ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

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Acquisitions

• Columbia University, New York City, hasmade available a notable library of rare books, manuscripts and old master prints. The collection of 1,159 volumes and 139 prints was assembled by Alan H. Kempner, late director of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux publishing house, beginning in Paris in 1920. Included are works by such neglected 19th-century printmakers as Legros, Brac- quemond, Buhot, and Helleu as well as such acknowledged masters as Callot, Canaletto, Daumier, Durer, Goya, Rembrandt, Tiepolo and Whistler. Two 1937 prints by Grant Wood, better known as a painter, are also included. Among graphic arts in the collection are ten illustrated and decorated Arabic, Coptic, Javanese and Western Medieval manuscripts, five fore-edged paintings on books by Ruskin, Scott, Tennyson and others, and an abundance of illustrated editions, primarily Italian and English, ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Among 15th-century works are a French psalter once owned by the English poet William Morris. 16th-century works include John Gerard’s The Herball or Generali Historie of Plantes (1633), a compendium of science and folklore illustrated with some 2,766 woodcuts, and the first polyglot work ever published, The Psalter of Genoa, printed in 1516. The work, containing the first account of Columbus’ life ever published, presents in eight columns versions in Hebrew, a literal Latin version of the Hebrew, the Latin Vulgate, the Greek Septuagint, the Arabic, the Chaldee (in Hebrew characters as well as the literal Latin), and Scholia. Representing the 17th century is an extensive collection of works by poets including Michael Drayton, John Donne, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Among 18th-century books is a highly prized edition printed at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Press that has been called the most distinguished piece of printing to come from the press: Lucan’s Pharsalia (1760), with a cartouche engraved by Gringnion on the title page. The major novelists and biographers of the century are represented by first editions of their most important works. The largest group of first editions dates from the 19th century and represents some of the best-selling fiction of the age. Other notable items are an illustrated collection of humorous poems by W.S. Gilbert from 1869 and a book on astrology once owned by Lewis Carroll and heavily annotated in his hand.

• Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, hasreceived the original manuscripts, correspondence, and early works of author Loren Estleman, a 1974 graduate. Estleman is known as the creator of the Amos Walker detective novels and for his stories set in the Old West. He has published 25 books.

• Kansas State University, Manhattan, has re-ceived a collection of more than 2,000 recordings from Jerry Wexler, a KSU alumnus and co-owner of Atlantic Records in the 1950s. Wexler is credited with inventing the term “rhythm and blues” to replace “race music.” The collection focuses on the period from the mid-1960s to the present and includes material by such R&B and Soul performers as Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Ray Charles, and Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters. Jazz recordings include early issues by the Modern Jazz Quartet and reissues of Charlie Parker material. Spoken records include a conversation with journalist H.L. Mencken and comedian Lenny Bruce’s legendary Berkeley, California, concert.

Kansas State has also established the Consumer Movement Archives, intended as a repository of manuscript and archival material. The collection is meant to provide unique primary materials for the study of consumer education, protection, policy, and history by historians, journalists, political analysts, home economists, and students of social reform. KSU professor Richard L.D. Morse, whose papers document consumer activities of the past 30 years, is an initial contributor.

• The New York Public Library, Manhattan,has opened an extensive archive of the papers of city planner Robert Moses (1888-1981). Known as “the man who got things done,” Moses profoundly affected the development of housing, transportation systems, power authorities, and parks in New York City during an extraordinary career spanning six decades. The archive, which dates from 1912, includes personal and professional correspondence, press releases, speeches, blueprints, reports and photographs, and fills 160 linear feet of shelf space. Prominent correspondents include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Benjamin Cardozo, Herbert Lehman, and Fiorello LaGuardia. Moses gave his papers to NYPL over a period of 30 years with the proviso that the archive remain unannounced until after his death.

• Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, hasbeen given a collection of books on Japanese culture by visiting representatives of JETRO, a nonprofit, Japanese government supported organization. The collection includes well over a hundred titles in English and more than 100 in Japanese. Among the Japanese items is a four-volume set, Japanese Who’s Who in Science and Technology, and a dozen children’s books. The English- language titles include works on Japanese crafts, ethnic cuisine, business and economics, travel, and language study.

