Rare Books and Manuscripts (Special Collections)

Authors Collection

This collection consists of mostly correspondence with some manuscript materials, printed materials, and photographs. The collection features documents related to 145 authors and spans from 1795 to 1962. Included in the collection are Edmund Blunden, William Cullen Bryant, Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, E.M. Forster, Robert Francis, Robert Frost, John Keats, Archibald MacLeish, Ellsworth Mason, H.L. Mencken, Bertrand Russel, Siegfried Sasson, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats, among others.

Avant-Garde Literature

This collection, which supports the Weingrow Avant-Garde Collection, contains books, journals, manuscripts, and related ephemera, which represent a variety of literary efforts to break with traditional forms and mores.

Poets of the Cities. New York and San Francisco 1950-1965

Blampied Collection

This is a collection of the correspondence of Edmund Blampied, an artist best known for his etchings depicting farming life. Letters are dated from 1927 to 1956.

Kroul Collection

The Hofstra University Collection of Nazi Culture and Propaganda documents the rise of the National Socialist mentality in the Germany of the 1930s. In 1969, Hofstra purchased the core of this important collection, the Henry Kroul/Cragsmoor Collection, from the Kroul family's bookstore in upstate Cragsmoor, New York. Detailed information on this collection can be found here.

Lenore Sandel Children's Literature Collection

The Lenore Sandel Collection of Children's Literature at Hofstra University represents a professional lifetime of collecting by Lenore Sandel, reading educator and Professor Emerita of the School of Education, Hofstra University. Spanning over 100 publishing years, and predominating in the 1940s-1950s, the collection includes such noted children's authors such as Louisa May Alcott, J.M. Barrie, Pearl S. Buck, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Charles Dickens and Laura Lee Hope.

The collection has examples of books which speak to an early 1960s awareness of cultural diversity among ethnic communities, contrasting with a 1945 edition of Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo. There are fine examples of 1960s book illustration by Kazue Mizamura, The Big Wave (1960), and Marianne Yamaguchi, The Golden Crane (1963), as well as an interesting wartime edition of Mother Goose and Mother Goose Victory House (1943).

Mother Goose and Mother Goose Victory House bookcover

Literary Collections

This collection contains samples of 20th-century English literature. It contains books, manuscripts, periodical articles, and reviews related to modern English writers. Included in the collections are George Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton, the Powys Family, the Bloomsbury Group, and the Georgian Poets.

P.G. Wodehouse. Letter to a Mrs Just, October 24, 1962 at Remsenberg, N.Y.

Newspaper Collection

The bulk of this collection is comprised of clippings of illustrations (largely political cartoons and reportorial sketches) that appeared in Harper's Weekly from March 1860 through August 1913. Many of these illustrations were done by Thomas Nast, who worked for the newspaper from 1862 until late 1886. Nast's political cartoons were extremely influential and one of them was even said to have reelected Abraham Lincoln in 1864. He is often referred to as the "Father of American Caricature."

Also included in the collection are newspapers, news clippings, magazines, and illustrated journal covers and advertisements. Many of the aforementioned are from local Long Island source materials.

A Thomas Nast Cartoon in Harper's Weekly, 1872: The caption reads "PUTTING HIS HEAD IN THE BRITISH LION'S MOUTH"

Thomas Nast Cartoon
Harper's Weekly, 1872

Nila Banton Smith Historical Collection in Reading

This collection contains primers, readers, textbooks, and teachers' manuals related to the teaching of reading from the colonial times to the present. It forms a complement to the instructional materials on reading held in the Curriculum Materials Center (CMC) in the Joan and Donald E. Axinn Library. The collection was brought together by H. Alan Robinson; major contributors include Lenore Sandel, Melanie Freese, Vincent Faorone, and Julius Chodorow.

The Goose Quill. A Third Grade Language Book

Pinter Collection

The Pinter Collection is comprised of clippings, correspondence, theatrical programs, scripts, and interviews including documents and audiovisual materials. The items in the collection relate mostly to Harold Pinter's work as a playwright and screenwriter. The bulk of the collection include scripts and programs from Pinter's plays that were performed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Powys Collection

The Powys brothers, John Cowper, Theodore and Llewelyn, were authors. Their sister Marian Powys Grey was also an author, but never gained as much fame as her brothers. The Powys brothers and sister published from the 1890s to the 1950s. Their works included poetry, novels, biography and philosophy. John wrote the novels Wolf Solent, Owen Glendower, etc.; Theodore wrote allegorical novels of good and evil, life and death, in a rural village; Llewelyn wrote stories and impressions of African life. The collection consists of correspondence and manuscript documents.

Private Press Collection

These books are issued or reissued by private presses. Many are handset, beautifully bound and illustrated, and printed in limited editions. Private presses represented in Special Collections include the early William Morris' Kelmscott Press as well as the following presses: Black Sparrow Press, Golden Cockerel Press, Heritage Press, Hogarth Press, Limited Editions Club, Nonesuch Press, Overbrook Press and Thomas Byrd Mosher.

William Morris. Pre-Raffaelite Ballads. NY: A.Wessels Co, 1900

The Weingrow Avant-Garde Art and Literature Collection

The Weingrow Collection of Avant-Garde is the gift of Muriel and Howard L. Weingrow. This collection consists of some 4,000 original illustrated books, manifestos, periodicals, catalogs, posters, prints, manuscripts, photographs, film, and records, which represent the Dada, Surrealist, and Expressionist movements. Also included are samples of many other movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as selections from the second Avant-Garde movement of the late 1960s, and the movement known as the New Realism.

George Grosz. Ecce Homo. Berlin: Malik-verlag, c.1923

Utopian Communities Collection

This collection is composed of materials relating to several Utopian communities, with an emphasis on those which were based within New York State – Oneida, Quakers, and Shakers.

Catalogue of Medicinal Plants and Vegetable Medicines, Prepared in the United Society [Shakers], New Lebanon, NY

RARE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS