A New England Correspondence Archive: Descriptive Notes and Approach to Valuation Recently a Massachusetts antiques dealer sought me out to evaluate an archive of approximately 100 autograph letters received by one Edward B. Dearborn (1807-1886), including many related to teaching, mostly in rural New England schools in the late 1820s and early 1830s. What at first appeared to be a boring batch of... [more]

The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is a museum in Hartford, CT located in the house where Stowe and her family moved to in 1873. She resided there for the final 23 years of her life, during which Stowe continued to write, lecture, and made considerable contributions to local art institutions. The Center has a worthy collection: over 12,000 books, 4,000 pamphlets, 180,000 manuscripts, and 12,000 ima... [more]

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which monitors and reports hate and extremist groups in the U.S., has donated its 30 year collection of extremist materials to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. The 90 boxes of periodicals, pamphlets, flyers, and other documents will be added to the Library's Human Rights Archive. The mission of the Hu... [more]

Robert Frost enthusiasts have reason to celebrate this week, as it was announced that a collection of rare Frost material was donated to the State University of New York at Buffalo. The donor Jonathan Reichert is a professor emeritus at the university and his father was close friends with Frost. Even though Frost was sixty years older than Reichert, he still formed a friendship with the young man ... [more]

I've been taking a fabulous course on rare books through NYU SCPS and the greatest part about it is that each session features a guest lecturer and/or a trip. We have visited the Morgan Library & Museum, Christie's auction house, a rare bookseller's store (thanks for having us, James Cummins Bookseller!), and the New York Academy of Medicine. One of the best aspects of living in NYC is that you ar... [more]

An extensive Ernest Hemingway collection compiled by a Mississippi physician was donated to the University of South Carolina Columbia and put on display at the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library for a special showing earlier this week. Edgar Grissom, the 70-year-old collector and donor, has worked for more than 50 years in his quest to compile all of Hemingway's English-language public... [more]

On May 1, Emory University's Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) opened the archive of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to the public. The SCLC was founded in 1957 by seminal civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. in response to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Black leaders in the southeast were cognizant that the boycott was the beginning of a much l... [more]

Today, a collection of over 600 rare bookswhat some are calling "the last great private library "will be auctioned off in New Zealand. The books were collected by Arthur Pycroft, a prominent Auckland naturalist and scholar. Pycroft earned his living as a senior manager of NZ Railways, but his passions were ornithology and natural history, which he delved into with dedicated research and during p... [more]