ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Acquisitions

The papers of American poet JamesDickey, along with an extensive collection of personal and professional items, have been acquired by the Special Collections Department of Emory University. The significant acquisition will be part of the Floyd C. Watkins American Literary Manuscripts Collection. Personal correspondence from Robert Penn Warren, photos from the movie set of Deliverance, and correspondence from his first wife are some of the items in more than 50 boxes of materials. Familiar to many as the author of the 1970 novel Deliverance, Dickey is first and foremost a poet. Over his long career as a man of letters, Dickey has published more than a dozen collections of poems, as well as three novels. The collection includes hundreds of drafts of poems as well as multiple drafts of his first two novels and other prose writings. The earliest literary manuscripts date from the early 1950s when Dickey was a young and unknown poet.

The von Hunersdorf Collection, an important library of rare horse books representing five centuries of equestrian thought, has been acquired by the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Virginia. The collection, which features 205 titles in 11 languages, provides a rich selection of major European texts on riding, training, breeding, cavalry, and veterinary medicine from the Renaissance to the late 19th century. The collection traces back to Ludwig Baron von Hunersdorf (1748-1812), a German riding master who in 1790 published his own treatise on equitation. Through the years, the books were passed down through the von Hunersdorf family and supplemented with additional acquisitions. The Ohrstrom Foundation, New York, obtained the collection from Richard Baron von Hunersdorf, Ludwigs’s great-great- great grandson, and presented it to the National Sporting Library.

Ed. note: Entries in this column are taken from library newsletters, press releases, and other sources. To ensure that your grant and acquisition news is considered for publication, write to Pam Spiegel, Assistant Editor,C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795.

This illustration is from the Duke of Newcastle’s Methode et Invention Nouvelle de Dresser les Chevaux(Antwerp, 1657), one of the highlights of the National Sporting Library’s new von Hunersdorf Collection.

The entire collection of the Bing CrosbyHistorical Society has been acquired by Foley Library at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, Crosby’s alma mater. The addition doubled Gonzaga’s previous collection, making it the world’s largest public collection on this entertainer. The items include over 800 78-rpm records, 200 LP albums, 100 books, 700 audiocassettes, 150 videotapes, sheet music, newsclippings, scrapbooks, Bing Crosby coloring books, his board game called “Call Me Lucky” (manufactured by Parker Brothers), empty pint cartons of Bing Crosby Ice Cream, and hundreds of individual photographs. One of the highlights of the collection is a health device called “Stretch to Your Health with the Stars,” a rubberized piece of equipment in its original box. The library is planning renovations of the exhibit area in its Crosbyana Room.

The archives of the Stra†emeyer Syndicate, which includes materials from such classic children’s mystery and adventure favorites as the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift series, has been acquired by the New York Public Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Division from Paramount Publishing. The syndicate was the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, who got his start writing serial stories and dime novels, and who was known for having finished the works of Horatio Alger after Alger’s death. The archives contain more than 7,000 books and 150 cartons, including mint editions of every book ever published by the Syndicate, sales records, and outlines from numerous books.

Books and journals relating to the studyof Madagascar were acquired by the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. They were donated by Mary Danielli, a scholar who first began the collection as a Cambridge University graduate student in the mid-1940s by advertising in out-of-print book magazines for books on Madagascar. The collection of about 150 volumes includes rare early imprints as well as works in the Malagasy language.

A large addition to the Sadakichi Hartmann collection was acquired by the University of California, Riverside. Hartmann (1867- 1944) was an actor, writer, photographer, playwright, poet, lecturer, dancer, and critic of the arts whose ideas were often ahead of their time. The new acquisition includes a diary kept by his wife, a series of pastels by Hartmann, a letter from Ezra Pound, the text of a eulogy Hartmann gave on the death of a young child, and photos from the set of the movie The Thief of Bagdad, in which Hartmann played the court magician. The collection also includes numerous other photographs, a sculpture, and drawings of Hartmann by other artists.

A 58,000-volume collection of children’sliterature from the College & Research Libraries (CRL) has been acquired by the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. The acquisition, combined with the more than 43,000 volumes of children’s literature already held by the library, makes this the largest collection of its kind outside of the Library of Congress. CRL’s collection dates from the association’s founding in 1949 and includes review copies received from the Center for Children’s Books.