Pearlman Gift

Dr. Ira Weiss Pearlman (M'47) of Bethesda, Maryland, has donated a collection of more than 6,000 volumes encompassing noteworthy collections in the fields of American literature, American history, and the history of medicine as well as books on a wide variety of subjects, all of which remained in his family after the closing of his father's well-known Washington bookshop. The range and strength of the collection is suggested by a review of a few of its many high spots: an advance proof copy of Raymond Chandler's first book, The Big Sleep (1939); the first edition of Sir William Osler's Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892); the apparently unrecorded first edition of N. G. Burgess' Ambrotype Manual (1856); the first edition, in dust jacket, of Arline De Haas' movie-based novel The Jazz Singer (1927); Horatio Storer's pioneering work On Criminal Abortion in America (1860); and Andre Tridon's Psychoanalysis (1919) with the ownership inscription of Sinclair Lewis dated 1920 and placing him at the time in Washington, D.C.