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• Texas Tech University, Lubbock, has receiveda collection of autographed material consisting of documents, letters, signed photographs, books and bound manuscripts from Lubbock resident Leo Whitehill. The signatures of Napoleon, Helen Keller, Isabella I, Catherine the Great, Stephen F. Austin, Johann Strauss Jr., and Thomas Jefferson are among those represented. The 400-item collection spans four centuries and includes several Korans in calligraphic Arabic script; the 1638 first edition of John Wilkins’ The Discovery of a World in a Moon, perhaps inscribed to his fellow scientist Galileo; and a variety of documents illustrating the political processes of various countries.

• The University of California, Los Angeles, recentlyreceived the papers of classical music administrator and author Lawrence Morton (1904-1987). Morton was an expert on the life and music of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and was also a personal friend to whom the composer dedicated his Eight Instrumental Miniatures. The bulk of the Morton papers consists of a collection of Stravinskiana, including books, articles, published and unpublished musical scores, clipping files, manuscripts and correspondence with and about the composer. Morton’s own “Stravinsky bibliography” is included in two large boxes of index cards, along with photographs and reproductions, original portraits of the composer, and a complete list of the artworks owned by Stravinsky in the mid- 1960s. Rare Slavonic folk music editions demonstrate Morton’s interest in the sources of Stravinsky’s music. Also of interest are Morton’s datebooks and the diary he kept while accompanying the Stravinskys for the 1956 premiere of the Canticum Sacrum in Venice, and recordings of Stravinsky conducting in the Soviet Union during a 1960 visit to his homeland. Other items in the collection include letters to and from many eminent classical musicians and recordings of Pierre Boulez conducting his own compositions with the Do- maine Musicale.

• The University of Colorado, Boulder, has receiveda number of archival collections, including the papers of Colorado Senator Gary W. Hart. The Hart collection includes approximately 200 cubic feet of Senate Office records and contain detailed descriptions of regional and national problems, including Hart’s stance on numerous controversial issues. Materials related to Hart’s unsuccessful 1983-1984 and 1986-1987 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination include large quantities of newspaper clippings, audio and video tapes, and photographic material.

The University has also received a duplicate set of International Typographical Union publications. Formerly headquartered in Colorado Springs, ITU recently merged with the communication workers of America and has moved its offices and archives to Washington, D.C. The 50 cubic feet of materials include numerous complete publication runs dating from the 1870s through 1986. Known as a staunchly democratic, capitalist organization, several ITU publications contain letters from members forthrightly critical of the union leadership.

Boulder has also been selected as the repository for the archives of the Tissue Culture Historical Society, an organization of biologists from Europe, Asia and the Americas. Two manuscript collections have been received to date: the papers of University of Maryland professor and cell biologist George O. Gey, dating from the 1920s through the 1970s; and those of Keith Porter, a major figure in the development of electron microscope research into the growth of human tissue in vitro. Porter’s papers date from 1939.

An addition to the papers of sociologist Elise Boulding has also been received. The collection documents her career as a professor at Colorado and Dartmouth College, from which she retired in 1985, a scholar of the women’s movement, and a peace researcher and activist.

• The University of Southern California, Los

Angeles, has acquired a collection of more than 2,000 items relating to the career of Beat poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The material includes copies of all of Ferlinghetti’s books, many of them signed and many in typescript, including A Coney Island of the Mind, which remains one of America’s best-selling books of poetry more than 30 years after its initial publication. The archives of City Lights Books, a publishing company set up by Ferlinghetti in 1952 and best known as the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” comprise a large portion of the collection. Numerous unpublished photographic negatives feature important personalities in the Beat movement of the 1950s, who congregated in Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookshop. The collection also contains research material related to Neeli Cherkovski’s biography of Ferlinghetti and audio recordings of Ferlinghetti and other artists. Of particular note is a typed and signed letter from Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) to Neal Cassady, in which Kerouac likens Cassady’s writing to that of Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Wolfe and talks about his plan to spend three years “on the road.”

USC’s Korean Heritage Library has received, through the Korean Cultural Service, some 1,600 Korean-language books on a variety of topics. The books are the gift of the Daehan Kyoyuk Insurance Company of Seoul. It is the largest donation ever to the Library.

