ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

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News from the field

Acquisitions

•Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, has received the Kenneth E. and Dorothy V. Hill collection of rare and fine ornithology books. Presently on deposit at Cornell, the books will be housed in the History of Science Collections together with other historical bird books. The Ornithology Project began four years ago with the offer of a $150,000 challenge grant by the Hills to develop Cornell’s ornithology collections. Special emphasis has been placed on acquiring pre-1900 works on North American ornithology. The Hills have also established a book endowment fund and are creating an ornithological research fellowship fund.

•DePaul University, Chicago, has received a collection of documents relating to the social, cultural, and economic history of Hispanics in the Midwest over the past 12 years. A special archive has been created at the University’s Lincoln Park Campus for the materials, received from the Chicago Latino Institute, a group serving as an advocate for Latinos and Latino communities throughout the Chicago area. The addition of the Hispanic archive will further facilitate researchers at De- Paul’s Center for Research on Hispanics.

• The Free Library of Philadelphia has acquired an Edgar Allan Poe letter long thought to be lost. Written by Poe in Philadelphia on July 14,1839, to his cousin, George W. Poe of Houston, Texas, the author briefly relates his own life and provides a family tree of descent from his grandfather, John Poe. The autobiographical section contains a few embroideries on the truth, although Poe did take care to point out to his correspondent a number of familial relationships and intermarriages.

•The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., has acquired the original manuscripts of an 18th- century American literary classic, Michel- Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and related essays. The acquisition was made possible by the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, which gave funds to the Foundation for the Commemoration of the United States Constitution as a gift to the Library. The grant was given in recognition of the importance of Crèvecoeur’s work to the understanding of the historical context from which the Constitution emerged. In 1922, an American scholar in France discovered that only one-third of the Letters had ever been published, and that the rest remained in manuscript in the custody of the Crèvecoeur family. The additional essays were published in 1925 by the Yale University Press, whose editors, however, admitted that they had not attempted “to reproduce exactly the manuscript of Crèvecoeur.” The full manuscript of the Letters, therefore, has never been published. The Library has acquired the manuscripts imperfectly edited in the 1920s as well as those which formed the basis for the original Letters, and is displaying them during 1987.

• The New York Public Library, New York City, has received the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection “Shelley and His Circle,” the world’s preeminent private collection relating to the 19th-century English Romantic writers. The gift was made by the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation of New York and provides a $3 million endowment fund for continued maintenance of the collection. Containing approximately 8,000 manuscripts, the collection includes the most extensive assemblage of autograph letters by leading poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), as well as letters, journals, poetry and prose by members of his circle. It also contains 13,000 printed volumes, from the late 18th century to the present, which document the lives and times of these writers and their importance to later authors, critics and scholars. In addition to Shelley, the circle includes the poet Lord Byron; the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstone- craft and her husband, the philosopher and novelist William Godwin; their daughter Mary Woll- stonecraft Shelley (author of Frankenstein); Leigh Hunt, poet, liberal journalist, and man of letters; and Thomas Love Peacock, poet and comic novelist.

Highlights of the collection include the Esdaile Notebook, a copybook containing the bulk of Shelley’s early poetry; a pocket notebook containing the only text of A Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley’s longest prose work; over a third of the known manuscripts of Shelley’s letters and more than 380 letters and manuscripts by Mary W. Shelley; manuscripts of three complete works by Godwin and corrected or association copies of most of his other writings; Shelley’s annotated copies of several of his own works; his annotated copies of the works of Herodotus, Spinoza, and Godwin; many of the classical texts used by Shelley during his student days at Oxford; as well as Shelley’s first extant poem, A Cat in Distress, written at the age of ten, and copied and illustrated by his sister Elizabeth. The extensive materials relating to Lord Byron (1788-1824) include holograph manuscripts of his poetry Fare Thee Well, Beppo, Marino Faliero, the last complete canto of Don Juan, and many of his letters. In addition, there is an extensive Byron archive preserved by Countess Teresa Guiccioli that includes her letters to him, letters to Byron from other Italian mistresses, several versions of Guiccioli’s account of their life together, and her annotated copies of books about Byron. The collection also contains many items of related interest, such as portraits by George Romney of Shelley’s parents, and a copy of Opie’s portrait of Wollstone- craft commissioned by Aaron Burr.

Other unusual items include Shelley’s holograph will, a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, and a broadside from an early production of Frankenstein. The collection offers an in-depth look at the major predecessors who influenced Shelley and his circle as well as their contemporaries. Included are important manuscripts by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Edmund Burke, Lamb, Washington Irving, Cowper, and Grabbe, and first editions of works by these and others. Much material illuminating the circle’s pervasive influence upon writers up to the present day is featured, including manuscripts and rare editions by the Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The research archives of leading Byron scholar Leslie A. Marchand are also included.

Conceived and begun by the late Carl H. Pforzheimer (1879-1957), a New York City investment banker and one of the major book collectors of the 20th century, the collection has been a leading archive for Romantic research for 30 years. A significant portion of the manuscripts have already been cataloged and published in the first eight volumes of Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822, initiated by the collector in 1952 and published by the Harvard University Press. The Pforzheimer Foundation will fund the publication of the four projected remaining volumes. Also planned is a published catalog of printed books in the collection.

