ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries February 1987 / 83 ★ ★ ★ New s fro m th e f i e l d Acquisitions • Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, has re- ceived the Kenneth E. and Dorothy V. Hill collec tion of rare and fine ornithology books. Presently on deposit at Cornell, the books will be housed in the History of Science Collections together with other historical bird books. The Ornithology Proj ect b e g a n fo u r years ago w ith th e o ffe r of a $150,000 challenge grant by the Hills to develop Cornell’s ornithology collections. Special emphasis has been placed on acquiring pre-1900 works on North American ornithology. The Hills have also established a book endowment fund and are creat ing an ornithological research fellowship fund. • DePaul University, Chicago, has received a collection of documents relating to the social, cul tural, and economic history of Hispanics in the Midwest over the past 12 years. A special archive has been created at the University’s Lincoln Park Campus for the materials, received from the Chi cago Latino Institute, a group serving as an advo cate for Latinos and Latino communities through out the Chicago area. The addition of the Hispanic archive will further facilitate researchers at De- Paul’s Center for Research on Hispanics. • The Free Library of Philadelphia has acquired an Edgar Allan Poe letter long thought to be lost. W ritten by Poe in Philadelphia on July 14,1839, to his cousin, George W. Poe of Houston, Texas, the author briefly relates his own life and provides a family tree of descent from his grandfather, John Poe. The autobiographical section contains a few embroideries on the tru th , although Poe did take care to point out to his correspondent a num ber of familial relationships and intermarriages. • The Library of Congress, W ashington, D .C ., has acquired the original manuscripts of an 18th- c e n tu ry A m eric an lite r a r y classic, M ichel- Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur’s Letters fro m an American Farmer (1782) and related essays. The acquisition was m ade possible by the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, which gave funds to the Foundation for the Commemoration of the United States Constitution as a gift to the Library. The grant was given in recognition of the im por­ tance of Crèvecoeur’s work to the understanding of the historical context from which the Constitution emerged. In 1922, an American scholar in France discovered th a t only one-third of the Letters had ever been published, and th at the rest remained in m anuscript in the custody of the Crèvecoeur fam ­ ily. The additional essays were published in 1925 by the Yale University Press, whose editors, how ­ ever, adm itted th at they had not attem pted “to re­ ­ produce exactly the m anuscript of Crèvecoeur.” The full m anuscript of the Letters, therefore, has never been published. The Library has acquired the manuscripts imperfectly edited in the 1920s as ­ well as those which formed the basis for the origi­ nal Letters, and is displaying them during 1987. • T he New York Public L ib ra ry , New York City, has received the C arl H. Pforzheimer Collec­ tion “Shelley and His C ircle,” the w orld’s preem i­ nent private collection relating to the 19th-century ­ English Romantic writers. The gift was m ade by the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation of New York and provides a $3 million endowm ent fund ­ for continued m aintenance of the collection. Con­ taining approximately 8,000 manuscripts, the col­ lection includes the most extensive assemblage of autograph letters by leading poet Percy Bysshe ­ Shelley (1792-1822), as well as letters, journals, ­ poetry and prose by members of his circle. It also ­ contains 13,000 printed volumes, from the late 18th century to the present, which document the lives and times of these writers and their im por­ tance to later authors, critics and scholars. In addi­ tion to Shelley, the circle includes the poet Lord Byron; the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstone- craft and her husband, the philosopher and novel­ ist W illiam Godwin; their daughter Mary Woll- stonecraft Shelley (author of Frankenstein); Leigh H unt, poet, liberal journalist, and m an of letters; and Thomas Love Peacock, poet and comic novel­ ist. Highlights of the collection include the Esdaile Notebook, a copybook containing the bulk of Shel­ ley’s early poetry; a pocket notebook containing the only text of A Philosophical View o f Reform, Shel­ ley’s longest prose work; over a third of the known manuscripts of Shelley’s letters and more than 380 letters and manuscripts by Mary W. Shelley; m an­ uscripts of three complete works by Godwin and corrected or association copies of most of his other writings; Shelley’s annotated copies of several of his own works; his annotated copies of the works of Herodotus, Spinoza, and Godwin; m any of the classical texts used by Shelley during his student days at Oxford; as well as Shelley’s first extant poem, A Cat in Distress, w ritten at the age of ten, and copied and illustrated by his sister Elizabeth. The extensive m aterials relating to Lord Byron 84 / C&RL News (1788-1824) include holograph manuscripts of his poetry Fare Thee Well, Beppo, Marino Faliero, the last complete canto of Don Juan, and many of his letters. In addition, there