The Special Collections Department of the University of Delaware Library is a microcosm of the library's general collections. It comprises books, manuscripts, prints, broadsides, periodicals, pamphlets and realia from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries that reflect the complexity and variety of many fields of knowledge in both ancient and modern languages. The works described in this catalog are highlights of the collections. While the individual works are splendid treasures, each also represents a comprehensive collection of which it is an integral part. The books, manuscripts and other items are placed in four broad subject categories and arranged chronologically within each.
The art of the book is magnificently unveiled in many of the Victorian colorplate books published in England and America. The printing discoveries and techniques that revolutionized printing and the graphic arts in the nineteenth century are proclaimed and analyzed in books, manuals, specimen books, and printers' catalogs. The art and craft of modern fine printing and papermaking can be studied in the archives of the Bird & Bull Press, acclaimed as one of the finest American private presses. The Plough Press is its English equivalent and the archives of this press are also in the manuscript collections.
Although representative works are present from earlier centuries, the English literature holdings are strongest for the century 1750 to 1850. Samuel Johnson's Plan of a Dictionary English Language (1747), James Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum (1787- 1803), being a presentation copy from Robert Burns, and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) are but a few examples of the breadth and depth of these eighteenth-century collections. Romantic poetry and prose focuses on the works of Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and works by important critics and essayists such as Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt are also represented. Comprehensive collections of the work of Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, the Hogarth Press and modern authors such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell suggest the coverage for later periods of English literature.
English literary manuscripts include the manuscript diary of William Hazlitt sister, papers of the poet Elizabeth Jennings, numerous letters of John Galsworthy and Rudyard Kipling, and a particularly interesting group of letters and manuscripts of Christopher Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), the father of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, the only such group of papers in an institution outside Great Britain.
The depth of the American literature collections is impressive, with many of the most important works of major American literary figures being present in first and variant editions. James Fenimore Cooper's Precaution (1820) in original printed boards is in the collection. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe (1828), in original boards, crowns a very complete Hawthorne collection. Every edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and then reissued at regular intervals, with revisions, until the author's death, is present. The works of Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Howard Pyle, Carl Sandburg, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and a host of others are included in the collections. The American literary manuscript holdings include papers of John Malcolm Brinnin, Paul Bowles, Paul and Alice Dunbar, Donald Justice, Ishmael Reed, Gilbert Sorrentino, Louis Untermeyer, Kurt Vonnegut, Tennessee Williams, and the archives of Pagany, A Native Quarterly.
The library has been collecting Irish literature for only a relatively short period of time, but important collections have been developed, particularly for the period of the Irish Literary Renaissance. The publications of the Dun Emer Press and the Cuala Press comprise an area of concentration, together with major collections of Padraic Colum, Isabella Augusta Gregory, James Joyce, Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw and John Millington Synge. The Irish literary manuscripts include extensive correspondence between William Butler Yeats and Shri Purohit Swami, numerous letters of George Bernard Shaw, the papers of Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell and Ulick O'Connor.
Delawareana focuses on every facet of the State of Delaware, including its settlement in 1638 by the Swedes and its significance as the first state to sign the United States Constitution. The collections contain manuscripts, family histories, catalogs, maps, prints, broadsides, and a host of other materials that document the history of this region.
The resources for the study of the history of chemistry are comprehensive and extend into many related areas such as alchemy, pharmacy, and medical botany. Rare periodicals such as Das Laboratorium (1829-1833) and Annales de Chimie (1789-1802) provide further depth and scope.
Books that document the history of engineering include the most important works published during the Renaissance in a number of different branches of engineering: electricity, mining, hydraulics, and mechanics. Mining is represented by Georgius Agricola's spectacularly illustrated De Re Metallica in the editions published in 1556, 1561, and 1657. The Renaissance "machine" books, with their brilliant plates depicting levers and pulleys moving every kind of object, are the foundations upon which much of modern engineering rests. Certainly the most widely acclaimed work is Agostino Ramelli's Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine (1588), but not to be forgotten are such comparable works as Jacques Besson, Theatrum Instrumentorum et Machinarum (1578) and Domenico Fontana, Della Trasportatione deu'Obelisco Vaticano (1590).
The works of such figures as Archimedes, John Dalton, Albert Einstein, Galileo Galilei, Stephen Hales, and Isaac Newton are present in first or early editions of their works as well as hundreds of treatises by less well known contemporaries, equally important in many ways.
American contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge include Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1769). The natural sciences include, among others, an array of books by John James Audubon, Benjamin Smith Barton, John and William Bartram, Amos Eaton, Asa Gray, Thomas Nuttall, John Torrey, and Alexander Wilson.
The history of American horticulture is an area in which the collections of the University of Delaware Library are particularly rich and diverse. Books, periodicals, seed catalogs, trade catalogs, prints, advertising broadsides and manuscripts are all present. Such works as Andrew Jackson Downing's The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1850) and Alfred Hoffy's North American Pomologist (1860) are examples of the kinds of books to be found in this collection. It is a collection that has many works with wonderful illustrations and is indeed fertile ground for the study of American colorplate books.
As this catalog reveals, the rare book and manuscript collections of the University of Delaware Library are diverse and filled with treasures both old and new. This library has been most fortunate in the continuing support it has received from its many friends and alumni. The collections are a testimony to their generosity, of which the University of Delaware Library is most appreciative.
NATHANIEL H . PUFFER
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF LIBRARIES
FOR COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT
ALICE D. SCHREYER
HEAD, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
