New directions

You may have read of plans for rebuilding the West Wing of Green Library, with more seminar rooms and a newly designed Special Collections Reading Room all in library surroundings more hospitable than they were 20+ years ago, when I was fairly sure to find splendid solitude (and dust) in the old stacks. But we don't want to wait until the opening of the West Wing to encourage your use of our materials for your research and your classes.

Our riches include rare books new and old, fragile newspapers, medieval manuscripts, photographs, more modern manuscripts, archives, and ephemera, sources that both anchor and enrich research and teaching. This newsletter is designed to call your attention to both new and notable acquisitions and to suggest their use and their fit with other Special Collections holdings.

The listing that begins at right includes, for example, an archival set, in fine condition, of the first 20-some years of Dell paperbacks. Though such books are not intrinsically rare, in this condition and all together, they are most uncommon. The covers alone - lurid colors, arresting images, designed to grab your attention in a supermarket line - should provide much grist for the mill of culture and gender studies. Comparing these paperbacks with our splendid, more traditional rare books will certainly speak to the esthetic of the book. But, especially in conjunction with archives of publishers and editors, they will also speak to the economics and technologies involved.

Our collections are also rich in other examples of "images of culture," inviting, for instance, comparison of an account of late 19th-century train travel through the Southwest and Mexico, embellished with actual photographs, and lavish engravings produced for 16th- and 17th-century European accounts of so-called new-found lands. If we're very clever in our collecting, we might be able to expand on the theme of images of culture by juxtaposing Dell paperback covers and those of modern publishing ventures aimed at other audiences, say, a Spanish-speaking American audience.

Our collecting will, quite naturally, continue to exploit and explore the advantageous local context. For example, we want to build upon the Donald Knuth Papers already in University Archives (part of Special Collections) to document use of electronic technologies in the design and production of books, especially the partnership of type design and computers. And we seek documentation of electronic publishing and network-based communication, with a natural connection to our holdings for history of the book and history of Silicon Valley. The rapid growth of Silicon Valley has also brought with it varied social and environmental consequences we hope to document, including roles of women in this technological power base and efforts made to protect ground water from contamination in the course of chip production.

I've chosen these examples to suggest some of the collecting directions I intend to pursue in the next few years. They are embedded in a larger structure for building Special Collections, a collective process in which all the curators of the Humanities and Area Studies Group play critical roles (see below). Much of our collective attention will be directed toward contemporary records. We intend to emphasize interdisciplinary collecting initiatives, and to strengthen Special Collections by forging links between its components. These more general collecting initiatives (which are intended to be prescriptive, not restrictive) sweep in diverse aspects of cultural change, including transformations and expressions of culture under circumstances of change. Among examples of the latter are East German theater around the time of reunification, literature of American "counterculture," and the fiction of cyberspace. A second collecting category emphasizes new loci of power or influence, especially in regional context. It can encompass such topics as Chicano activism; women in positions of economic, cultural, or political power; and new holders of economic power in Silicon Valley. A third category concerns transformations in the environment, especially as these issues are connected to other of our collecting initiatives; a focus on environmental change in the American West is a natural.

In making sure that Stanford has rich and appropriate special collections ready for the next generation of scholars, we will be reading scholarly trends and taking cues from your innovative research and teaching. Our intent is to pursue collecting directions that will serve your needs and those of your students (and their students), and we want to make sure that you know what we're acquiring and that we know what you need. Our successes in turn will help Stanford continue to attract the best and brightest of faculty and students.

We look forward to working with you and your students: facilitating your use of materials in our Reading Room, introducing your classes to collections of special relevance, and learning more about your research and teaching so that we can better meet your needs.

Robin Rider is Frances and Charles Field Curator of Special Collections. This article is adapted from her remarks to a Stanford University Libraries reception, May 26, 1994.

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Acquisitions worth noting

Beau Geste Press, Devon, England. Artists' books and ephemera, 1969-1975.

The works of Beau Geste Press, founded in 1969 by artists David Mayor and Felipe Ehrenberg, have focused on performance art and happenings, conceptual art, Fluxus, and mail art. Products of this cross-cultural venture cover a wide array of social, political, and cultural concerns.

