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This collection contains the correspondence, editorial files and office files of the Columbia University Press, primarily from its reorganization in 1923 by Frederick Coykendall to the present.

Papers and 50 boxes of paperback books.

Correspondence, manuscripts, documents, financial records, photographs, drawings, engravings, and printed materials of Benjamin. The personal and business papers concern Benjamin's publishing and bookselling company, his numerous benefactions, the disposal of his collections, and many printed catalogs for his company, 1883-1940. The two major correspondents are the business and financial records for the printing, binding, and extensive promotion through a network of agents of Stedman's A LIBRARY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM THE EARLIEST SETTLEMENT TO THE PRESENT TIME; new ed. (New York, W.E. Benjamin, 1894). There are also letters, manuscripts, documents, and drawings of English literary figures collected by Benjamin. Among these are six letters of George Eliot, 47 letters and six manuscripts of John Ruskin, and three letters and one manuscript of Joseph Mallord Turner, with four letters relating to the artist. In addition there ten drawings and watercolors by Ruskin.

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.

Correspondence, manuscripts, notes, notebooks, documents, photographs, course-related materials, and printed materials. The manuscripts include typescripts of Sykes' published and unpublished novels, monographs, plays, short stories, and articles. Among these are The Perennial Avant Garde, The Cool Millennium, and The Hidden Remnant. Sykes' notes and notebooks span the period from the early 1930s to 1980, and include preliminary ideas and sketches for his books, as well as autobiographical material. A small number of documents concern Sykes' wartime work in the U.S. Government Office of War Information. Course-related material including writings and correspondence of students taught by Sykes between 1962 and 1975 at the New School and as an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Printed materials consist of numerous reviews of Sykes' books, in addition to offprints and articles by Sykes. Included as well are printed materials about or connected with Sykes, offprints of articles inscribed to him, and many volumes from his library. The substantial correspondence series includes personal letters and correspondence with agents and publishers relating to his books. Correspondents include Harold Clurman, Aaron Copland, Lawrence Durrell, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Francis Steegmuller, as well as a number of Sykes' students. There is extensive correspondence between Sykes and the artist John Hartell from 1927 to 1983.