 in Sioux City, Iowa, he embarked on a
theatrical career early in life, studying acting, writing plays,
directing, and producing in local community theater, in Cedar Rapids, and
at the University of Iowa. In 1938 Downing was assigned to write and act
with the WPA's Federal Theater Project, and thereafter toured with the
famous Lunts in productions of The Seagull (1939), The Taming of
the Shrew (1940), and other plays. During World War II Downing managed
the stage production of USO camp shows, but it was after the war that
Downing's career peaked, when he produced and managed such Broadway
premieres as A Street Car Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1955), and Camelot (1960). His theatrical career
afterward included several distinguished appointments: as director of
the Lincoln Center's Repertory Theater (1964 1965), as U.S. State
Department lecturer abroad (1966), and as drama editor for the Denver
Post (1967-1970). However,
Downing's career was hardly limited to the stage. He acted in Hollywood
films from 1936 to 1961, including Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954).
He also appeared regularly in various radio dramas during the 1930s. In
addition, he was a pioneer performer in early television, with roles in The
Fred Allen Show (1952), variety specials, and Captain Video (1952-1953). In
1961, when Downing sold his theater collection to the University of Texas,
the numerous photographs, blueprints, costume designs, letters, scripts,
and other pieces of ephemera were accompanied by his large personal
library of books. The Robert Downing Collection is marked by this
distinctive bookplate, which uses nostalgic images of the theater to
commemorate
Downing's identity. The 3.25" x 2.25" plate features the name
"Robert Downing," inscribed by sketched curlicues, beneath a
pen-and-ink drawing of a showboat moored to a river dock. In silhouette,
ladies and gentlemen adorned in antebellum formal dress crowd the upper
deck of the Dixiana riverboat. On the lower deck, a prominent
broadside announces "HAMLET-TO-NITE." The
images on the bookplate juxtapose, rather unhistorically, several images
from the career of Downing as a young actor, but, cumulatively, they
indicate his ability successfully to mix classical, canonical drama and
popular entertainment. The Dixiana Showboat was a theatrical venue
moored at the Diversey Parkway Bridge in Chicago, where Downing played
melodramatic leads during the 1934-1935 season at the age of twenty-one.
However, Downing never actually portrayed Hamlet on the Dixiana; he
had acted the part of the melancholy Dane in a modern-dress
performance in Cedar Rapids (1934), and later mounted a "GI
version" of the Shakespeare play for the USO in 1945. While playing
the Chicago showboat, he had appeared in somewhat less memorable
productions: Bertha, The Sewing Machine Girl, No Mother to Guide Her,
and The Convict's Daughter were some of the melodramatic titles
that the Dixiana company presented during Downing's youth. The
vulgarized "to-nite" spelling and the popular nostalgia venue
of a riverboat in Depression-era Chicago combined with the Hamlet
advertisement point to one of the book collector/actor/producer's most
important artistic impulses—the desire to bridge taste cultures and
unite the classical and American popular arts. Dan
Streible Department
of Radio-Television-Film University
of Texas at Austin [Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 24, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 489-490.]
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| Last updated June 8, 2001 |
