Collections : [Rare Book & Manuscript Library]

Correspondence, manuscripts, lectures, notes, diaries, notebooks, reports, financial records, blueprints, photographs, and printed materials of Y.C. James Yen and the IIRR concerned with the development, sharing, and financing innovative methods of teaching, improving agriculture, health and family planning, and education in impoverished villages. Among the cataloged correspondents are: Pearl Buck, William O. Douglas, Nelson Rockefeller, and DeWitt Clinton.

The incomplete records of the New York State Library School, Albany, 1890-1911. Included are diploma lists, grade sheets, examination questions, examination questions with corresponding set of students' answers, pass cards, senior certificate lists, an admissions application, entrance examinations, curriculum materials, and some documents for the class of 1890. Also, records of the New York State Library School Association, Incorporated. In addition to letters from such prominent American librarians as Katharine L. Sharp, Joseph Wheeler, Ralph Munn, and James I. Wyer, there are minutes, reports, memoranda, and printed documents, including the Association's constitution. There is a scrapbook of blanks and forms used in the executive departments of U.S. libraries in 1893, mounted by the N.Y. State Library School for the American Library Association World's Columbian Exposition Comparative Library Exhibit (Chicago, 1893). Also, files of the school consisting of course materials, exams, publications of the School, student records, admission files, class lists and rankings, and some related correspondence.

The collection consists of the editorial and production archives of Random House, Inc. from its founding in 1925 to the 1990s. The correspondence and editorial files include many of the prominent novelists and short story writers from 20th-century American and European literature: Saul Bellow; Erskine Caldwell; Truman Capote; William Faulkner; Sinclair Lewis; André Malraux; Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. Among the poets there are files for W. H. Auden; Allen Ginsberg; Robinson Jeffers; Robert Lowell; and Stephen Spender. In the area of theater there are files for Maxwell Anderson; Moss Hart; Lillian Hellman; Eugene O'Neill; and Tennessee Williams. Random House transacted business with many fine presses and noted typographers and the archives contain files for Nonesuch Press, Grabhorn Press and Golden Cockerel Press, as wll as for Bruce Rogers, Valenti Angelo, and Edwin, Jane, and Robert Grabhorn.

An extensive collection of research files.

The professional and personal correspondence, papers, and pamphlet collection of Melvil Dewey, relating to libraries, the American Library Association, library classification, the Lake Placid Club, Columbia College, the New York State Library, and spelling reform. Included are notes for and a typescript of Grosvenor Dawe's biography of Dewey.