The bread of days. Classical Mexican poetry in original Spanish, and English as translated by Samuel Beckett. Commentaries by Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger. Covelo, California: Yolla Bolly Press, 1994. This volume, the first livre d'artiste to be produced by the Yolla Bolly Press, includes a suite of multicolor etchings by Mexican artist Enrique Chagoya, now a Bay Area resident. The work, hot off the press (issued 18 November 1994) links Special Collections' strengths in fine printing, artists' books, and Mexican-American culture.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. The physiology of taste: or meditations on transcendental gastronomy. Translated by M.F.K. Fisher, illustrated by Wayne Thiebaud. San Francisco: Arion Press, 1994. This product of one of the Bay Area's fine presses weaves together Brillat-Savarin's witty classic with Fisher's strongly personal commentary, enhanced by the color lithographs and drawings of northern California artist Wayne Thiebaud.

Works of James Branch Cabell. Mainly signed, limited editions by the American Southern writer James Branch Cabell, 1879-1958, often with revealing personal notes. This Cabell collection reinforces Special Collections' strength in British and American literature. George Keating, Sr., who assembled the collection and to whom most volumes are inscribed, earlier gave Stanford what we know as the Memorial Library of Music, containing manuscript scores and letters as well as first editions of scores and other published works.

Sir John [Jean] Chardin. Voyages de Mr. le Chevalier Chardin en Perse. 10 volumes. Amsterdam: Le Lorme, 1711. Jean Chardin, originally sent to Isfahan to look after the family diamond business, eventually served as royal plenipotentiary in the East and as a major source for Montesquieu's view of the merits of Persian government. This volume, with its wealth of engravings of the ancient site of Persepolis, amply illustrates one culture's view of another.

Dell Publishing Company. 2,857 paperback books, published 1943-1962. In assembling this collection, William H. Lyles tried to obtain one specimen of each printing, a daunting task given the frequency of multiple printings. Dell catered to a mainstream audience and published a variety of mysteries, romances, westerns, cookbooks, and language and humor books. This collection can be seen as a significant barometer of popular literary tastes during the 1940s-1960s, and the cover art reflects changing attitudes toward sex, gender, race, and violence over two decades.

Deutsches Raketen- und Raumfahrmuseum (DRRM), 1954-1968. Papers and collections. The DRRM organization, founded in November 1952, planned to establish a German Rocketry and Space Flight Museum in Stuttgart. Because the museum itself was never completed, the artifacts collected for it are now housed in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The DRRM collection now at Stanford includes the archives of this museum, its science fiction paperback and photograph collections, and historical material pertaining to German, Soviet, and American rocketry from World War II through the 1950s.

Ellet Family Papers. This collection of primarily 19th-century documents has been carefully preserved as a family archive. The memoirs of the family matriarch, Mary Israel Ellet, speak to issues of women's history, whereas the Civil War letters of Brigadier General Ellet afford a personal view of a 19th-century military career. Other manuscript and printed materials illuminate the careers of other family members, including noted engineer Charles Ellet, Jr. The typographic periodical Emigre, issued by Emigre Graphics, first of Berkeley and now of Sacramento, is characterized by its editors as "the magazine that ignores boundaries." Emigre began publication in 1984 and serves as venue for experimentation with digital typography and other technologies.

The William and Louise Fielder Collection of American Sheet Music. Some 2,500 pieces of sheet music spanning the period 1800-1940 and arranged by cover subject. The cover images range widely over such topics as ethnic and racial stereotypes, childhood, home, the Civil War, sports, fashion, California, and the Pacific.

Lady's scrapbook. England, early to mid-nineteenth century. This example of a genre popular among young women of the middle and upper classes in 19th-century England emulates printed books in its arrangement of engravings clipped from other sources. It is unusual for its use of fabric swatches in "depicting" costumes.

Mikhail Lemkhin. Photographs, 1964-1992. These 36 portraits of contemporary Russian cultural figures are the work of a Russian photographer who emigrated to the United States in 1983. Carl Franz Anton Schreibers.

