Melanie Rehak and Andrew Stott will discuss Stott’s new book, The Vampyre and the Poet: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters. Lord Byron spent the summer of 1816 in the Swiss countryside with his friends John Polidori, Percy ­Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Claire Clairmont. Stott recounts how, at Byron’s suggestion that the group trade ghost stories, Mary Shelley and Polidori created two of literature’s most revered monsters: Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the predecessor of Bram Sto­ker’s Dracula.

Ye Are Many—They Are Few, Cantata for a Just World, an art song with text and music by Norman Mathews, was performed 12 May 2014 at the Cultural Center (the former main public library) in Chicago with the VOX3 Collective Company. Mathews’ cantata turns on the problem of standing up to injustice. The tone is solemn. A powerful amount of text comes from Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy.”

Elizabeth Denliger, curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library, has announced the acquisition of Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810), the first book of verse published by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Known to exist in only three other copies worldwide. Denliger calls it "a black tulip, one of the rarest items in the Shelleyan world." Co-authored with his sister Elizabeth, Original Poetry, says Denliger, is evidence of "Shelley's early and powerful urge to publish" and his "inclination to literary collaboration."