Eighteenth-Century Highlights of the The Kline/Roethke Collection at Stanford University

This essay first appeared in The East-Central Intelligencer, N.S. 16:3 (September, 2003)

Stanford University Libraries is the grateful beneficiary of the remarkable gift of the collection of John Kenneth Kline, donated to the libraries in 1980 through the generosity of Kline's daughter, Harriet Roethke, and her two children, Gretchen Young and Johanna Kroger. John Kline was a newspaperman trained in the law, who in 1915 became part owner of the Green Bay Press Gazette. An avid collector of English literature, books on international politics, and illustrated books, Kline built his collection almost exclusively from 1920 to 1930; today it stands an indication of what sort of collecting was possible to a person of taste and means in that remarkably rich era of book-collecting. Kline's list of acquisitions records in most cases the source of each purchase and the price paid, a boon to any researcher endeavoring to track prices paid in the '20s for exceptional copies. Holdings in the Romantics are remarkably rich in the Kline/Roethke Collection, but the collection of authors from the long eighteenth century is also splendid.

Kline's titles from the eighteenth century include many of the high spots of British literature. Many of these copies were bound by the finest binders of the nineteenth century, and are lovely (if perhaps too fancy to eighteenth-century tastes); many others are stunning in their original state: uncut, unopened, in original wrappers, or in eighteenth-century calf or sheep. full article here

Kline/Roethke in Socrates (over 1100 titles)