ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Acquisitions

A library of Josiah Wedgwood information collected by Elizabeth Chellis has been donated by Lucille Stewart Beeson to the Birmingham Museum of Art. The 1,200-volume library includes a core collection of 18th-century books documenting the facts of Wedgwood’s world including the impact of the discovery of classical artifacts on 18th-century European tastes. Also included are 21 letters, 13 of which were inscribed or written by Wedgwood.

Henry S. Villard, former U.S. ambassador to three African nations, has donated his papers to the Twentieth Century Archives at Boston University. Villard’s career as a foreign service officer spanned a period from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. As a diplomat he served at posts in Tehran, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, and Oslo and as ambassador to Libya, Senegal, and Mauritania. The collection includes manuscripts from his articles, books and speeches, diaries, foreign service dispatches, and correspondence from numerous American statesmen including Dwight Eisenhower, Christian Herter, Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Microfilm runs of the major newspapers of record produced by the Chicago gay and lesbian community between 1973 and the present have been donated to the Chicago Historical Society by Robert B. Marks Ridinger of Northern Illinois University in memory of the late Joseph Gregg, head of the Henry Gerber and Pearl M. Hart Library and Archives. Gregg died of AIDS in 1987. The donation includes full runs of The Chicago Gay Crusader, Gay Life, Windy City Times, and Chicago Outlines.

The entire book collection from AllianceCollege of Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, has been donated, upon the college’s closing, by the Polish National Alliance to the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh CUP). The collection of 35,000-45,000 items consists mainly of Polish-language books on the history of Poland, Polish literature, and the history of Poles in America. A small part of the collection contains English-language books on the same topics. To help catalog the collection UP has hired a full-time cataloger, and the Polish-American Kosciuszko Foundation is sending an exchange fellow from Poland to work for ten months beginning in the fall.

Eleven ink, pencil, and watercolor drawings of the “Yellow Kid’’ by artist Richard Felton Outcault (best known for his later creation, “Buster Brown”) have been discovered in the archives at Syracuse University Library. The “Yellow Kid” was America’s first comic strip superstar according to Brian Walker of the Museum of Cartoon Art. The 11 illustrations are believed to be designs for the Yellow Kid magazine. The Yellow Kid character was a bald, beady-eyed street urchin with two teeth, large ears, and bare feet, dressed in a formless yellow nightshirt.

Papers of the Barbarian Press, a smallpress in British Columbia, have been donated to the University of British Columbia (UBC). The press had a varied output from fine monographs, miniatures, and pamphlets, to typographical oddities, broadsheets, keepsakes, and business cards. The papers include project files, financial records, and sample presswork.

UBC also received an addendum to the papers of Nan Cheney (1897-1985), a noted landscape and portrait painter, and the first medical illustrator at UBC (1951-1962). The addendum includes editorial pages generated by the publication of Emily Carr’s letters to Cheney (UBC Press, 1990) and a large collection of medical drawings spanning Cheney’s career.

Actor, writer, and director Crane Wilbur'spapers have been acquired by the University of Southern California Cinema-Television Library. Correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, diaries, and scripts are included in the collection which covers a 58-year show business career encompassing motion pictures, television, radio, and the Broadway stage. Wilbur first gained recognition on the stage, then rose to international fame as Handsome Harry, Pearl White’s leading man in the 1914 movie The Perils of Pauline. He also produced a script for the 1953 3-D chiller “House of Wax.” ■