Alexander Library Research Articles

Book Review

Book Review

Flint Goodridge Hospital and Black Health Care in Twentieth-Century New Orleans

Flint Goodridge Hospital and Black Health Care in Twentieth-Century New Orleans

Occult Collections and Mysterious Coincidences at Rutgers

Gorder’s article is based on her experience as the curator of the exhibition and as a articipant in the June 23, 2014 internationalcolloquium held in the Alexander Library, “The Soldier and theSeer: J. F. C. Fuller, Aleister Crowley, and the British Occult Revival related to the occult collections at Rutgers. The conference was appropriately held in the Alexander Library, the home of SpecialCollections and University Archives. Her article also reflects her keen knowledge of the archives at Rutgers from which she unearthed information about Fairweather, J. F. C. Fuller, and John Hammond, who was an assistant dean at Rutgers, a contemporary of Fairweather, and a notorious wild child of a famous occultcommune. Gorder speculates on a series of mysterious coincidences that has made Rutgers an inadvertent source for occult studies.

Obituary

Obituary

The Saga of Peter Still

The following is an expanded and footnoted version of the twenty-fourth annual Louis Faugères Bishop III lecture, held Monday, February 23, 2009 at the Alexander Library of Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

Milton in the Library

Fulton describes how this special issue was inspired by a spring 2011 exhibit in the Alexander Library at Rutgers which consisted of about 150 books, pamphlets, broadsides, and manuscripts, and other artifacts having to do with John Milton, his political and cultural contexts, and his literary afterlife. He summaries the contents of each article in this issue and how they fit together. He also outlines ways in which the actual artifact reveals far more about the conditions of writing and reading than can be reproduced in modern editions or in digital form. As we move forward in the centuries after Milton’s death, we encounter many different Miltons —the young but proper Milton of the eighteenth century, replaced by the bold, powerful, prophetic, Blakean Milton early in the nineteenth century.

Alexander Library: Transition to the Future

Within the unified system of the Rutgers University Libraries, Alexander Library has been established as the research library for humanities and social sciences, and delivers services and builds collections on this basis. It is a repository of scholarly resources which provides access to worlds of information inside and outside the building; an environment conducive to the process of information seeking, analyzing and synthesizing; and provides assistance to patrons in need of these resources. All library activities being carried out by librarians and staff are for a single purpose: providing meaningful services effectively to the target audience—library patrons in the Rutgers community and beyond. In keeping with its service mission, the Library must be sensitive to the needs of Rutgers students and faculty of today and tomorrow, support the philosophy and goals of the university, and must operate effectively within a constantly changing environment. A major factor which will continue to affect the Library's operations is the rapidly developing computer and telecommunications technology. The impact is as significant as the invention of movable typesetting on the publishing world. Today, formats in which information is stored are no longer limited to manuscripts, books, journals, microforms, CDs, or laser disks. Electronic means for generating, retrieving and disseminating information have already broadened the concept of library services beyond the walls of the building. In order for the library to deliver meaningful services effectively, librarians must constantly reassess service priorities, learn and apply new technology, and make decisions on emerging issues. The newly expanded and renovated Alexander Library building must be responsive to this on-going transition.

Alexander Library: The Past, the Present, the Future

Alexander Library: The Past, the Present, the Future

The Art Library: A New Art Landmark at Rutgers Mall

The Library of Rutgers University is located in a new facility on the historic Voorhees Mall. The mall is one of the oldest parts of the University. Some of its buildings date back to the university's early colonial beginnings. The mall is dominated on one end by the administration building, Old Queen's, and on the other end by the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. A historic sculpture of William the Silent presides at one extremity of the mall, while on the other, a modern sculpture in front of the art museum proclaims its contemporary role. The mall serves as the nucleus of an otherwise dispersed university. It is a ceremonial and symbolic place where every year hundreds of new graduates march the traditional path from Old Queen's, past the Library to Murray Hall, to receive their diplomas in celebration of the affirmation of their achievement. On this historic mall stands the Library: it observes, participates, and educates. The Library was transferred in 1966 from Alexander Library to Voorhees Hall, an already existing building and the former main library for the university in New Brunswick. The move was accomplished with the initiative and active participation of the History Department under the chairmanship of James Stubblebine. Roger Tarman, a newly hired art librarian, organized the transfer. James Stubblebine expressed his enthusiasm and approval of the new arrangement in his article Art Finds Home: Part of the old bookstack area has been made into an art library, with its attractive reading room, which is one of the triumphs of the building. In the same building and at the same time, the Gallery was established. This arrangement provided for a working symbiosis among three related but separate parts—the Gallery, the History Department, and the Library—and defined the center of the art community at Rutgers. Although the library was now well-located, the space it occupied had not been specifically planned to accommodate the Library's needs.

Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and the Rutgers Handel Collection

A chance visit in January, 1991, to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff drew my attention to a portrait in their collection of the young Sir Watkin Williams Wynn( 1749-89) painted on a visit he made to Italy in 1768. (Pl. 1) had previously encountered his name as that of an enthusiast and collector of art and music, particularly music by Handel, some of which had found its way into Special Collections and Archives of the Rutgers University Libraries in New Brunswick, New Jersey. That visit has led me to the present attempt to explore Sir Watkins relationship to art and music, and especially to Handel and the Handel collection at Rutgers. In the December 1965 issue of this Journal described a collection of prints and manuscripts of music by George Frideric Handel housed in Special Collections and Archives of the Alexander Library of Rutgers in New Brunswick. It was explained there that part of the collection was acquired by Rutgers around 1950 as a result of a purchase by the Dana Library of Rutgers in Newark that had been recommended by Professor Alfred Mann, a distinguished Handel scholar, now emeritus. Some time after this purchase, which included eleven manuscript volumes described in my article cited above, the materials were transferred to Special Collections in New Brunswick. At that time the provenance of the Handel manuscripts was largely a mystery, although it is clear that they were once part of a single collection, being uniformly bound in leather and numbered consecutively from to IX, lacking vol. IV but including an Appendix Vol. I and two unnumbered volumes. All the numbered volumes are devoted to Anthems, while the unnumbered ones contain An Ode for Queen Anne's Birthday and Italian Duettos and Trios? Since the publication of my article, the collection, and particularly the manuscripts, have been cited in the relevant literature, including studies by Larsen, Dean, and Beeks, the Handel thematic catalogue by Baselt, and the edition of Anthems in the Hallische HandelAusgabe.

The Rutgers' Collection of Children's Literature

H E R U T G E R S Collection of Children's Literature is a repository for the original art of children's books and contains over 3,000 pieces of artwork spanning fifty years of book illustration. The collection is housed at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Although the emphasis is on New Jersey illustrators, the collection represents artists from all over the country who have generously donated their artwork. The collection is dedicated to furthering scholarly research and artistic creativity by documenting the production of children's books from the preparatory sketches to the full-color illustrations and the finished book. Original manuscripts are also collected and preserved by the Special Collections Department at the Archibald S. Alexander Library, the main library center for the university. By gathering together the written and visual material of children's books, the collection provides an invaluable archive for future research on this important genre. The director of the art museum, Phillip Dennis Cate, first became interested in the art for children's books in 1974 when he organized the exhibition American Illustrators of Children's Books. The quality of the artwork in that exhibition inspired the university to respond to the growing interest in establishing an archive for manuscripts and illustrations of children's books. Harry Devlin, a prominent illustrator and member of the Advisory Council on Children's Literature, was the prime mover behind the concept of the repository. It was his concern that a wealth of artwork by New Jersey artists was leaving the state and being collected by other institutions. The collection was officially founded in 1979 and was quickly expanded to encompass artists from all parts of the United States, Europe, and Asia. A collection of the original art for the printed book complements the art

Mary Norton: "A Grand Girl"

£ £ E A R M A R Y , You are a grand gir l , Franklin D . I 1 Roosevelt wrote on White House stationary on June 1, * J 1942.1 The letter was addressed to Honorable Mary T . Norton,2 the first Democratic woman elected, after suffrage, to the House of Representatives. Norton, whose papers are housed in Rutgers University's Alexander Library, represented Jersey City and Bayonne in the House from 1924 to 1950. She was the first woman to serve on the New Jersey State Democratic Committee, of which she was chairwoman from 1932 to 1948. She became the first woman to co-chair the National Democratic Platform Committee in 1944 and, in 1948, the first woman to chair the Credentials Committee; in 1932, Norton became the first Democratic woman elected to a position on the Board of Chosen Freeholders in Hudson County, New Jersey; and in 1924 she was elected to the House of Representatives and was the first woman to chair a congressional committee—the House Committee on the District of Columbia, on which she served as Mayor of the District from 1931 to 1937. Norton was also the first woman to chair the House Labor Commit-

