ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Acquisitions

Two previously unrecorded manuscriptsby poet Emily Dickinson have been acquired by Amherst College, Massachu- setts, for its Special Collections in the Robert Frost Library. One is an unpublished letter, tenta- tively dated to 1858, to Dickinson’s sister-in-law Susan in which the poet embeds a short poem and refers to her withdrawal from social life. The second manuscript is a new variant of a well-known poem beginning “The feet of people walking home.” In this version, Dickinson has written the poem as a letter, presumably also to Susan. The two manu- scripts, acquired from a private collection, join the collection already at Amherst, which con- tains approximately half of Emily Dickinson’s known manuscripts.

Two Jack London manuscripts have beenacquired by the Huntington Library from Christie’s auctions in New York. The first, acquired in December 1991, is a four-page, detailed autograph letter written in 1902 to the editor of the Youth’s Companion answering specific questions about the content of London’s celebrated short story “To Build a Fire” prior to its publication. The second, purchased in June 1992, consists of 42 pages of autograph working notes for London’s 1908 novel Adventure. The manuscripts join the more than 30,000 literary manuscripts, letters, photographs, documents, scrapbooks, and broadsides comprising the Huntington’s London Collection.

Lawrence Welk and his accordion, circa 1938.

A large collection of Lawrence Welk memorabilia has been donated to North Dakota State University, Fargo, by Welk’s family and the Welk Group, Inc. The gift includes more than 15,000 musical arrangements used on the Lawrence Welk television show, all of the bandleader’s office furniture, photographs, and scrapbooks of his early days. The university will actively acquire additional Welk-related materials in the future including artifacts, oral interviews, and personal papers. Welk died at the age of 89 in May 1992.

The Alexander Flanigan HymnologyCollection has been acquired by the Library of Reformed Theology Seminary, Jackson, Mis- sissippi. Flanigan was a dockworker in Belfast, Ireland, who spent much of his life collecting Chris- tian hymnology totaling about 1,800 volumes, over 300 periodicals, and some archival materials. The col- lection is predominantly British, but other northern European titles are in- cluded, particularly Scan- dinavian.

A century and a half ofBristol history has become part of the Archives and Permanent Collections of the Main Library at Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island. Some 150 volumes of back issues of the Bristol Phoenix dating back to the 1830s were deposited at the library in May after Bristol’s Town Hall could no longer hold the collection.

A number of manuscript groups from theAuerbach Collection were recently acquired by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Herbert S. Auerbach, son and nephew of the founders of the Auerbach Company, one of the great mercantile companies of Salt Lake City and the far West, amassed a collection of books, manuscripts, maps, and pictures of the Old West which was partially sold off after his death in 1945. The remainder of the collection held back by the family was recently put up for sale and acquisitions by the Bancroft include the unpublished autograph memoirs of both Samuel H. Auerbach and his wife Eveline Brooks Auerbach; reminiscences by early residents of Rabbit Creek, California (now La Porte), and Herbert S. Auerbach’s notes based on interviews with pioneers still living in the 1920s; and a group of Brannan family correspondence—numbering 103 letters—centering on John Brannan, the seafaring older brother of San Francisco’s Sam Brannan.

The Bancroft Library has also acquired a collection of pictures focusing on the East Bay Firestorm that occurred on October 20, 1991. After a call for contributions, the library received prints in a variety of formats from over 50 individuals. The images will be made available for research at the library and an anniversary exhibition of photographs from the collection is planned for October 1992.

A large collection of drawings and othermaterials by architect John H. Howe have been given by the artist to the Northwest Architectural Archives of the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities. Howe was bom in Evanston, Illinois, in 1914 and studied under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin for 32 years. He moved to Minneapolis in 1967 and practiced there until his retirement this year. The collection includes documentation for virtually every project, built and unbuilt, since 1967, as well as several executed while Howe was at Taliesin. These consist of renderings in colored pencil and ink with accompanying sets of working drawings (plans), specifications, and photographs. ■