Collections : [Rare Book & Manuscript Library]

Letters written by the Tieck brothers Ludwig Tieck and Christian Friedrich Tieck. Ludwig's seven letters were directed from Dresden and Berlin, 1820-1847, to various people on mainly personal subjects. Friedrich's four letters were sent from Berlin, 1837-1842. One of these was written to a court official regarding an inscription to be put on the bust of General Gneisenau which Tieck had just completed. The others are personal.

Letters written to Dibdin. All of the material is concerned with the execution of drawings, etched and or engraved plates and woodcuts for Dibdin, perhaps in preparation for his BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ANTIQUARIAN AND PICTURESQUE TOUR IN FRANCE AND GERMANY (1821). Chief among the correspondents are the English engravers James Mitan, George Hollis, and Frederick C. Lewis.

Letters of Thomas Hood. Eight of the nine letters in the collection are addressed to J.O. Ward and treat chiefly matters of Hood's health and a governmental pension. None of these is dated. The remaining letter, written from abroad in 1837 to a Doctor Elliot of London, is a lengthy account of Hood's health, travels, literary activities, and experiences of living in Germany and Belgium. The items are pasted on or hinged to versos of leaves in one volume, being faced by typed transcriptions.

A collection of over 1,300 nineteenth-century maps published for use by tourists and cyclists. Approximately seventy-five percent of the maps depict Italian provinces, but Great Britain and other European countries (especially Switzerland and Germany) are also represented. There are a few maps of non-European countries as well. Most of the maps are mounted on linen and many are folded into cardboard cases as issued. The collection also includes a few guidebooks (published in a set with separate maps) and post card views

A collection of Franklin Roosevelt letters, manuscripts, and documents including twelve letters written to his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, of a personal nature, and 24 letters written to a business associate, John B. Shearer. Signed typescript and mimeographed copies of the first three inaugural addresses are present in the collection as well as a valuable document"Biographical Notes for the Cyclopedia of American Biography" completed in the President's holograph on August 21, 1919. The most charming letter is the one written to his grandfather, Warren Delano, on August 23, 1896, when the President was fourteen years old and traveling through Germany. The books in the collection reflect a wide range of interests including religion, poetry, and history, and all are either signed or inscribed, including the seventeen copies of the President's own writings.

Papers pertaining to Heuser's studies of Gerhart J.R. Hauptmann (1862-1946), the German dramatist of social protest and early exponent of realism. There is correspondence both with Hauptmann and with others prominent in literary and academic fields, giving their views on Hauptmann. The correspondence is roughly in two groups; letters written to Heuser during his trip to Germany in 1923; and letters concerning Hauptmann's visit to the United States to deliver the oration at the exercises held at Columbia University in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the death of Goethe, 1932. There are twenty letters from Hauptmann and 59 letters from his wife Margarete. The correspondence with the Hauptmann family continues up to 1957. There are twelve boxes of manuscripts and notes on Hauptmann; and five boxes of mounted clippings and printed extracts. Among the miscellaneous correspondence are letters from H.L. Mencken, Auguste Forel, Albert Schweitzer, Tristram Coffin, and Nicholas Murray Butler. Also, photographs relating to Hauptmann.

The main body of this collection contains letters from Carpenter to Robert W. Herrick (1868-1938), a student of his at Harvard from 1888 to 1890, and later a colleague on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty, 1890-1893. At this time Herrick went to teach at the University of Chicago and Carpenter came to Columbia. Much of this correspondence is concerned with helping his friend Herrick break into the professional writers' world. Items of personal interest are also discussed in these letters to a long-time friend. Three early letters, 1886-1888, are written to his mother from Paris and Berlin where he spent the two years of the Rogers Fellowship upon his graduation from Harvard in 1886. More descriptive than personal, they tell his impressions of these countries and news items of the day. In addition there is an 11-page manuscript by Carpenter entitled "My Impressions of France" written ca. 1888. There is also a scrapbook of clippings from newspapers and magazines of writings by Carpenter from 1892 to 1905. Included are book reviews, literary writings and some items relating to Columbia University.