Special Collections at Brown University: A History and Guide (Providence: The Friends of the Library of Brown University, 1988).
The first edition of Special Collections at Brown University: A History and Guide was published in 1988. This was the library’s first attempt to provide a systematic overview of the evolution of Special Collections from a handful of books kept under lock and key in the 18th century to one of the leading research libraries in the United States. Although its primary function was to better acquaint the Brown community, researchers, and the general public with the riches of the John Hay Library, the History and Guide also provided an organizational framework for assessing existing strengths within Special Collections; identifying unifying themes across individual collections and subject areas; and presenting credible avenues for future growth.
Among the well-established collections, the 1990s was a period of sustained growth, much of it incremental through gift and purchase. In some traditional collecting areas however, growth was more conspicuous, notably in the book arts, American and British literature, the stamp collections, and the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection.
The Rollo G. Silver Collection of American Printing and Publishing History.
Left: Patrick Miller, The Green Ship ([London:] Golden Cockerel Press, 1936; Number 91 of 200 copies).
Left: Ilse Buchert Nesbitt, The Best Tailor in the World; Wit and Wisdom in the Folk Tale (Newport: The Third & Elm Press, 1983).
Persian manuscript leaf from the Shahnama (Book of Kings), circa 1450–1600.
Oliver Bell Bunce, Picturesque America, or, The Land We Live In (New York: D. Appleton & Company, circa 1872–1874).At the outset of the decade the John Hay received two major collections that expanded its holdings in the book arts, the Alice and Rollo Silver Collection of American printing history and the Crawford Collection of fine printing and calligraphy. Rollo Silver, Class of 1932, was acknowledged as the nation’s leading authority on American printing and publishing history, and his working library was deemed the finest private collection in its field. At the time of its donation, the Silver Collection consisted of over 3,000 volumes plus numerous printing manuals, many type specimen sheets, and for researchers, an invaluable collection of 68 albums of research notes that Silver had compiled over a 50-year period. The Crawford Collection came as the bequest of John M. Crawford, Jr., Class of 1937. One of the most prominent private collectors of his time, Crawford’s great interest in the book arts and in Asian art benefitted many institutions, with Brown having received gifts periodically since the 1960s. The 1991 bequest transferred to Brown both Crawford’s Asian art book collection and his examples of western calligraphy and fine press printing of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the latter including examples of the production of the Eragny, Chiswick, Ashendene, Black Sun, and Golden Cockerel presses. Later in the decade the John Hay’s book arts collections were joined by several additional gifts. Notable were 500 type specimen books collected by Alexander Nesbitt, proprietor of Newport’s Third & Elm Press, a gift that later was enhanced by the donation of the press archive by Nesbitt’s widow and co-proprietor, Ilse Buchert Nesbitt; a strong collection of the work of famed illustrator Fritz Eichenberg, donated by his widow Antonie; a good representation of the Derrydale Press, given mid-decade by Mrs. Bayard Ewing; the exceptional Minassian Collection of some 1,000 Arabic and Persian manuscript leaves, dating from the 8th to the 20th centuries, given by Adrienne Minassian in honor of President Vartan Gregorian; and the Robert S. and Margaret A. Ames Collection of illustrated western travel narratives, important not only for the great variety of illustration techniques represented in its holdings but also as a complement to the Eberstadt Collection of Western Pioneer Narratives.
Walter Feldman Arts of the Book Student Work.
Dickinson/Bianchi/Evergreens Collection.
"The Evergreens" Library.
H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time (Autograph manuscript, with extensive corrections and revisions, [1934-1935]).
[Clark Ashton Smith], Typed letter, signed "Klarkash-Ton" to [H. P. Lovecraft] "Éch-Pi-El" [June 16, 1934], with envelope.
Contemporaneous with these gifts, the John Hay Library entered into a formal agreement with Professor Walter Feldman of the Department of Visual Art to involve the library’s book arts holdings, as well as its staff, in his book arts courses. Professor Feldman donated his printing equipment to the library and within a few years, this intensely “hands-on” laboratory program, which resulted in student productions of small editions of fine press work, moved physically into the John Hay, where it continues under the direction of Visiting Lecturer Elias Roustom.