•The University of Delaware, Newark, has added two manuscripts by playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) to its collection of books by and about him. One, entitled The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, is an unproduced screenplay based on the awkward social debut of Rose Williams, the playwright’s sister. Begun in 1957, the manuscript was completed and submitted to Williams’ agent, Mitch Douglas, in 1980. The 113-page typed and holograph working draft, which differs substantially from the published text, is completely reworked, with revisions, corrections and deletions on every page. These changes, spanning more than 20 years, provide insight into Williams’ working patterns and artistic development. The second work, Kirche, Kutchen und Kinder: An Outrage for the Stage, is an eccentric work of social commentary, produced by an experimental theater company in New York in 1980 but as yet unpublished. The 73-page manuscript, written on scraps and hotel stationery and marked “first draft,” is very heavily corrected throughout.

Grants

• Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia, has been selected to receive a $285,000 grant from the Mabel Pew Myrin Trust of Philadelphia. $150,000 has been earmarked for a remodelling and expansion of the college’s combined computer center and listening lab, housed in the Kelly Library. Additional listening equipment and computer furniture will be purchased.

• The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., has received a grant from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation to support the first phase of production of a publication, Washingtoniana II: A Guide to the Architecture, Design and Engineering Collections of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Approximately 40,000 architectural drawings in the Division collections will be studied, labeled, encapsulated, and reviewed for conservation needs as part of the project. A descriptive inventory will also be prepared.

•The Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, has been awarded a grant of $100,000 by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation of Menlo Park, California, for the purpose of improving bibliographic control over its manuscript collection. A uniform, complete description of more than 3,500 selected manuscript holdings will be entered into OCLC by Society catalogers over a two-year period. The entries will serve as the basis for a printed guide to the collection when the Society celebrates its bicentennial in 1991.

•The New York State Library, Albany, has received a $256,668 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to begin identifying and cataloging unique newspaper titles. The 18-month grant to the New York State Newspaper Project will permit the Capital District and Rochester areas to join what will eventually become a statewide project. Serving about two million people and involving 226 institution systems, the areas’ library councils will work with State Library staff to survey newspaper holdings and complete bibliographic and location information. A second phase of the project will include the microfilming of rare or damaged newspapers.

•The New York University Libraries, New York City, with the cooperation of the State University of New York at Buffalo Libraries and the University of Rochester Library, have been awarded $138,855 by the New York State Education Department. The libraries are cooperating to microfilm each institution’s student and institutional publications, including newspapers, literary journals, club magazines, and alumni publications. Such publications are of interest for research in biography, institutional history, sociology, social history, and literature. Printed on poor-quality paper, most have deteriorated rapidly. The project will produce preservation microfilm copies of the publications and provide shared access through RLIN.

• The University of Missouri, Columbia, has receivedan NEH grant of $95,698 to fund increased use of its microform collection. The History Department, the Campus Writing Board, and director of libraries Thomas W. Shaughnessy have developed a project which will lead history faculty and their students to use important library collections through intensive writing courses. Begun last fall, the first phase is the preparation of an annotated, user-friendly resource guide to the libraries’ microform collections and other holdings in history. Students in five history courses will be exposed to primary source materials and sophisticated library research methods as they experience some of the challenges facing historians in interpreting and evaluating historical accounts. The courses are intended to satisfy a new graduation requirement in freshman composition recommended by the Writing Board.

•The University of Oklahoma Librarias, Norman, has received a ten-year, $2.3 million challenge grant from the Kerr Foundation of Oklahoma City, to be used for staff and collection development, graduate assistantships, and other needed library programs. The grant follows a 1982 three- year challenge grant of $600,000 for the purpose of collecting materials in American history and culture and in energy. The present funding will be awarded in yearly increments of $115,000, to be matched by funds raised by the University for a permanent endowment of more than $2 million.

•The University of Virginia Library’s SlavicBibliography Section has received a $10,000 grant from the United States Information Agency/Pri- vate Sector Programs Division, for the purpose of sending American Studies publications to the library’s academic exchange partners in Eastern Europe. An offer of a list of expensive American reference books is planned, from which libraries in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia will be able to choose.

News Note

•Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts,has undertaken a $10 million project to expand and renovate the Wessell Library. Plans call for adding 60,000 square feet of floor space and an expansion in services and stack area, which will be enlarged to accomodate 600,000 volumes. The project also includes plans for a new library of science and technology. The Wessell renovation is being funded with a $300,000 challenge grant from the Kresge Foundation, with matching funds of $660,000 to be raised by the University over the next eight months. Extended audiovisual services, more modern facilities for microforms, fine arts, government publications and special collections, and new reference and electronic services will be major features once the five year project is complete. ■ ■

Seventh Cenko Prize in Ukrainian Bibliography

The Harvard Ukrainian Institute is accepting submissions for the seventh award of the Cenko Prize in Ukrainian Biblography. The $1,000 annual prize established by Mykola and Volodymyra Cenko of Philadelphia will be given for the best bibliographical work on a topic of Ukrainian studies.

Four copies of entries (in English or Ukrainian) must be submitted by March 1, 1987. Manuscripts must be in their final pre-publication form with the names and addresses of authors. Published works and late submissions will not be considered.

Acceptable entries include: descriptive bibliographical essays or annotated bibliographies of a subject or author; index of a Ukrainian periodical; or more general works that discuss the impact of the printed book on Ukrainian culture.

The winner of the sixth Cenko Prize was Euge- niusz Misilo, a research associate of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, for his work entitled, Bibliohrafiia ukrains’koi presy v Pol’shchi (1918-1939) i Zakhidno–Ukrains’kii Narodnii Re- spublitsi (1918-1919), a bibliography of the Ukrainian press in Poland and the West Ukrainian National Republic.

The winner or winners will be announced at Harvard University no later than June 1987. Entries should be sent by registered mail to: Cenko Prize in Ukrainian Bibliography, Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute, 1581-1583 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138. ■ ■