Beyträge zur Geschichte und Kenntniss meteorischer Stein-und Metal-Massen. Vienna: J.G. Heubner,1820. Schreibers' slim volume, a landmark first edition of the iconography of meteorites, features nature-printed illustrations, where the "nature" in question is a meteorite (not the customary inked leaf or flower). The lithographic plates number among the earliest products of this method of book illustration; some, borrowing a term from early printing in Europe, call them "incunables of lithography." The work thus connects Special Collections' strong holdings in science and in the history of the book.

Emmanuel Pallas. Recherches historiques, chimiques, agricoles et industrielles sur le maïs ou blé ... Paris: Bechet, 1830. This work about corn includes sample leaves printed on corn-based paper - at a time when papermakers were casting around for less expensive alternatives to rags in order to serve the industrialization of printing and publishing. The results, not altogether successful, complement other 19th-century titles in the Gunst Collection documenting the art and history of the book.

Abbé Percheron de La Galézière. Observations sur les impositions susceptibles de reduction, conversion, ou suppression: contenant un plan d'établissement de deux foires à Paris. Paris: Chez Debure ..., 1775. This rare pamphlet proposes the creation of two new public markets in the center of Paris to serve the demand for luxury goods as well as necessities. The careful planning laid out sectors for different categories of goods, "parking lots" for transport animals, and ample provision for cafés, but the project seems never to have reached the implementation phase.

Robert Pinsky. Papers, 1960-1994. The papers of poet and critic Robert Pinsky begin with his Stanford studies in the Creative Writing Program, document his service as poetry editor for the New Republic, and include extensive correspondence as well as drafts and manuscripts of poetry and prose. Among the "papers" is Pinsky's electronic novel Mindwheel, which seizes literary opportunities presented by technological change. The collection complements Stanford's holdings of the papers of other contemporary American poets.

Stephen Rodefer. Papers, 1955-1993. The papers of Pinsky's exact contemporary, Stephen Rodefer, track the career of a poet, translator, and teacher in the avant-garde of contemporary American literature. The papers, rich in drafts, journals, and notes, also contain correspondence, including that with mentor Robert Creeley, whose papers are also in Special Collections.

SMS [Shit Must Stop]. New York: Letter Edged in Black Press, 1968. This collection of original multiples includes works by artists already heavily represented in Special Collections. As such it enriches Stanford's collections on innovative book arts and affords numerous examples of experimentation and tension in the art world of the late Sixties. Directions concerning one multiple on paper by Marcel Duchamp, for example, instruct the "reader" to detach the paper record and play it on a phonograph.

Les frères St. Laurent. Correspondence. An ensemble of correspondence of two brothers, French naval officers based in Toulon during the tumultuous years 1786-1791. The letters describe the "habits, life, and esprit" of the prerevolutionary French navy, at just the time that it was threatened with dissolution. Mixed in are more mundane details of family life, including expense lists for laundry, wigs and hairdressing, auberge and lodging.

George C. Street. Che! wah! wah! or, The modern Montezumas in Mexico. [Rochester, NY: E.R. Andrews, Printer], 1883. Street's account of a railroad voyage from Chicago to Chihuahua via Denver and the Southwest contains dozens of albumen photographs and woodcuts illustrating landmarks, towns, scenic views, and living conditions along the 4,300-mile journey.

Allen Ginsberg Papers. The many manuscripts, journals, correspondence files, business records, related papers, and extensive sound recordings in this comprehensive literary archive add much to Stanford's holdings of the papers of avant-garde literary figures. Ginsberg's habit of compiling research files about contemporary social and political issues has also resulted in a collections rich in ephemeral materials of and about the counterculture beginning with the Fifties and early Sixties.

NCLR Records. This extensive collection of the records of the National Council of La Raza documents the organization's efforts to improve life opportunities for Americans of Hispanic descent. The records thus complement those of the Mexican- American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and related collections of personal papers.

Gordon A. Craig Papers. Professor Emeritus Craig is a renowned historian of European diplomacy and expert on modern Germany. His career has also included a wartime stint in the Office of Strategic Services and an honorary professorship at the Free University of Berlin. His papers include correspondence, lectures, notes, class materials, articles, and microfilm copies of 50-plus years of diaries and occasional verse.

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