Brown’s historically strong holdings in American literature were significantly enhanced by the bequest of the Dickinson/Bianchi Collection, which began arriving at the John Hay Library in 1991. The collection, from “The Evergreens,” the Dickinson family home next door to the house where Emily Dickinson lived and died, consisted of a very large body of manuscript and printed material pertaining to the Dickinson family. Its bequest from the estate of Mary Landis Hampson was achieved through the efforts of two Brown faculty members, Barton Levi St. Armand and George Monteiro, who had earlier befriended Mrs. Hampson during the course of their research on Emily Dickinson. The Dickinson/Bianchi Collection provides a family context for the life and writings of the reclusive Emily as well as exhaustive documentation regarding the acrimonious battle for control of her literary estate.
The John Hay Library had long been known for its unparalleled holdings of the papers and publications of H. P. Lovecraft, the acknowledged father of modern fantasy and science fiction literature. One of the most significant Lovecraft acquisitions of the decade came from Nelson Shreve in 1995; the donation was the manuscript of The Shadow Out of Time, one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories and the only one for which the whereabouts of the manuscript had been unknown. Additional Lovecraft material was added throughout the 1990s, primarily through purchase, and considerable effort was expended in broadening the fantasy collections, particularly in manuscript form, to Lovecraft’s literary associates. Among the collections thus acquired between 1991 and 1995 were the Robert Barlow papers, Lovecraft’s correspondence with Donald Wandrei, the Joseph Payne Brennan papers, Wandrei’s correspondence with August Derleth, and the Manley Wade Wellman papers. Arriving by bequest in 1996 were the Joseph E. Smith papers.
Left: Gertrude Stein, A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow, A Love Story (Paris: Galerie Simon, [1926]).
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (Paris: Obelisk Press, [1934]).
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1895; first American edition).
George Bernard Shaw, St. Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue (London: Constable, [1924]).
Autograph letter from George Bernard Shaw to Mary Hamilton, September 4, 1917, with accompanying photograph.The modern American and European literary collections were further strengthened in the mid-1990s through a series of gifts and a bequest from James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, the noted publishing house of innovative writing. Especially important in the Laughlin donation were the large number of rare editions and association copies of the writings of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Thomas Merton, Gertrude Stein, and Henry Miller. Among the many significant individual titles were a first printing of The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1951) marked with corrections for the New Directions edition of 1967; one of only nine special copies of the 1966 New Directions edition of Pound’s Cavalcanti Poems (New York, 1966) and a first edition copy of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (Paris, 1934), including the book’s prospectus and a letter from Miller to E. M. Lanham.
The John Hay Library’s well-established British literature collections also grew rapidly in the 1990s, though in a more traditional vein than the American literature collections. Four major author collections were added to the library’s holdings, beginning with the purchase of a virtually complete H. G. Wells Collection in 1989. Wells, perhaps best known as the author of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, was an extraordinarily prolific author, not only of fantasy and science fiction, but also of history, biography, and social commentary. The Brown collection is rich in British colonial editions as well as heretofore unrecorded editions, issues, and variants. It is the most significant Wells collection in the United States.
In 1991, the library purchased one of the finest George Bernard Shaw collections in existence from Sidney P. Albert, a noted Shaw scholar. Shortly thereafter, the library also purchased the surviving archival files of Shaw’s American publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company, and almost 20 years later, a hitherto unknown group of letters between Shaw and a young actress, Mary Hamilton, was donated by Alastair Maitland. The Shaw collections consist of over 2,000 books by and about Shaw and substantial holdings of pamphlets, programs for plays, film stills, posters, publicity photographs, recordings, periodical issues, contracts, letters, and other manuscript material. Don B. Wilmeth, Professor of Theatre and English, was a critical factor in building the Shaw collections, from securing financial support from President Vartan Gregorian to soliciting the Maitland gift.