Grants

• City College of the City University of New York, Manhattan, has received a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a series of programs entitled “We Wish to Plead Our Own Cause: Black-Owned Book Publishing in the United States, 1817-1987.” The program was developed following an ACRL/ PLA/NEH Humanities Programming Workshop for academic and public librarians and humanists. The programs will be held in April and May and will be co-sponsored by the Division of the Humanities of the the City College and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. The series includes an exhibition on black book publishing, a keynote address, three lecture/discussions by scholars in the humanities, a book fair, a one-day conference on contemporary black publishing and a one-day conference on black book publishing for children.

• Harvard University’s Francis Loeb Library of the Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has received an award of $87,500 from the J. Paul Getty Trust. The grant will fund a two- year project to enhance access to the library’s archival collections, which will include the hiring of an archivist. An inventory of the Loeb collections was published in 1986. Among more than 40 manuscript collections to be studied are the professional papers and drawings of noted Spanish architect Jo- sep Lluis Sert (1902-1983), former professor and dean of the Faculty of Design at Harvard; manuscript papers and other materials of the Congrès In- ternationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), a network of architects, artists and others who, from 1928 to the 1950s, promoted the idea of modern architecture and town planning; correspondence, sketchbooks, and other material by acclaimed architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965); correspondence and professional papers of John C. Olmsted (1852-1920), nephew and adopted son of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and a partner in the Olmsted firm; and the papers of Arthur A. (1870-1957) and Sidney N. Shurcliff (1906- 1981), Boston father-and-son landscape architects who were instrumental in the development of the profession.

• Ohio University, Athens, has received an HEA Title II-C grant of $101,000 to fund the cataloging into OCLC of more than 4,000 titles in the University’s Southeast Asia Collection. The grant covers the second phase of the project, and will concentrate on cataloging microfiche of titles, especially from Indonesia, produced between 1981 and 1985. Titles produced from 1978 to 1980 have already been entered into the database.

• The Rochester Institute of Technology’s Im- age Permanence Institute, Rochester, New York, has been awarded a $41,830 grant by the National

Historical Publications and Records Commission to pay the salaries of staff participating in a study of the degradation of cellulose acetate safety photographic films. The role of temperature and humidity on the deterioration of films in use from the 1930s to the present is the major focus of the study.

•The University of Pittsburgh’s School of Li- brary and Information Science, Pennsylvania, has received $616,000 in grants from AT&T Corporation in support of its telecommunications program. The gifts and grants include new equipment valued at $356,000, including personal computers, a minicomputer, and networking hardware and software; the third annual installment of a $300,000 grant from the AT&T Foundation; a $50,000 research grant from the AT&T Affiliates Program for a project entitled “Research on an Expert System Approach to Network Design and Analysis”; and $150,000 to support an AT&T visiting professor from the Affiliates Program.

•The University of Waterloo, Ontario, has been awarded three grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to support the purchase of research materials. $20,000 has been directed for the purchase of rare architectural books from the 16th century to the present to augment an existing collection. Already acquired is a rare edition of a treatise by Roman writer Vitruvius. Known as the Perugia edition, it was published in 1536 and illustrated with plates prepared by Cesare di Lorenzo Cesariano (1483-1543). $8,000 will be used to purchase early British city plans, including plans of London, Manchester and Edinburgh, and works by such pioneer British planners as Thomas Adams, Patrick Geddes, Patrick Abercrombie, and Raymond Uniwin. Waterloo is also co-recipient, with Wilfrid Laurier University, of a $15,000 grant to acquire extensive runs of several 19th-century women’s periodicals. The library plans to acquire microfilm copies of such publications as Woman (1890-1902), The Englishwoman’s Review and Drawing Room Journal (1857-1859), The Ladies Treasury (1858-1895), The Helen Blackburn Pamphlet Collection, and the papers of Bessie Rayner Parkes.

•The Washington State Library, Olympia, has received a $216,626 NEH grant to catalog and microfilm newspapers in the State of Washington as part of the United States Newspaper Program. The grant is for a 16-month period and includes $56,000 in matching funds. An advisory group of representatives from the Washington State Library, the Seattle Public Library, Eastern Washington University, the University of Washington, Washington State University and Western Washington University is overseeing the project. More than 2,000 newspapers have already been identified and 400 have been selected for microfilming.

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