The Walter de la Mare Collection at Temple University in Philadelphia has more than
500 volumes and 1,000 letters.
General versus SpecificSome children’s collections are within huge umbrella organisations, such as those in the
research library at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), while others are
focused. The UCLA collection has more than 200 books published by John Newbery or his
successors, and a large number of nineteenth-century children’s books.
The Clement Moore Collection at the State University of New York at Albany has 200
volumes of twentieth-century English-language editions of the poem, ‘A visit From St
Nicholas’.
The May Massee Collection at Emporia State University in Kansas holds all the books
she edited for both Doubleday, Page and Company from 1922 to 1932 and for Viking
Press for the next three decades. By the end of her career, she had been involved with
the publishing of nine books which received the Newbery Award and another four
Caldecott Medalist titles. In her first year as an editor she published Charles B.Falls’s
ABC Book (1923). Later she published her own translation of Erich Kästner’s Emil and
the Detectives (1929). In addition to books in the collection, there are manuscripts,
illustrations and correspondence accompanying a number of them.
Baylor University in Waco, Texas has the original manuscript with illustrations by
William McCready for ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning, and 150 different
editions of the poem. An exhibition of its Pied Piper materials was held in 1969, and an
accompanying catalogue was produced.
Genre and FormatThe John M. Shaw Collection of Poetry at Florida State University in Tallahassee holds
more than 25,000 volumes. A keyword index provides access to the 200,000 poems.
The Parker Collection of Early Children’s Books in Birmingham (England) holds 105
games from the seventeenth century on, in addition to more than 10,000 books.
Small and Alternative Press books covering the years since 1970 are collected by the
Co-operative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin in Madison;
by 1994 it contained over 1,600 books from American and Canadian publishers. Harry
B.Hudson gave his boys’ series books and dime novels to the University of South Florida.
Girls’ series books are a speciality of the Hess Collection at the University of Minnesota.
While the Library of Congress holds the largest number of foreign children’s books in
the USA, in more than sixty languages, many other research libraries also have rich
collections. For example, Butler Library at Columbia University has non-English books
published as early as the seventeenth century. The University of New Mexico, Arizona
State University and El Paso Public Library in Texas have strong Spanish and bilingual
English-Spanish book collections.
Publishing companies, too, place their business papers at educational institutions.
For example, Indiana University at Bloomington has the papers of the Bobbs-Merrill
Company covering the years 1885 to 1957, while the University of California at Berkeley
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