ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the field

Acquisitions

• Camegie-Mellon UniversityLibraries, Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania, has acquired the calligraphy and type design collection of professor emeritus of calligraphy Arnold Bank. The collection represents Bank’s own calligraphy, the work of his colleagues and students, his teaching exercises, and a substantial number of historical samples of calligraphy and typography. It also contains work Bank executed for commissions, including the Rockefeller Center Credo, the Scott Paper Alphabet Series, and bronze plaques and stained glass for the university. Bank was professor of graphic arts in the university’s Design Department from 1960 to 1974.

• Duke University,Durham, North Carolina,has acquired a complete collection of the first editions of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, who published 85 volumes of novels and romances between 1882 and 1930. The collection, which also includes a significant amount of autograph material and other ephemera, should prove useful to literary historians studying these works of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Duke’s Music Library has purchased the music collection of the eminent Viennese musicologist and bibliographer Alexander Weinmann. The collection of over 3,000 items was assembled by Weinmann during his years of studying and cataloging the output of 18th and 19th century Austrian composers and publishers. Among the composers represented in the collection are Johann Strauss (both elder and younger), Carl Czerny, Gaetano Donizetti, Franz Liszt, Gioacchino Rossini, and Carl Maria von Weber. In addition to printed music, the collection contains several Weinmann manuscripts.

• The Georgetown University Library has receivedthe first two editions (1586 and 1591) of the Ratio studiorum, the set of guidelines that directed Jesuit liberal education for more than 300 years. Both volumes are featured in a Special Collections Division exhibit titled “The Society of Jesus 1540-1773: Rare Books and Manuscripts,” which marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Ratio studiorum. Both editions are extremely rare, with no other copy of either recorded in the United States, and fewer than half a dozen copies of each recorded in Europe. The Jesuit order, which established its first college in 1545, placed a high priority on the founding of schools and colleges for the education of clerics and laymen, and the Ratio studiorum was designed to govern educational policies and procedures. The Georgetown volumes come from the collection of early books belonging to English bibliophile Sir Leicester Harmsworth. They came onto the open market w'hen the last part of his collection was dispersed at auction in 1948 and had been in a private American collection since the early 1950s. The gift was supported by Georgetown graduates Homer V. Hervey, Paul Straske, and by Mrs. S. R. Straske.

• Harvard University’sMuseum of ComparativeZoology Library has received books, papers and ephemera from the private library of noted entomologist William Morton Wheeler (1865-1837). Wheeler, who specialized in the study of ants, was also renowned as a lecturer, writer, linguist, historian of science, and social philosopher. His Harvard career included service as professor of entomology, dean of the Bussey Institution for Research in Applied Biology, and curator of entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. The collection includes 187 volumes of historical interest, the earliest from 1671; 35 boxes of administrative and scientific papers; 8 boxes of reprints; and 6 boxes of illustrations. The gift adds significantly to the university’s resources for the study of early 20th century biology, and will shed light on the history of the Bussey Institution as well. The collection is a gift of Wheeler’s grandsons, William M. Wheeler Jr., and Paul S. Wheeler.

• The Lake Forest College Library has recievedthe papers, library and memorabilia of Joseph Medill Patterson, founder in 1919 of the tabloid New York Daily News. The collection, a gift of Patterson’s son James, records the operations of the nation’s first tabloid and largest circulation paper. Patterson was a member of the Medill-Patterson-McCormick newspaper dynasty that founded the Chicago Tribune. The collection covers the period from 1910, when Patterson assumed co-editorship of the Tribune with Robert R. McCormick, to Patterson’s death in 1946. The papers include Tribune, Daily News, and corporate-related correspondence, exchanges with major writers and political figures, family letters, and files on other Patterson interests, including flying, the military, Groton, and personal business (real estate, farming, and trusts).

• Trinity University’sMaddux Library, San Antonio,Texas, recently purchased the 7,000-volume library of Professor Benjamin Nelson (Ph.D., Columbia, 1944). Nelson, who died in 1978, was for over three decades a pre-eminent medievalist and sociologist and the author of the classic study The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (1949).

The Maddux Library has also purchased a 700volume collection once owned by William C. Sullivan, chief inspector and assistant director of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. The principal focus of the collection is the Soviet Union and U.S. communism. Included are 73 anti-communist pamphlets from the 1940s and 1950s published by such organizations as the Catholic War Veterans, the Queen’s Work, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Federation of Labor, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

In October the Maddux Library added its 500,000th volume. Chosen for the occasion was a two-volume set, The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant Don Quixote of the Mancha, the first English-language translation of Cervantes’s masterpiece. The volumes were originally published in 1612 and 1620, and were reprinted in 1927 by the Ashendene Press.

• The University of Missouri-Columbia’s EllisLibrary has received a substantial collection of books on China and Japan in honor of Professor Robert Milton Somers (1942-1983), who taught at the University from 1976 to 1983. The core of his library consists of approximately 1500 titles on a wide range of Japanese and Chinese topics. Represented are many titles, often rare out-of-print works, on the history and civilization of the two countries, as well as comparative studies on peasantry, social change, and empire.

News Note

• The Francis Bacon Library, Claremont, Cali-fornia, will hold the 1986 Bacon Birthday Celebration on January 22. Sponsored by the library in cooperation with the Claremont Graduate School, the Bacon Celebration is now in its thirteenth year. Henry Gibbins, Claremont Graduate School, will speak on “Some Perspectives on the New Atlantis‚” at 4:00 p.m. in the Founders Room, Hannold Library. After the talk a reception to toast the 425th anniversary of Bacon’s birth will be held at The Francis Bacon Library, where rare books and manuscripts will be displayed. For further information, phone (714) 624-6305. ■ ■