This finding aid is made available for public use following the Universal 1.0 Public Domain Dedication Creative Commons designation.
The material is arranged into five series and several subseries.
The following boxes are located off-site: 1, 3-5. You will need to request this material from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at least three business days in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room.
This collection has no restrictions.
The collection contains the papers of Donald Brace and his family and chiefly relates to Brace's publishing activities. The first series includes Brace's correspondence with authors, professional associates, family members, and friends. The author correspondence includes letters from many prominent American writers during the 1930s through 1950s, but includes no correspondence with the firm's British authors. Series II includes the papers of Harcourt Brace, the bulk dating from 1919 to 1960: proofs of three Virginia Woolf books and one novel by fellow Bloomsbury writer David Garnett; as well as business files, financial records, catalogs, and photographs of the firm's offices and personnel. Series III contains the personal papers of Donald Brace and materials related to his involvement with Columbia College. Series IV holds the Brace family papers - including deeds, marriage certificates, compositions, and correspondence - dating from 1839 to 1977. Series V contains limited-edition or privately printed books owned by Donald Brace, including a complete series of leaflets from writer and activist J. E. Spingarn's Troutbeck Press.
Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Donald C. Brace Papers; Box and Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.
Reproductions may be made for research purposes. The RBML maintains ownership of the physical material only. Copyright remains with the creator and his/her heirs. The responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the patron.
2016-2017-M124: Source of acquisition--Katharine Consenza Butler. Method of acquisition--Gift; Date of acquisition--date.
Donald Brace was born in 1881 in West Winfield, N.Y., where his father was a local newspaper publisher. In 1901 he matriculated at Columbia University, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Spectator and was named 1904 class valedictorian. He began his career in publishing at Henry Holt & Co. before founding his own firm with Columbia classmate Alfred Harcourt in 1919. The newly formed Harcourt, Brace & Howe (William Howe soon left the firm) found early success with John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street (both released in 1920). Through Keynes Brace met other Bloomsbury writers, and over the next decade he made frequent trips to England to secure the U.S. rights to books by novelists and poets such as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, and George Orwell. Prominent American authors on Harcourt Brace's list included Lewis Mumford, Katherine Anne Porter, Carl Sandburg, Jean Stafford. The firm also established a successful textbook department and ran the Harcourt Brace bookshop in Manhattan. After Alfred Harcourt's retirement in 1942, Brace served as chairman until his retirement in 1948.
Brace and his wife Ida lived in Riverside, Connecticut with their two children. The Brace family was friendly with several writers and artists published by Harcourt Brace, including Paul de Kruif, Christopher Morley, and Rockwell Kent, and with the British publisher Jonathan Cape, whose children lived with the Braces during World War II. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Brace's father Frank joined his son at the publishing firm, while Brace's younger brother Ernest became a novelist in Woodstock, N.Y. An active Columbia alumnus in later life, Brace chaired scholarship fundraising efforts and received the university's Medal of Excellence in 1950.
When Brace died in 1955, T. S. Eliot wrote in a London Times obituary"No American publisher was better known or better liked in the literary world of my generation." After Brace's death, Harcourt Brace (under the names Harcourt Brace & World and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) became more focused on textbooks, and took an increasingly commercial orientation under William Jovanovich's leadership. It nonetheless maintained an interest in literary translation, with the Helen and Kurt Wolff (Pantheon Press founders) imprint. The firm's backlist is now a part of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Papers processed by Will Glovinsky (GSAS 2020), 2017.
Finding aid written by Will Glovinsky (GSAS 2020), July 2017.
No additions are expected
Materials may have been added to the collection since this finding aid was prepared. Contact rbml@columbia.edu for more information.
This series includes Donald Brace's correspondence with authors, professional associates, and family members and friends.
This subseries includes letters from many prominent American writers, but includes no correspondence with the firm's British authors. Correspondence is most extensive with Paul de Kruif, Christopher Morley, Lewis Mumford, and Katherine Anne Porter. Because Brace was intimately acquainted with some of the authors he published, this subseries includes letters and telegrams that bear on personal and professional matters.
