Stephen A. Schwarzman Building > Collections & Reading Rooms > Berg Collection > Recently Acquired or Cataloged

Purchases

  • Ann Bannon. Odd Girl Out. New York: Fawcett Publishing, 1957.
  •             . I am a Woman. New York: Fawcett Publishing, 1959.
    “ Ann Bannon” is the pseudonym of the pioneering author of five books of lesbian pulp fiction, issued in paperback. The two novels listed above are the first two of the five she published.
  • [Bloomsbury]. Collection of nude photographic studies of Bloomsburyites. Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry, photographers. 36 original negatives, 53 original vintage photographs, 13 old photographs, and 14 modern photographic prints. (Vintage is generally defined as prints that have been made up to seventeen years after the negative, though most of these vintage prints date from several years to a dozen years after the negatives were made.) All of the negatives and prints are unpublished.

    The nudes are posed in typical life-study poses, often classically inspired, though a few were apparently posed for mild eroto-comic effect. The subjects are Oliver Strachey (one photo shows him standing with a nightgown-clothed Rachel Strachey), Duncan Grant, Pippa Strachey, Clive Bell, Duncan Garnett, Katherine Cox, Marjorie Strachey, Gerald Shove, Roger Fry, and Vanessa Bell herself. The five photos of Vanessa Bell herself, nude, are negatives. Also included are fourteen miscellaneous Bloomsbury photos, comprising almost all of the well-known Bloomsburyites (clothed), except for Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and including Lytton Strachey’s lover Dora Carrington, and E. M. Forster.

    In addition to the photos of the nude and clothed Bloomsburyites are five unpublished photos of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s drawing room of their apartment at 52 Tavistock Square, showing the wall decorations created by Bell and Duncan Grant. The apartment and all its contents were destroyed in the Blitz, in 1940, and the photos (except for two which were sold to a private collector), constitute the only visual evidence of any portion of the Woolf apartment interior and of the Bell decorations. The drawing room photos were taken either by Roger Fry or Vanessa Bell some time during or after 1932.

  • T. S. Eliot. 5 unpublished autograph letters, signed, to the Rev. H. S. Swabey, 1937-1950, regarding the following topics: Ezra Pound’s incarceration and the Church’s historical views on business practice and usury.
  •             . 1 unpublished typed letter, signed, to H. Keith Thompson, [n.d.].
    Eliot expresses his views on the unfairness of the Nuremberg war crime trials.
  •             . 1 unpublished typed letter, signed, to “Master” Lucius Shepard, Daytona , Fla., June 16, 1952.
    A reply to a young admirer about his difficulty in understanding “The Waste Land.”
  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Backroads to Far Places, After Basho. 10 spitbite aquatint etchings by Stephanie Peek. Nara, Japan: Tokugenji Press, April 2003. Copy no. 3.
    A scroll with nine poems by Ferlinghetti, inspired by the Haiku poet Matsuo Basho, printed in letterpress by Alan Hillesheim at Digger Pine Press, Berkeley , Ca. The etchings were printed by Paul Mullowney at Tokugenji Zen temple in Nara, Japan.
  • Bruce Jay Friedman. The novelist, playwright, and screenwriter’s personal archive. In process. Will not be available to researchers before October 2004.
  • Jack Kerouac. The Berg Collection contains the largest collection of Jack Kerouac manuscripts, typescripts, notebooks, and letters in institutional hands. Most of the material listed below has been in the Berg for the past ten years (i.e., before the arrival of the Jack Kerouac Archive), but its presence here may not be generally known. See below for a selected list of the Berg's accessible Kerouac holdings:

    4 autograph notebooks for Maggie Cassidy
    11 autograph notebooks for Some of the Dharma
    3 autograph spiral notebooks for Satori in Paris
    15 autograph notebooks of literary sketches
    autograph notebook for Tics
    autograph notebook for Daydreams
    6 autograph notebooks for Mexico City Blues
    10 autograph notebooks for Passing Through
    11 notebooks for Book of Dreams
    Typescript for Book of Dreams
    Mansucripts/typescripts of about a dozen poems
    Over 100 autograph letters (and about 20 typed letters) signed by Kerouac

    This material cannot be made available to potential researchers in the usual manner because it is largely unprocessed, and to allow use of more than one item by more than one researcher at a time would pose a security risk. Letters, however, will be made available five at a time. Researchers may apply to the Curator to gain access to this material. If there is great demand for use of this material, researchers may be limited in the amount of days they may use the material, though they may reapply immediately to use the material again and would be placed on a waiting list. The purpose of this policy is to ensure fairness in access while maintaining security. Of course, all would-be users of the Berg Collection must obtain a reader's card from the Special Collections Administration Office before they can gain admission to the Berg Reading Room.

  • D. H. Lawrence. The Life of J. Middleton Murry by J.C. London: Privately printed, 1930. Single sheet, folded. First and only printing of this text.
    Lawrence wrote this review for a satiric journal, to be titled Squib, which he wanted to found, but he died soon after this sheet appeared. John Middleton Murry had recently published The Life of Jesus Christ, and Lawrence was inspired to write this lampoon—the review of a biography of Murry by Jesus Christ.
  • Ezra Pound. A collection of unpublished papers by and about Ezra Pound, including 43 typed letters, 16 of them signed, to Frederic D. Grab, Feb. 4, 1955-June 17, 1959, with 28 of the letters emended in Pound’s hand and 8 emended in the hand of his wife, Dorothy Shakespear Pound; correspondence from E. E. Cummings, Archibald macleish, Marianne Moore, Stephen Spender, William Carlos Williams, and others regarding the radio program tribute to Pound organized by Grab for broadcast on the Yale University radio station; Grab’s notebook, containing his detailed accounts of his visits to Pound, at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, including who else was present, Pound’s reading material, conversations with Pound, etc.
  • George Bernard Shaw. First autograph draft of The Table-Talk of G.B.S., 95 p. [1925].
    The questions were written by Archibald Henderson, a mathematician and Shaw's authorized biographer. Shaw has emended his replies in about 300 to 400 instances. The text was further heavily revised in galleys, and thus differs substantially from the published text.
  • Julia Strachey (1901-1979). Collection of unpublished diaries, letters, and manuscripts.
    This material documents the personal lives of many Bloomsbury figures. The largest group of correspondence comprises 74 autograph letters, five cards, and one note, signed, to the painter Dora Carrington (1893-1932).
  • Stephen Tennant. 72 unpublished autograph letters, signed, to his nephew Simon Blow. 149 pages, Salisbury, Bath, and Mexico, March 1971 to August 1985, and undated; with: 76 pages containing Tennant’s drawings, poems, epigrams and quotations. The poems, some of which are untitled, as well as the drawings, are unpublished.
  • Oscar Wilde. The Soul of Man under Socialism. Autograph manuscript, signed, including numerous autograph corrections, cancellations, and emendations, [December 1890/January 1891], 59 p.
    In this essay, Wilde formulated what might be called a holistic approach to politics, and in his analysis of socialism and capitalism, incorporates his political insights into an aesthetic conception of reality and a conception of the human soul as an entity that finds fulfillment in its striving toward individuality.
  • William Carlos Williams. 22 unpublished autograph letters, signed, to Vivienne Koch, 1939-1954.
    Koch was Williams’s first biographer (William Carlos Williams, 1950). Though she denied in her introduction that Williams knew about her project, these letters disprove this assertion. She would send sections of her manuscript to Williams as she wrote them, and he would reply to her with instructions on how to restructure her account of his literary development. The letters contain detailed explications of several important works, including Patterson (Book Three), as well as evaluations of himself as a writer and of his place in American letters.