A Checklist of Incunabula in the Department of Special Collections and Archives, A. S. Alexander Library, Rutgers University

A Checklist of Incunabula in the Department of Special Collections and Archives, A. S. Alexander Library, Rutgers University

Arthur Waley and Amy Lowell: A Note

R T H U R Waley's translations from the Chinese attracted widespread attention when some of them were printed in 1917 in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies} More followed in other periodicals, both British and American, and in July 1918 his collection A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems was published by Constable. It was shortly to be called one of the most memorable books of recent years, a judgment amply confirmed by subsequent critics. Alfred Knopf inquired soon afterwards about an American edition. It came out in May 1919, and an advertisement for the book appeared in The New Republic of May 31 quoting from an endorsement which Knopf had obtained from Amy Lowell, and which she authorized him to use in his publicity. (Miss Lowell's letter, dated 22 May 1919, was recently acquired by the Alexander Library on the William Allen Chapman Fund.) The comment heading the advertisement reads: No better translations have so far appeared of Chinese poetry. He has given the real feeling of Chinese poetry, its clarity, its suggestion, its perfect humanity. There is no other translation of Chinese poetry now available with anything like the merit of this. AMY L O W E L L . Mr. Knopf did not indicate the ellipsis which he made between the first and second sentences of Miss Lowell's letter to him. The sentence which he excised was: I have been working lately on Chinese poetry with a friend of mine who lives in China, so I know whereof I speak, and while I do not always agree with Mr. Waley's renderings of those poems with which I am familiar, he has done what nobody else has. Her reservation brings out that she and Florence Ayscough saw themselves as com-

"My Dear Siegfried": Gosse to Sassoon

TH E Alexander Library has recently added to its Gosse collection a number of interesting letters to Sassoon running from the twenty years from 1908 to Gosse's death in 1928. Some have been printed in Evan Charteris's The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse (1931); others are unpublished.1 thing they emphasize is Sassoon's assiduity in promoting his literary career, a motif he carefully omitted in The Memoirs of George Sherstony his three-volume account of his life up through The Great War. It is a work which increasingly we are agreeing to assign to the domain of fiction. of Sassoon's lifelong problems was reconciling or at least understanding his polarities as sportsman, on the one hand, and author, on the other. As he says, One half of me was huntingfield and the other was gentleman writer.2 Hemingway would show how these two identities could be reconciled, but Sassoon's problem was that he imagined that literature had to be delicate if not frail to be beautiful. The hunting-field half of him he depicts as the healthy, thoroughly philistine Sherston; the gentleman writer half he presents as Siegfried Sassoon, the actor and agent of recall in The Old Century and Seven More Years (1939), The Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried's Journey (1945). It is entirely as the aspirant gentleman writer aged 22 that he first presents himself to the 59-year-old Edmund Gosse in 1908. There had been a long social and familial connection between the Sassoons and the Gosses. Siegfried's mother was a close friend of Gosse's wife Nellie, and Siegfried's Uncle Hamo, the sculptor, had been best man at Edmund's wedding. To young Gosse appeared not only eminent but, as the friend of Swinburne, Hardy, and James, advantageously situated to recognize talent and then

Donald F. Cameron

Charanis recounts Cameron's thirty-seven years of association with Rutgers from 1929 to 1966. His accomplishments including helping found Rutgers University Press and the Research Council, and transforming the college library he inherited into an important research library, overseeing the construction of the new university library, the Alexander Library.

The New Library

Cameron speaks with enthusiasm about the New Library (Alexander Library) that will be opened in September of 1956. Construction is almost complete and the plans for the operation of the Library are nearly complete.

Gifts and Acquisitions

Sinclair speaks about the New Jersey Room in the new library (Alexander Library). It is for rare books and newspapers, old maps, manuscripts, Rutgersensia, and other categories of out-of-the-way research and display material—will occupy what is called the New Jersey Room on the main floor, together with a similar space directly below it.

Moving a Library

Cameron writes about the complexity of moving from the Voohees Library to the new University Library (later known as the Alexander Library), in 1956.

Last Words

Marchand has a preview of the new library (Alexander Library) with the University Librarian before it opens.