Grants and Acquisitions Ann-Christe Young

University of Library has received collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon in New York. The resulting resource will Foundation to fund Phase II of the Early make available to scholars for the first time, American Fiction digitization project. Phase I 1,000 years of Western medieval is a Mellon-funded W eb archive of over 560 iconography organized in a searchable volumes of American prose fiction from 1789 online database. to 1850, and is near completion after three years of work. Phase II will extend the archive Trinity University has received a Higher to 1875 and make available online texts from Education Technology Advancement Grant such writers as Louisa May Alcott, Samuel of $188,886 from the Telecommunications Clemens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Infrastructure Fund Board, a state agency in Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and 90 other Austin, Texas. The grant will allow Trinity’s 19th-century novelists. Elizabeth Huth Coates Library to purchase equipment to enhance Internet access and to Amigos Library Services has been awarded improve distance learning capabilities. a $601,909 National Endowment for the Humanities grant for funding its imaging and University of South Carolina’s Film Library preservation activities through June 2001. has been awarded a film preservation grant Additionally, the grant will enable Amigos to of approximately $16,000 in the third and enhance its coordinating role with the Regional final round of the $1.1 million American Film Alliance for Preservation, a nationwide, Institute (AFI) Challenge Grant series. The cooperative training and resource-sharing awards were made by a five-person panel project among 14 leading preservation and from funds in the 1999 AFI/National conservation centers. Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Challenge Grant raised by AFI. Major contributors to the Texas Tech University’s Southwest grant include Blockbuster, the Film Collection has received a $20,000 grant from Foundation, and NEA. The film library’s the Texas State Library and Archives award will be used to preserve endangered Commission to enter its oral history collection newsreel footage that exists only as nitrate- into the Texas Tech University Library based camera negatives in a collection of computer catalog. The project will create 35mm Fox newsreel outtakes. Specifically, computer bibliographic records for the 2,800- the grant will be used to preserve 32 reels plus oral history interviews in the Southwest depicting the Balkan region from 1924 to Collection’s holding and make those records 1930. The film library was a recipient of a available for public access through the Internet similar grant from AFI in 1997. and the Online Computer Library Center. “When we stared collecting oral histories in the mid-1950s, many of the early pioneers Acquisitions w ere in their 70s and 80s, but they could still remember what it was like to arrive on the The archive of Paul Zimmer, a poet South Plains in a covered wagon,” said Project who directed the poetry programs at the Director Janet Neugebauer. University of Pittsburgh and the University of Iowa presses since the 1960s, has been has received a acquired by the University of Rochester. This $250,000 grant from the Getty Grant Program. The university’s Index of Christian Art will use the grant to support the initial phase of a Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, project to create an online, digitized, searchable C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; catalog of the medieval manuscripts in the e-mail: [email protected].

C&RL News ■ October 1999 I 775 trove, packed in 30 boxes, includes Zimmer’s correspondence by Auden, Stephen Spender, personal and profession papers, especially as E. M. Forster, Gerald Heard, and Edward director of the two university poetry series, Upward; and hundreds of family letters. but also as an important practicing poet. In addition, the archive contains significant Ellen Louise Payson’s professional correspondence from writers including Marvin landscape architecture designs have been Bell, Hayden Carruth, Annie Dillard, John acquired by the University of Maine. Her Engels, Clayton Eshelman, George Garrett, prominence in what is known as the “Golden among others. There is also correspondence Age of American gardens” was acknowledged with Raymond Carver, James Dickey, Ralph in some of the leading publications of her Ellison, Seamus Heaney, Richard Hugo, and time. And as a woman practicing a craft and others. Now writer-in-residence at the profession in what historically had been a University of Montana, male-dominated field, she Zimmer continues to helped redefine the correspond with writers character and qualities that from his home. established the distinctive­ ness of American gardens Jenkins Garrett has and estates. For decades donated his Texas the whereabouts of much Postcard Collection to the of Payson’s original plans, University of Texas at drawings, and other works Arlington (UTA). Garrett, were unknown. It wasn’t a Fort Worth attorney, until after her death in businessman, civic leader 1977 that family members and noted collector of discovered a sizable Texana, acquired the collection of originals postcards over a ten-year stored in a large chest at period. The collection a family home in Portland. includes 13,438 Texas postcards, whose subjects The archives of Yaddo, span the 20th century. the distinguished artists’ Among the images he The Charles S. Payson estate in community in Saratoga acquired, it was difficult Manhasset, New York. Springs, New York, has for him to ch o o se a been acquired the New favorite, but street scenes prior to 1915 give York Public Library. Spencer and Katrina him the most pleasure. Nearly 320 cities and Trask founded Yaddo in 1900, with a vi­ towns are represented in the collection, sion of nurturing the talents of writers, which dates from 1903 to 1996. painters, composers, and other creative art­ ists. Yaddo has hosted thousands of art­ Author Christopher Isherwood’s complete ists, including James Baldwin, Leonard literary archive has been acquired by the Berstein, Elizabeth Bishop, Truman Capote, Huntington Library. Isherwood (1904-84), Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Wil­ an English-born, naturalized U.S. citizen, is liams. Many artists—including Carson the author of plays, screenplays, novels, and McCuller, Katherine Anne Porter, and John nonfiction. The tales in his book The Berlin Cheever—maintained a rich personal cor­ Stones fictionalized his stay in pre-Nazi Berlin respondence with Elizabeth Ames, who from 1929 to 1933, and were adapted as the was Yaddo’s executive director from 1926 play I Am a Camera and as the musical and to 1969; and that correspondence forms a film Cabaret. Among the notable materials significant part of the collection. The col­ are multiple drafts of his works, showing lection also includes the personal archives extensive revisions; notebooks and early of the Trask family; administrative files; and manuscripts (including unpublished poems) documents pertaining to the Lowell Affair, by W. H. Auden, Isherwood’s close friend one of the most notorious moments in and literary collaborator; lengthy files of Yaddo’s history. ■

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