ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


125

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News from the Field

Acquisitions
•  The Library of Congress has received 1,300

aluminum disc recordings of the early 1930s from
the American Dialect Society. The 78 rpm discs
contain field recordings of samples of regional
American speech made for the Linguistic Atlas of
the United States and C anada, an ongoing project
to document the distribution of regional speech
variants. Proverbs, riddles, rhymes, folksongs, 
folktales, and narratives of every sort may be
heard. Included in the collection are the voices of a
young Alastair Cooke, just out of Yale D ram a
School; folklorists Alan and John Lomax, recorded
at the home of Harvard scholar George Lyman Kit­
tredge; a Zulu speaker attending Yale University; 
and a Connecticut resident rem em bering Mark
Tw ain. Aluminum discs were the first portable
electric means of recording sound; later the alumi­
num  was replaced by ac e ta te  base recording
blanks. The collection will be housed in L C ’s Re­
corded Sound Collection.

•  Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois,
has received from an anonymous donor one of the
original steel-faced copper engraving plates en­
graved by Robert Havell in 1834 to prin t John
James Audubon’s Birds of America. This copper­
plate, accompanied by a recently pulled uncolored
restrike, produced the print of the Sora rail, plate
num ber 233 in the set, and has been unknown pub­
licly for 150 years. A wedding gift to the Hawkes
family of Connecticut in 1855, it remained in the
family until recently. This is the 79th original en­
graving plate from Audubon’s work now known to
have survived. No example of an original copper
engraving plate has appeared in the auction m ar­
ket in the last 50 years.

•  Sangamon State University, Springfield, Illi-
nois, has been given a collection of manuscripts,
photographs, correspondence, diaries, minutes,
and financial records of the Handy W riter’s Col­
ony, which operated from the early 1950s until
1964 in the small Illinois town of Marshall. The col­
ony was established by Lowney Turner Handy,
H arry H andy, and James Jones, the au th o r of
From Here to Eternity and Some Came Running. 
The collection includes manuscript copies of those
books, as well as Jones’s unpublished first novel, 
They Shall Inherit the Laughter. O ther m anu­
scripts include published and unpublished works
by Gerald Tschappat, Charles W right, Charles
Robb, and Lowney Turner Handy. The letters in
the collection predate the existence of the colony by

20 years and end with Handy’s death, detailing 34 
years of correspondence w ith w riters, agents, 
movie stars, prisoners, soldiers, and her friends and 

 family.
 •  The University of Arizona, Tucson, has ac-
 quired a 955-volume collection of Russian poetry. 
 Although its strength lies prim arily in 20th-century 
 imprints, several standard editions of 19th-century 
 classics—Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Maikov, 

Tiuchev, Fet, and Nadson—are well represented, 
 both in pre-1917 and post-revolutionary editions. 
 A large amount of the 20th-century poetry consists 
 of emigré imprints spanning the world from Rerlin 
 and Paris to New York, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, 

Sydney, Buenos Aires, K harbin, and Tel-Aviv. 
Several of the books cam e from the lib rary  of 

 George Reavey, British author and translator, and 
 others came from the collection of Alexander Be- 

nois, Franco-Russian artist and stage designer.
 •  The University of Iowa, Iowa City, has been

designated to receive one of the finest collections of 
books on the culinary arts and science in existence 
today. Chef Louis Szathmary, chef and owner of 

 The Bakery Restaurant in Chicago, has amassed a 
collection of over 10,000 rare and exotic volumes 

 on cookery and gastronomy. In addition to a num ­
ber of incunabula collected during the past 25 

 years, there are some 15,000 assorted pamphlets, 
 menus, and letters from U.S. presidents and cook­

books owned and used by them. The Szathmary 
 Collection is particularly strong in American cook­
 books beginning about 1650, and Chef Louis used 

it for reference in the preparation of his 15-volume 
 history on American cooking and living, Cookery 
 Americana. The transfer of these historic materials 

will continue over a number of years. Szathmary’s 
intention is to donate a considerable number of 
books from his antique collection each year until 

 everything is housed in Iowa City.
 •  The University of Washington Libraries, Seat-

tle, has acquired three collections of photographs 
 for its Historical Photography Collection. The Pu­

get Power and Light Company donated over 2,000 
 photos taken during the construction of the compa­
 ny’s W hite River and Electron hydro projects in 

western Washington. The Electron project, com­
 pleted in 1904, and the W hite River project, com­

pleted in 1911, are two of the Northwest’s earliest 
hydroelectric generating plants. The family of the 

 late Lawton Gowey donated a collection of 5,000 
 images of electric street car, interurban railway, 
 and steam railroad operations in the Pacific North­

west dating from the 1880s. A third acquisition



126

consists of five photograph albums which docu­
ment the construction of a coal gas works on Seat­
tle’s Lake Union in 1906-1907.

News notes
•  The Ohio State University Library for Com-

munication and Graphic Arts, Columbus, will 
sponsor an exhibit of comic books and comic book 
art from May 19 through August 2, 1985. The ex­
hibit will trace their history and development from 
early efforts in 1933-1936 through the golden age 
(1937-1950), theE .C . period (1950-1955), and re­
vival (1956 to the present). Materials will be drawn 
from a number of private collectors, plus the li­
braries of Ohio State University, Michigan State 
University, and the Museum of Cartoon Art. The 
exhibit will open on May 19 with a speech by noted 
cartoonist Will Eisner.

•  The Research Libraries Group and the British
Library Board met in London on November 29 to 
sign a memorandum of understanding that marks 
the beginning of a program of cooperative activi­
ties between the two organizations. A few days 
later a leased dedicated telecommunications line 
between RLG and the British Library was ordered 
for installation this spring. The first traffic on the 
line will extend work on the Eighteenth-century

Short Title Catalogue. The separate versions of the 
catalogue in Great Britain and the United States 
will be unified in work done on the BLIN network. 
The two organizations also intend to coordinate 
preservation activities, to exchange records and 
files between their respective databases, and to ex­
plore direct electronic communications for interli­
brary lending.

•  The University of Florida’s Peter Malanchuk
was the first-prize winner in a reference product 
giveaway held by the Information Access Com­
pany at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Washing­
ton. His library will receive a one-year subscription 
to either Magazine Collection or Business Collec­
tion, full text microform printing and retrieval sys­
tems developed by I AC; a one-year subscription to 
one of IAC’s microform indexes; a one-year license 
to Search Helper software and hardware, includ­
ing 700 free online searches; and two hours free on­
line time to any of IAC’s databases. Malanchuk is 
chair of the Reference and Bibliography D epart­
ment at Florida and chair of ACRL’s Law and Po­
litical Science Section.

Academic librarians also won the two second 
prizes in the drawing. Clyde Walton of the Univer­
sity of Colorado and Marcia Willis of the Univer­
sity of the District of Columbia were awarded a 
one-year subscription to their choice of four IAC 
products. ■ ■

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