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GRANTS AND ACQUISITIONS

C&RL News, June 2007
Vol. 68, No. 6

by Ann-Christe Galloway

Acquisitions
Two reformation pamphlets from collector and scholar Milton (Mac) Gatch have been acquired by Columbia University’s Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary. Gatch, former director of Burke Library, donated the pamphlets in conjunction with a talk he gave earlier this year entitled “Reformation Pamphlets and Reformation Research: Union’s First Church Historians.” Reformation pamphlets are relatively short printed works, usually quarto in format, written by the Reformers and their opponents and published in the 16th century (mostly before 1550). The two pamphlets donated by Gatch are rare examples from his personal collection. The first, “Von dem pfrundt marckt der Cutisanen und Tampelknechten,” dating from 1521, is one of at least four copies in the United States. The second pamphlet, “Beclagung aines leyens genant Hanns schwalb über vil missbreüch Christliches lebens, vnd darinn begriffen kürzlicn von Johannes Hußen,” dates from 1521, as well. The title page’s woodcut vignette depicts the sale of indulgences, a principle cause of Martin Luther’s Reformation. This pamphlet may be one of only two copies of this imprint in the United States.

Maya Angelou has donated her collection of film and theatre related materials to the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. Angelou’s Film and Theatre Media Manuscript Collection contains her expansive works in major motion picture and television film and in live theatre. The collection encompasses her work as writer, director, producer, editor, and featured actor. The materials in the collection include play drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, movie scripts, photographs, movie posters, theatre playbills, and directorial schedules totaling over 63 linear feet. The collection is a wealth of primary and secondary source materials featuring the multimedia works and writings of a prominent American writer, speaker, and director. Works represented include Down in the Delta, Angelou’s directorial debut film in 1998 featuring Alfre Woodard, Esther Rolle, and Wesley Snipes; Georgia, Georgia (1972), Angelou’s first original screenplay and musical score; and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a CBS production airing in 1979 based on the book of the same name starring Diahann Carroll, Esther Rolle, and Ruby Dee.

^{Maya Angelou}

The University of South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library has acquired the personal papers of Kaye Gibbons, whose novels about self-reliant women in the rural South have made her a prominent figure in contemporary Southern fiction. Gibbons’s papers are the first acquired from a contemporary Southern woman writer. They will join the literary papers of John Jakes, Joseph Heller, George V. Higgins, and James Ellroy. Gibbons’s archive includes her critical essays written as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina and storyboards used for plot development in her novels. Gibbons has won critical acclaim, as well as wide readership. Her first novel Ellen Foster, which she wrote in 1987 at age 26, is considered a classic, taught alongside works such as Catcher in the Rye and To Kill A Mockingbird in high schools and universities. The novel, which earned accolades from Eudora Welty and Walker Percy, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Louis D. Rubin Writing Award. The book’s sequel, The Life All Around Me, by Ellen Foster, was released last year.

Actor Harold “Hal” Gould’s papers have been acquired by the University at Albany’s Libraries. Gould has been recognized with five Emmy nominations, an Obie, a Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and an ACE Cable TV Award for his varied roles. Gould’s career includes Broadway roles in such plays as John Guare’s House of the Blue Leaves, Neil Simon’s Fools, and Jules Feiffer’s Grown Ups. He is most widely known for his roles on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, and The Golden Girls. He also had roles in films such as The Sting (1973) through Freaky Friday (2003), and English as a Second Language (2005).

The architectural archive of Pierre Koenig, the internationally celebrated architect whose work helped to define modern architecture, has been acquired by the Special Collections of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (GRI). This archive, containing more than 3,000 objects, including drawings, models, photographs, slides, and documents, will enable scholars to study a significant chapter in post-war American domestic architecture. Among the architectural gems documented in the collection are Koenig’s Case Study Houses #21 and #22, which were both executed as part of Case Study House Program of 1945–1963 for John Entenza’s Arts & Architecture magazine. Koenig was one of the youngest architects included in the program, which promoted modern, indoor-outdoor California living through innovative steel-frame design and construction. Born in San Francisco in 1925, Koenig became interested in the structural possibilities and advantages of steel residential construction, while a student at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture in the 1950s. Confronted with the skepticism of his professors, who questioned the applicability of steel to residential architecture, Koenig proved them wrong by designing and building his own steel home at a cost lower than that of a traditional wood frame structure. This innovative structure earned him the American Institute of Architects’ House and Home Award of Merit. Upon graduation, he opened his own architectural practice in Los Angeles. Throughout his career, which spanned five decades, he never relinquished his goal of producing prefabricated homes for the masses. Koenig died in 2004. 

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; e-mail: agalloway@ala.org.