Rare Books and Manuscripts

A $15,000 Pennsylvania History and Museum grant from the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission [PHMC] has enabled the Special Collections Library in the Pennsylvania State University Libraries to identify, preserve, arrange, and describe the historical records of a pioneering firm in stage lighting design and manufacturing. The Theatre Lighting Drawings Collection consists of some 16,000 original pencil, ink, and blueprint drawings of stage lighting equipment invented and designed primarily by Kliegl Brothers. The collection documents 20th-century innovations in theatre lighting equipment installed in theatres and auditoriums in public spaces throughout the United States and beyond.

The grant, awarded in September of 2007, provided the funds for wages, equipment, and supplies. Project directors Sandra Stelts, curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Susan Hamburger, Special Collections manuscripts librarian, have supervised the work of project archivist Katelyn Dion, a recent Penn State graduate; Kerry Schork, an intern in Jacqueline Esposito’s archives management class; Caverly Allatt, a preservation volunteer; Lori Snyder, an intern in Cataloging and Metadata Services; Tim Babcock and Lee Gruver of the Rare Books and Manuscripts staff; and John Jacobsen, a former Work-Study student and recent graduate of the theatre lighting major in the College of Arts and Architecture. Karen Dabney, Libraries conservator in the Digitization and Preservation Department, trained and assisted the staff in handling, cleaning, humidifying, flattening, mending, and separating the drawings by process. The different processes have been identified and stored separately because many of them (like diazotypes) are chemically incompatible with each other and with other library materials.

The majority of the drawings are from Kliegl Brothers’ working files. From their establishment in 1896 until dissolution during the 1990s, Kliegl Brothers was the oldest and largest stage lighting manufacturer in the world. The carbon arc lamps used in the lighting of motion picture sets since the silent film era were originally called Kliegl lights after their inventors, the brothers John and Anton Kliegl, and later shortened to Klieg lights—the preferred standard in stage as well as screen production since 1911. When Kliegl closed its offices in the 1990s, 66 flat files and open crates of loose drawings were delivered to Penn State and deposited in a basement stairwell of the Arts Building, where they remained until Professor William Kenyon of the theatre lighting department contacted Stelts in 2006 to ask the University Libraries to assume control over them. Rare Books and Manuscripts already has strong holdings in theatre lighting in its Theatre Lighting Control System Drawings (1950–1971) from Century Lighting, Inc., and the George C. Izenour Architectural Drawings Collection, both transferred to the Libraries through the good offices of William Allison, former associate director of Penn State’s Institute for Arts and Humanities and a professor of theatre lighting. Professor Allison was solely responsible for originating and developing the lighting drawings collection during his time at Penn State. The idea came from his thesis on theatre lighting at Yale and grew from years on the Century Lighting Company’s theatre engineering staff before arriving at the University. He began assembling items for the lighting archives collection in 1970 and continued doing so until his retirement in 1989. Charles Firmin, associate professor emeritus of theatre, continued adding to the collection until his retirement in 1999.

Among the highlights of the collection are the lighting plans and designs for a number of important theatres, including the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D. C., and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The collection has considerable potential for research for a varied public constituency: faculty and graduate students in lighting design, scholars engaged in researching the history of theatrical lighting, and practitioners of theatre lighting system design. The Theatre Lighting Drawings Collection will be a key instructional resource for Penn State’s undergraduate and graduate classes devoted to stage design. There is new national interest in making theatre lighting design accessible and in documenting the sources for those interested in understanding the history of lighting design, the history of the teaching of lighting design, the changing technology and how it impacts lighting design documentation, and teaching lighting design with the use of archives.

A selection of digital images from the Theatre Lighting Drawings can be found here.

The Theatre Lighting Drawings Collection will be available to researchers in the 2009 fall semester. For further information, contact Sandra Stelts, (814) 865-1793, sks5@psu.edu.

Related collections:

Theater Lighting Control System Drawings, 1950-1971. Century Lighting, Inc.
Rare Books and Manuscripts, 1970-0003R

The Century Strand Theatre Lighting Archives is described in "The Penn State Archives of American Theatre Lighting Including Century Lighting and Century Strand Control System Drawings, 1950-70," by William Allison in *Performing Arts Resources*, Vol. 10 (New York: Theatre Library Association, 1985), pp. 41-48. The collection contains about 10,000 engineering drawings of lighting control systems designed by George C. Izenour for 570 projects, identified by the job for which the system was designed, usually auditoriums, theaters, or meeting halls at schools, colleges, hotels, TV stations, churches, and other public buildings throughout the United States, and with some for Canada, Central and South America, and the Caribbean Islands. George C. Izenour developed the first satisfactory remote dimming control system and began a working relationship with Century Lighting, Inc. in 1951.


Related artifacts can also be found at Penn State's Theatre Department Web site.

Oral History Interview with George C. Izenour.
Rare Books and Manuscripts, #1998-0343/VF 9-2

Interviewed by Susan Hamburger, William Allison, and Sandra Stelts in University Park, Pa., on 12 September 1998. George C. Izenour was an electronic stage lighting researcher, inventor, teacher, and consultant. He did on 24 March 2007.George Izenour discusses his life and career as a theater lighting inventor and consultant. He talks about how he got started in the business with the WPA Federal Theatre Project, setting up his Electro-Mechanical Laboratory at Yale University, his inventions (synchronous winch system, electronic control system for stage lighting), consulting on theater construction projects, working with architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, the renderings (architectural drawings) for a traveling exhibit (Izenour drawings of the theater) and for his three books, Theater Design, Theater Technology, and Roofed Theaters of Classical Antiquity.

George C. Izenour Architectural Drawings, 1960-1978.
Rare Books and Manuscripts, #XXXX-0193R/W-10

The collection contains 1848 architectural drawings: drafts, final drawings, blueprints, and sepia prints on paper, Mylar, and architectural vellum for theatres and performing arts centers designed by Izenour for communities and universities in Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Venezuela. The gift of George C. Izenour, 1970.

Online finding aid: George C. Izenour Architectural Drawings

George C. Izenour Drawings of the Theater, 1938-1988.
Rare Books and Manuscripts, #1998-0342R

1363 architectural drawings, India ink on Mylar. The collection contains architectural drawings for three of Izenour's books, *Roofed Theaters of Classical Antiquity*, *Theater Design*, and *Theater Technology*, and exhibition drawings and negatives for the Izenour Drawings of the Theater exhibit in Spain of fifty of the most significant theater buildings in western cultural history. Also contains a working model for a mechanically-controlled three-configuration convertible theater. Gift of George C. Izenour, 1998.

Online finding aid: George C. Izenour Drawings of the Theater, 1938-1988

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