Recent Acquisitions

The past year has probably been the most notable in the history of the University Library in terms of the quantity and quality and diversity of additions to the collections. Most of the acquisitions listed here have given strength to areas in which the Library is already strong; but not mentioned in this brief report are many significant acquisitions that support teaching and research in all areas of the University.

In the field of English literature, the Library has acquired more than fifty first editions of the novels of George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, and Henry James. Several first and other early editions of Lord Byron, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and William Butler Yeats enhance the English poetry collection. English drama has been enriched by the acquisition of a large number of early editions of the plays of seventeenth and eighteenth century playwrights, including John Banks, Colley Cibber, George Colman, Richard Cumberland, John Dryden, George Lillo, Thomas Otway, Thomas Shadwell, James Thomson, and Edward Young, to name only a few. Three small groups of correspondence of the Sitwells go together to make a rather good collection of around fifty letters of this famous literary family.

In American literature the Mark Twain project directed by members of the faculty of the Department of English, was helped by the fortuitous discovery by one of our friends of a good-sized cache of early editions of Twain’s works. This collection plus a number of other Twain first and early editions recently acquired allowed us to add well over one hundred items to the Twain collection during the past year. Perhaps the most notable acquisition in American literature was a fine copy of the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). This and other early printings of the work, as well as several other Whitman first editions, give substance to our research materials available for textual criticism on one of the most well-known and important figures in American literature.

Our already significant collection of books in religious history, particularly in the area of the Reformation and Counter-reformation, was given even more importance by the addition, among other titles, of the following: St. Thomas Aquinas, De veritate catholicae, Venice, 1476; St. Augustine, Canones, Strassburg, 1490; Juan de Avila, Obras, Madrid, 1588; Petrus Comester, Historic scholastica, Augsburg, 1473; Laurentius Forerus, Luther Thaumaturgis, Dillingen, 1624; Johan Geiler von Kaisersberg, Prediger Teutsch, Augsburg, 1508; Jan Hus, Disputatio, Wittemberg, 1537; Jacopo Moronessa, Il Modella di Martin Lutero, Venice 1555; Pierre Nicole, Prejugez Legitimes contre les Calvinistes, Paris, 1671; Petrus Sanuto, Recens Lutheranarum assertionum oppugnatio, Paris, 1549; Pierre Pithou, Commentaire sur le Traite des Libertez de l'Eglise Gallicane, Paris, 1652; Prospero Cardinal Santa Croce, Lettres . . . au Cardinal Borromée, The Hague, 1717; Giovanni-Maria Verratus, Disputationes adversus Lutheranos, Venice, 1544.

The French history materials of the Library were augmented with an excellent copy of Robert Gaguin’s Compendium super Francorum gestis, Paris, 1500. The title page of this famous history of the kings of France is an emblematic full page woodcut which is said to be one of the finest compositions of fifteenth century Parisian wood engraving. The copy now in the University of Iowa Library is of added interest because it was once owned by the Abbey of Clairvaux and is so identified at the foot of the title-page by a manuscript notation.

Eight pamphlets by Etienne Cabet are a welcome addition to the collection of his works already in the Library. Cabet, a French socialist of the nineteenth century and founder of the group known as Icarians, is of special interest to Iowa history because of the Icarian community founded near Coming by Cabet’s followers.

English history is represented by the addition of about thirty pamphlets by and about John Lilburne and others in the seventeenth century group known as the Levellers. Lilburne was a political agitator of strong republican views whose ideas had great influence on the political ideas and the form of government which later took hold in the United States. The Library’s collection of Leveller pamphlets now numbers more than one hundred and contains some pieces which appear to be otherwise unknown.

Several gifts by friends of the Library must be acknowledged because of their interest and importance. Dr. Martin L. Burge, an alumnus of the University of Iowa and a graduate of the Medical College has presented to the Library a collection of 63 volumes of clippings from the Springfield (Mass.) Republican dating from November 1860 through September 1865. The clippings deal entirely with the Civil War and the events leading up to it and immediately following it. They are neatly mounted in bound volumes and form a chronological, daily newspaper history of the War.

A second gift of unusual proportions and content was received as a bequest from the estate of the late John Marshall Truax of Rapid City, South Dakota. Mr. Truax, a recent alumnus of the University, was on his way to enroll in the College of Law in September 1965 when he was killed in an automobile accident near Tama, Iowa. Under the terms of his will, he bequeathed to the University his extensive collection of nearly one thousand books and three hundred recordings. That a young man of modest means should be able to acquire such a splendid library in a few years is certainly a tribute to his tenacity and taste. The books, while all of twentieth century imprint, are wide-ranging in subject matter and include works by Henry Adams, Charles Darwin, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pablo Picasso, William Prescott, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, and Arnold Toynbee. Students of the University will long have cause to be grateful to this young man for interest in books, art, and music, and for his dedication to his alma mater.

Another gift is that of Mr. Paul C. Richards and Mrs. Gladys Richards of Brookline, Massachusetts, who have presented to the Library a number of manuscripts, typescripts, letters, pamphlets, and other documents of the late Henry A. Wallace. It is hoped that friends having materials by or relating to Mr. Wallace will add them to the University’s collection.

To the Iowa Authors manuscript collection were given fifteen letters of Ruth Suckow to Mrs. Grace Tomkinson, of New York City— a gift of Mrs. Tomkinson; correspondence, manuscripts, and notebooks from J. Hyatt Downing, author of Sioux City and other novels and short stories; correspondence and manuscripts from Carl Glick, of his plays, motion picture scenarios, and short stories; manuscripts of Frank Luther Mott, presented by his daughter, Mrs. Waldo Wedel; a large collection of manuscripts and typescripts from John T. Frederick, author, teacher, and founder and editor of The Midland; typescripts from R. V. Cassill of his The Father, and Other Stories; and from Mr. Ferner Nuhn and Miss Phyllis Playter a collection of thirty-six letters exchanged between Ruth Suckow and John Cowper Powys. The Carl Van Vechten holdings have been strengthened by the addition of sixty portrait photographs made by the late Carl Van Vechten, a gift of Mr. Bruce Kellner.

Mrs. Harold F. Shrauger of Atlantic, Iowa, presented a very interesting group of eight letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow written to Miss Cornelia Fitch, an ancestor of Mrs. Shrauger.

The papers of Edwin Thomas Meredith, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 1920-1921, in the cabinet of Woodrow Wilson, founder of the Meredith Publishing Company, and founder and publisher of Successful Farming (1902) and Better Homes and Gardens (1924), were recently presented as a gift to the Library by his son, Edwin T. Meredith, Jr. The collection comprises speeches, correspondence, articles, and biographical data, 1900-1926, and includes unpublished letters from William G. McAdoo, Samuel Gompers, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George W. Carver, Herbert Hoover, Bernard Baruch, Henry A. Wallace, and others.

Space does not permit the listing of many other significant recent additions to the resources of the Library, but the preceding sample may give some indication of the quality to which the Library aspires.