ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

News from the field

Acquisitions

• DePaul University Library, Chicago, has received a collection of more than 200 books on the Napoleonic Era. The books, collected by the late Dr. Max Thorek, were donated by his son Phillip. The collection includes materials describing the legal and political events of the early 19th century.

• Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, has added four important first editions to its rare book collection. The earliest is the 1596 edition of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, published in two quarto volumes by William Ponsonbie. The other three are first editions of John Keats’s Endymion (1818) and his first volume of poetry, called Poems (1817), and the first edition of Adonais (1821) by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

• The Toledo Museum of Art has received a collection of over 1,100 modern illustrated art books from Molly and Walter Bareiss. Highlights of the collection are more than 70 books illustrated by Pablo Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Yvette Guilbert (1894) with sixteen lithographs of the Parisian singer accompanying the text by Gustave Geffroy, Pierre Bonnard’s illustrations for Parallelement (1900) by Paul Verlaine, Wassily Kandinsky’s Klange (1913) which contains his poetry and woodcuts, and Tristan Tzara’s LAntitete (1949) illustrated by Surrealist artists Max Ernst, Joan Miro, and Yves Tanguy. An exhibition featuring these and other works from the collection may be seen at the Museum September 22 through December 29, 1985.

• Williams College’s Chapin Library, Williamstown, Massachusetts, has received collections of Eugene O’Neill and Robinson Jeffers assembled by Donald S. Klopfer, co-founder of Random House, who began publishing these authors in the early 1930s. The 20 O’Neill items include one of 12 special copies of Anna Christie with original artwork by Alexander King laid in, galley sheets for an abandoned 1947 edition of A Moon for the Misbegotten which was not published until 1952, and a typescript, early page proofs, and an inscribed first edition of Days without End showing a progression of major textual changes. Among the 23 Jeffers first editions are Grabhorn Press printings of Robinson Jeffers and the Sea, Solstice and Other Poems, Return, and Poems of 1928 with a signed Ansel Adams portrait of the poet.

Grants

• Georgia State University’s Southern Labor Archives, Atlanta, has been awarded a $10,000 grant by the Georgia Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities to explore the history of textile workers in Atlanta’s Cabbagetown and the Celanese Textile Community in Rome, Georgia. The project will involve research, oral history interviews, exhibits, and a series of public programs to be held in each community. Photographs, artifacts, and documents portraying housing, working conditions, child labor, and union activities will become part of a traveling exhibit to be displayed in Atlanta and Rome.

• Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, Baltimore, has received $27,619 in matching funds from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for a two-year project to arrange and describe 760 linear feet of institute records dating from 1857 to 1977.

• The Moravian Music Foundation, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has received a grant of $25,200 from the Winston-Salem Foundation to undertake corrective conservation measures in its archival collections of manuscript music. The music collections contain not only the sacred choral compositions of Moravian composers but also numerous works by European composers of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The latter, hand-copied by Moravian minister-musicians, are by such composers as Haydn, Stamitz, Danzi, Beethoven, the sons of J.S. Bach, and Handel. Several sinfonias by Johann Christian Friedrich Bach, flute duets by Kleinknecht, and string quartets by Stamitz are among the unique copies. The Foundation will undertake a three-year project to preserve the material and has employed Timothy D. Pyatt as conservator to implement the program.

• Northwestern University’s Herskovits Library of African Studies, Evanston, Illinois, has received a $150,000 grant from the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation. The grant will support a preservation program aimed at ensuring the longevity and useful materials in Africana. A full-time conservation assistant will be hired to carry out the in-house repair of 400 rare books, coordinate a survey of the general Africana collection, and microfilm rare books and additional items requiring this treatment.

News notes

• Queens College, New York, laid the cornerstone on April 22 for a new library building named after Benjamin Rosenthal, the late Congressman from Queens who served ten full terms in the House. The Rosenthal Library will be completed in 1987 and will house a Regional Archives and Public Policy center for the collection and study of documents relating to the business of Congress and the New York State Legislature. Benjamin Rosenthal’s papers have been deposited at the College and negotiations are now underway with major state and federal figures to give the library their public papers.

• The University of Chicago libraries were the subject of three articles in the Winter 1985 issue of the University of Chicago Magazine. The first two describe the collections and services at the new John Crerar Science Library and Chicago’s main facility, the Joseph Regenstein Library. Perhaps of greatest interest is the the third article in the series, “What Research Will Be ‘Hot’ in 2084?”, which gives an excellent description of the work of the subject bibliographers, mostly in their own words.

• The University of Michigan libraries were similarly profiled in the University’s Research News for July-September 1984. Produced at the instigation of the vice president for academic affairs, this special issue highlights many of the library services at the University of Michigan. Emphasizing access over immediate availability, each section of the issue features a book that for some reason was not in its proper location in the stacks and goes on to explain the work of the library department that could help a puzzled patron find it. In this way the library’s acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, inter- library loan, storage facility, online search service, and preservation units were profiled.