is an extensive Byron archive preserved by Countess Teresa Guiccioli that includes her letters to him, letters to Byron from other Italian mistresses, several versions of Guiccioli’s account of their life together, and her annotated copies of books about Byron. The collec­ tion also contains many items of related interest, such as portraits by George Romney of Shelley’s parents, and a copy of Opie’s portrait of Wollstone- craft commissioned by Aaron Burr. Other unusual items include Shelley’s holograph will, a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, and a broadside from an early production of Frankenstein. The col­ lection offers an in-depth look at the major prede­ cessors who influenced Shelley and his circle as well as their contemporaries. Included are im portant manuscripts by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Edm und Burke, Lamb, Washington Irving, Cow­ per, and Grabbe, and first editions of works by these and others. Much material illuminating the circle’s pervasive influence upon writers up to the present day is featured, including manuscripts and rare editions by the Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The research archives of leading Byron scholar Leslie A. Marchand are also included. C onceived and begun by th e la te C a rl H. Pforzheimer (1879-1957), a New York City invest­ ment banker and one of the major book collectors of the 20th century, the collection has been a lead­ ing archive for Romantic research for 30 years. A significant portion of the manuscripts have already been cataloged and published in the first eight vol­ umes of Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822, initi­ ated by the collector in 1952 and published by the Harvard University Press. The Pforzheimer Foun­ dation will fund the publication of the four pro­ jected remaining volumes. Also planned is a pub­ lished catalog of printed books in the collection. • The University of Delaware, Newark, has added two manuscripts by playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) to its collection of books by and about him. One, entitled The Loss of a Tear­ drop Diamond, is an unproduced screenplay based on the awkward social debut of Rose Williams, the playwright’s sister. Begun in 1957, the manuscript was completed and submitted to Williams’ agent, Mitch Douglas, in 1980. The 113-page typed and holograph working draft, which differs substan­ tially from the published text, is completely re­ worked, with revisions, corrections and deletions on every page. These changes, spanning more than 20 years, provide insight into Williams’ working patterns and artistic development. The second work, Kirche, Kutchen und Kinder: An Outrage for the Stage, is an eccentric work of social com­ m entary, produced by an experimental theater company in New York in 1980 but as yet unpub­ lished. The 73-page manuscript, w ritten on scraps and hotel stationery and marked “first draft,” is very heavily corrected throughout. G r a n t s • Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia, has been selected to receive a $285,000 grant from the M abel Pew M yrin T rust of P h ilad elp h ia. $150,000 has been earmarked for a remodelling and expansion of the college’s combined computer center and listening lab, housed in the Kelly Li­ brary. Additional listening equipment and com­ puter furniture will be purchased. • The Library of Congress, Washington, D .C ., has received a grant from the Morris and Gwendo­ lyn Cafritz Foundation to support the first phase of production of a publication, Washingtoniana II: A Guide to the Architecture, Design and Engineering Collections of the Washington, D .C ., Metropoli­ tan Area in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Approximately 40,000 ar­ chitectural drawings in the Division collections will be studied, labeled, encapsulated, and re­ viewed for conservation needs as part of the proj­ ect. A descriptive inventory will also be prepared. • The Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, has been awarded a grant of $100,000 by the W il­ liam and Flora H ew lett F oundation of Menlo Park, California, for the purpose of improving bib­ liographic control over its manuscript collection. A uniform, complete description of more than 3,500 selected manuscript holdings will be entered into OCLC by Society catalogers over a two-year pe­ riod. The entries will serve as the basis for a printed guide to the collection when the Society celebrates its bicentennial in 1991. • The New York State Library, Albany, has re- ceived a $256,668 grant from the National Endow­ ment for the Humanities to begin identifying and cataloging unique newspaper titles. The 18-month grant to the New York State Newspaper Project will permit the Capital District and Rochester ar­ eas to join w hat will eventually become a statewide project. Serving about two million people and in­ volving 226 institution systems, the areas’ library councils will work with State Library staff to sur­ vey new spaper holdings and com plete biblio­ graphic and location information. A second phase of the project will include the microfilming of rare or damaged newspapers. • The New York University Libraries, New York City, with the cooperation of the State University of New York at Buffalo Libraries and the Univer­ sity of Rochester L ibrary, have been aw arded $138,855 by the New