Meyer Gifts

Mr. and Mrs. Gerard Previn Meyer of Greenvale, New York and their children, Deborah J. and Eugene Meyer, have by their recent gifts greatly enriched the library's holdings of late 19th and 20th century English and American literature. Collectively, the more than 14,600 volumes make up one of the most extensive gifts the library has ever received.

The formation of the collections began in the 1920's, when Gerard Meyer, then a Columbia undergraduate, began frequenting the now legendary bookstores of lower Manhattan. In later years Meyer's longstanding involvement with poetry--as writer, editor, and reviewer--had much to do with the strong literary emphasis of the collections, as did, no doubt, his lengthy career as a teacher at Columbia, Hofstra, Queens College, and elsewhere. Like all true collectors, however, he never restricted the scope of his book acquisitions too narrowly.

Perhaps 9,000 volumes--or about two-thirds of the total--cover very broadly the literary genres of poetry, fiction, drama and criticism, and many of those volumes are first printings, often in their original dust jackets. Among those authors relatively "new" to Georgetown in any substantial first-edition strength are Paul Bowles, James Gould Cozzens, Ford Madox Ford, Howard Nemerov, John O'Hara, James Thurber and Louis Zukofsky. But other first editions fill in gaps in many of the library's established collections of first editions from Kingsley Amis and W. H. Auden to Evelyn Waugh and W. B. Yeats. Presentation and association copies, adding yet a further dimension to the gifts, include such items from Richard Eberhart, Anthony Hecht, Carson McCullers and Francis Warner, among others. Of special interest to Robert Burns scholars will be the forgery, almost certainly by the notorious Dr. S. Millington Miller, of a manuscript draft of Burns' "A Song," first published in 1788.

The remaining volumes in the three gifts (more than 5,600 in all) add significantly to the library's strengths in general works of English and American history, travel, cinema, architecture and interior design, fine arts and the art of the book. These latter include, besides bibliographies and historical monographs, finely-printed volumes from the Peter Pauper, Blue Sky and Georgian presses as well as two genuine rarities: the Oxford University Press first edition of Robert Bridges' The Testament of Beauty (1929, one of 250 copies, in dust jacket) and one of El Paso printer Carl Hertzog's early masterpieces, the 1944 first edition of Tom Lea's A Grizzly from the Coral Sea (one of only 195 copies, in dust jacket).