jan08c.indd


Ann-Christe Galloway G r a n t s  a n d  A c q u i s i t i o n s  

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 
(UNC) has received two awards to fund the 
cataloging of rare Russian­language periodi­
cals and books in the Andre Savine Collec­
tion. A grant of $218,000 from the Andrew W. 
Mellon Foundation will be used to catalog all 
1,616 serials from the collection. The grant 
will run from January 1, 2008, through June 
30, 2010. An additional gift from donors Kay 
and Van Weatherspoon of Charlotte, North 
Carolina, will be used to catalog approxi­
mately three­quarters of the monographs in 
the Savine Collection. The cataloging project 
will begin July 1, 2008, and end June 30, 
2011. Savine, a book dealer and owner of 
Le Bibliophile Russe bookstore in Paris until 
his death in 1999, amassed a collection of 
more than 60,000 items documenting the 
lives of Russians who lived in exile, from the 
1917 revolution onward. UNC acquired the 
Savine Collection in 2002 with a gift from the 
Weatherspoons. The cataloging projects are 
part of the UNC’s multiphased endeavor to 
maximize access to the Savine Collection. A 
2005 grant of $363,000, also from the Mellon 
Foundation, helped to create the Core Module 
of the “Russia Beyond Russia Digital Library.” 
The Core Module enables scholars to search 
and read Savine’s original research about 
and annotations to materials in his collection. 
New serial and monograph records will link 
to the Core Module, providing context for 
researchers who encounter records via the 
Internet or OCLC’s WorldCat. 

The Library of American Broadcasting at 
the University of Maryland received two 
$50,000 donations to catalog the Gomery Col­
lection and the Gliner Humor Collection—a 
personal collection of mass media­related 
materials and a collection of humor­related 
content. Douglas Gomery is an author and 

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C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; 
e-mail: agalloway@ala.org. 

media economist, and Art Gliner is founder 
of the Gliner Center for Humor Studies at 
the University of Maryland. The Gomery 
Collection consists of 250 boxes of books, 
journals, research materials, book drafts and 
galleys, and correspondence. Gomery has 
written on such a wide range of media­re­
lated tops including a volume of early 1900s 
“Little Nemo” cartoons next to a copy of 
Gomery’s own work Who Owns the Media 
(2004). There are several items in the collec­
tion of which Gomery is particularly proud: 
original copies of the Film Daily Yearbook 
(1926) and a personal signed copy of Story 
of Films, published in 1927 by Joseph Ken­
nedy, father of President John F. Kennedy. 
The Gliner Humor Collection is a mix of 
scholary books and journals; Playboy, MAD 
Magazine, and National Lampoon compila­
tions; mass market paperbacks; children’s 
joke books; audio and video tapes of stand­
up comics; bio and subject fi les composed 
of newspaper clippings; and articles from 
magazines. Gliner says the collection consists 
of more than 1,500 books and between 500 
and 1,000 audiocassettes with more than 60 
hours of comedian recordings. 

Acquisitions 

Father of the sociology of science Robert 
K. Merton’s (1910–2003) archive has been do­
nated to Columbia University’s Rare Book and 
Manuscript Library. The collection was do­
nated by Merton’s widow, sociologist Harriet 
Zuckerman, who is currently senior vice pres­
ident of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 
and professor emerita at Columbia. Merton’s 
archive includes unpublished lecture notes, 
course syllabi, draft manuscripts, and exten­
sive primary data and records from his long 
and varied career in the social sciences. The 
papers also feature Merton’s correspondence 
with other pivotal figures in 20th­century 

C&RL News January 2008  44 

mailto:agalloway@ala.org


sociology and public intellectual discourse, 
including Paul Lazarsfeld, C. Wright Mills, 
Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pitirim 
Sorokin, Pierre Bourdieu, Granville Hicks, 
Lionel and Diana Trilling, and Stephen Jay 
Gould, among others. The archive contains 
empirical data from a number of signifi cant, 
but mostly unpublished, research projects that 
Merton conducted in the 1940s and 1950s, 
as well as unpublished manuscripts on mass 
communications (Dwight Eisenhower’s presi­
dential candidacy), the sociology of science, 
and on sociological semantics, his last area 
of research. The archive includes multiyear 
studies focused on two of the nation’s oldest 
public housing projects and on patterns of 
American social life in friendships, politics, 
labor relations, and among different races 
and ethnicities. Merton’s papers include ex­
tensive correspondence with his Columbia 
colleague and collaborator of 35 years, Paul 
F. Lazarsfeld, with whom Merton worked at 
the Bureau of Applied Social Research on 
studies of mass communication. It was in this 
period that Merton developed the “focused 
interview” procedure—laying the ground­
work for the focus groups now widely used 
in marketing research. 

Materials associated with Sinclair Lewis and 
Lloyd Lewis’ (no relation) play “The Jay­
hawker” have been donated to St. Cloud 
State University by the family of Hubert Irey 
Gibson. Gibson served as Lewis’ personal 
secretary in the fall of 1933 in Chicago at 
the Hotel Sherry while “The Jayhawker” 
was written. The play was performed in 
Washington, New York, and Philadelphia in 
the fall of 1934, and was novelized in 1935. 
Included in the collection are several drafts 
of the play as it evolved, including the fi nal 
draft autographed by the authors and given 
to Gibson. Other materials include letters 
from 1933 between Lloyd and Sinclair Lewis 
regarding the plot, letters from Hubert Gibson 
to his daughter Barbara regarding his time 
with Lewis, and contemporary newspaper 
clippings highlighting the collaboration of 
Sinclair Lewis and Lloyd Lewis. 

January 2008  45 C&RL News