This subseries includes letters with fellow officers of Harcourt Brace, other figures in the New York publishing industry, and other non-author business correspondents.
This subseries includes letters from Brace's family, including his brother Ernest and father Frank, and friends who were not Harcourt Brace authors. It also includes correspondence regarding community organizations and several New York and Connecticut clubs of which Brace was a member (including the Century Club), notes of condolence on the passing of his father, correspondence regarding his guardianship of Jonathan Cape's children during World War II, and letters of recommendation or introduction.
This series 1991 includes proofs, business records, catalogs, and photographs related to the firm's publishing operations. The bulk of the material dates from 1919 to 1960.
This susbseries includes proofs of four books published by Harcourt Brace. The three Virginia Woolf titles, all first published in London by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, are
This subseries includes the minutes of incorporation outlining the corporate structure of Harcourt Brace & Howe in 1919 (Howe soon left and the firm was renamed Harcourt, Brace & Co.) as well as minutes of subsequent meetings of the board of directors and stockholders through 1939. The subseries also includes newspaper and magazine clippings about the firm, memoranda, letters of resignation addressed to the board of directors, the 1949 Report of the President to the Annual Meeting of Stockholders, a 1949 sales reports on the textbook division and 1949 Survey of the Textbook Publishing Industry, a 1953 report on the compensation of textbook salespersons, and the preliminary prospectus of Harcourt Brace's initial public offering in 1960.
This subseries contains four Harcourt Brace catalogs: the first announcement from Fall, 1919; Spring, 1923; Spring, 1936; and Spring 1943.
This subseries includes photos of Harcourt Brace's personnel, offices, warehouse, and bookstore.
This series includes materials related to Brace's personal life and his involvement as a student and alumnus of Columbia.
The subseries includes Brace's high school graduation program, newspaper clippings about Donald and Ida Brace, membership booklets of Brace's clubs, obituaries of Frank Brace, two typescripts, a notebook with various memoranda (including several related to Harcourt Brace business in 1947) and addresses, a 1954 diary, an obituary of Donald Brace from the West Winfield Star, and several portraits of Brace and photographs of him with family and friends.
Hung in Vault between aisles 36e and 37w
This subseries contains Donald '04 and Ernest '17 Brace's undergraduate transcripts, Donald's Sigma Chi certificate, a 1904 Sesquicentennial Columbia Calendar, newspaper clippings, 1904 and 1917 Class Day and Commencement programs, photographs of the 1904 Columbia College class and Spectator editors, the 1902 Yearbook of the Junior Class, and the 1904 Class Book. The subseries also includes correspondence and other materials related to Donald Brace's activities as an alumnus and fundraiser for Columbia in the 1940s and '50s and his 1950 Columbia Medal of Excellence.
This series includes the Brace family papers, including deeds, marriage certificates, compositions, and correspondence. The bulk of the material from the nineteenth and early 20th centuries includes family deeds and wills, and the papers of Frank Brace (1852-1936), who worked at the West Winfield Star, the American Press Association, the Frank Presbrey Company (a New York advertising firm), and finally at Harcourt Brace. The series also contains diaries, letters from Ernest to Frank Brace and Ida Brace's correspondence, including letters of condolence on the death of Donald Brace (including one note containing a clipping of the obituary T. S. Eliot wrote for him). The material postdating Donald Brace's decease includes Ida Brace's donation of a personal library to Clark University and an unsuccessful attempt by the University of Wyoming to acquire Donald Brace's papers in 1977.
This series includes privately printed or limited-edition works, mostly published by friends of Donald Brace with the exception of "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years" by Carl Sandburg, which Harcourt Brace published as a promotional addition to Sandburg's biography. Other miscellaneous items include a chapbook by Humbert Wolfe and a book on Henry Winthrop Sargent by J. E. Spingarn. The series also includes a set of Troutbeck Press Leaflets, published by J. E. Spingarn, which include works by Lewis Mumford and W. E. B. Du Bois.