York State Education De­ partm ent. The libraries are cooperating to micro­ film each institution’s student and institutional publications, including newspapers, literary jour­ February 1987 / 85 nals, club magazines, and alumni publications. Such publications are of interest for research in bi­ ography, institutional history, sociology, social his­ tory, and literature. Printed on poor-quality p a ­ per, most have deteriorated rapidly. The project will produce preservation microfilm copies of the publications and provide shared access through RLIN. • The University of Missouri, Columbia, has re- ceived an NEH grant of $95,698 to fund increased use of its microform collection. The History D e­ partm ent, the Campus W riting Board, and direc­ tor of libraries Thomas W. Shaughnessy have de­ veloped a project which will lead history faculty and their students to use im portant library collec­ tions through intensive w riting courses. Begun last fall, the first phase is the preparation of an anno­ tated, user-friendly resource guide to the libraries microform collections and other holdings in his­ tory. Students in five history courses will be ex­ posed to prim ary source materials and sophisti­ cated library research methods as they experience some of the challenges facing historians in inter­ preting and evaluating historical accounts. The courses are intended to satisfy a new graduation re­ quirem ent in freshman composition recommended by the W riting Board. • The University of Oklahoma Librarias, Nor- m an, has received a ten-year, $2.3 million chal­ lenge grant from the Kerr Foundation of Okla­ homa City, to be used for staff and collection devel­ opm ent, graduate assistantships, and other needed library programs. The grant follows a 1982 three- year challenge grant of $600,000 for the purpose of collecting m aterials in American history and cul­ ture and in energy. The present funding will be aw arded in yearly increments of $115,000, to be m atched by funds raised by the University for a perm anent endowm ent of more than $2 million. • The University of Virginia L ib rary ’s Slavic Bibliography Section has received a $10,000 grant from the United States Inform ation Agency/Pri- vate Sector Programs Division, for the purpose of sending American Studies publications to the li­ brary’s academic exchange partners in Eastern E u ­ rope. An offer of a list of expensive American refer­ ence books is planned, from w hich libraries in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia will be able to choose. News Note • Tufts University, M edford, Massachusetts, has undertaken a $10 million project to expand and renovate the Wessell Library. Plans call for adding 60,000 square feet of floor space and an expansion in services and stack area, which will be enlarged to accomodate 600,000 volumes. The project also includes plans for a new library of science and tech­ nology. The Wessell renovation is being funded ’ w ith a $300,000 challenge grant from the Kresge Foundation, w ith m atching funds of $660,000 to be raised by the University over the next eight months. Extended audiovisual services, more m od­ ern facilities for microforms, fine arts, government publications and special collections, and new refer­ ence and electronic services will be m ajor features once the five year project is complete. ■ ■ Seventh Cenko Prize in Ukrainian Bibliography The H arvard Ukrainian Institute is accepting submissions for the seventh aw ard of the Cenko Prize in Ukrainian Biblography. The $1,000 an­ nual prize established by Mykola and Volodymyra Cenko of Philadelphia will be given for the best bibliographical work on a topic of Ukrainian stud­ ies. Four copies of entries (in English or Ukrainian) must be subm itted by March 1, 1987. Manuscripts must be in their final pre-publication form w ith the names and addresses of authors. Published works and late submissions will not be considered. Acceptable entries include: descriptive biblio­ graphical essays or annotated bibliographies of a subject or author; index of a Ukrainian periodical; or more general works th at discuss the im pact of the printed book on Ukrainian culture. The winner of the sixth Cenko Prize was Euge- niusz Misilo, a research associate of the Polish Academy of Sciences in W arsaw, for his work enti­ tled, Bibliohrafiia ukrains’koi presy v Pol’shchi (1918-1939) i Zakhidno–Ukrains’kii Narodnii Re- s p u b lits i (1 9 1 8 -1 9 1 9 ), a b ib lio g ra p h y of th e Ukrainian press in Poland and the West Ukrainian National Republic. The w inner or winners will be announced at H arvard University no later than June 1987. E n ­ tries should be sent by registered mail to: Cenko Prize in Ukrainian Bibliography, H arvard Univer­ sity, U krainian Research In stitu te , 1581-1583 Massachusetts Ave., Cam bridge, MA 02138. ■ ■ Muslim librarians The Islamic Library Association is compiling inform ation for a directory of Muslim librari­ ans and academicians. The directory will list professionals working in both Islamic and non- Islamic countries. To receive a questionnaire, w rite to Rasheeda M oinuddin, Secretary, Is­ lamic Library Association, 6304 Cory Street, Simi Valley, CA 93063; or directly to the com­ piler, M ohammed A.S. Khan, Lecturer L ib rar­ ian, King Abdulaziz University, P.O . Box 9028, Jeddah 21413, Saudi Arabia. The deadline for inclusion is June 30, 1987.