T. E. Lawrence, Letters to E. T. Leeds with a Commentary by E. T. Leeds (Andoversford, England: The Whittington Press, 1988; no. 53 of 80 copies).
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Autograph manuscript, [1946-1948]).
George Orwell, Burmese Days (London: V. Gollancz, 1935);
"Penny Black" cover (1840).
Mimi Korach Lesser, "Ulm, Germany, July 24, 1945" (Watercolor with pen and ink highlights).The John Hay Library had received, in the 1970s, a small but distinguished T. E. Lawrence collection from Dr. Francis H. Chafee, Class of 1927. The Chafee Collection, consisting primarily of rare first and limited editions of Lawrence’s major works, included one of the subscribers’ edition copies of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London, 1926), the talisman for any important Lawrence collection. The Chafee Collection was greatly strengthened in 1998 with the gift of a Lawrence collection developed by Andrew Carvely. The Carvely Collection added breadth to the library’s Lawrence holdings through its large number of later editions and works to which Lawrence contributed introductions, translations, etc.; ephemera, ranging from pamphlets to movie posters for “Lawrence of Arabia”; compilations of Lawrence’s voluminous correspondence, many published in limited editions by Castle Hill Press; and many works in Arabic and Hebrew.
In 1992, Daniel G. Siegel, Class of 1957, presented to the John Hay Library a particularly momentous gift, the surviving manuscript of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell had routinely destroyed the manuscripts of his books but Nineteen Eighty-Four escaped this fate and as a result, it is considered to be the single most important surviving illustration of Orwell’s creative process. Owing to the presence of the Nineteen Eighty-Four manuscript at Brown, Daniel J. Leab determined the John Hay Library to be an appropriate home for his unequalled collection of the published works by and about Orwell. The Leab Collection contains first and subsequent editions of all Orwell’s books, from the first, Down and Out in Paris and London (London, 1933), to Nineteen Eighty-Four, his last (London, 1949). Included in the collection were scarce proof copies of Burmese Days (London, 1933), Animal Farm (New York, 1946), a rare variant edition of The Road to Wigan Pier (London, 1937), and a working copy of an unpublished illustrated edition of Animal Farm.
The stamp collections of the John Hay Library have grown through a sustained acquisition program and many gifts since the arrival of the Webster Knight Collection in 1938. By 1990, the combined stamp collections gave the John Hay the distinction of being one of the three largest publicly accessible stamp repositories in the United States. This distinction was assured in 1994, with a gift from Robert T. Galkin, Class of 1949, and a long-time donor to Special Collections. The Robert T. Galkin World Stamp Collection consists of over 120 albums spanning the history of postage stamps from their inception in 1840 to 1990. One of the John Hay’s two stamp rooms was renovated to accommodate the collection, and today the Galkin Collection faces the complementary George S. Champlin International Stamp Collection.
The Anne S. K. Brown Collection, the strongest collection in its field in the western hemisphere, continued to grow in the 1990s, both by purchase and through a series of significant gifts. Among the latter was the Jac Weller Collection which enhanced the Military Collection’s holdings on the Duke of Wellington and on the U.S. Confederacy. Traditionally, the Military Collection had not extended chronologically into the recent past, and to rectify this situation a curatorial decision was made to solicit original World War II art, primarily from artists who served in the American armed services during the war. This effort met with great success, beginning in the early 1990s and has continued to the present, the result being the largest publicly accessible collection of its kind in the United States.
Early in the decade the library purchased an outstanding collection of the political and military writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, thus providing a broader context for the more purely military content of the Military Collection, as well as for other collections with strong Renaissance holdings, from the Chambers Dante Collection to the incunabula of the Annmary Brown Memorial and the Lownes Collection of scientific books. Consisting of over 100 early imprints, the collection is especially strong in editions of The Prince and The Art of War. Among the rarest volumes are the pirated edition of The Prince, printed in Naples in 1523, the 1540 Aldine edition of The Art of War, and Paolo Giovio’s biography of Machiavelli published in Florence in 1552.