The Irving Levy Collection

One subject the Library did not buy in the nineteenth century was current American literature. (In fairness, we must note that hardly anyone bought Thoreau or Melville.) The Library has been able, however, to take a long stride towards rectifying the omissions of a century past with the purchase of the Irving Levy Collection, comprising more than 900 titles by 14 major American writers of the nineteenth century: William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe (alas! no Tamerlane), Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

With the exceptions of the works of Poe and Whitman, the collection contains fairly comprehensive holdings of first editions by each author, and the works of Cooper, Hawthorne, Irving, Longfellow, and Twain are especially well represented. The collection was assembled over a period of some 40 years, and, if it lacks some of the great rarities, it makes generous amends in its substantial number of English and Continental first editions and its rich selection of textual and binding variants, at times surpassing the numbers of these enumerated by Jacob Blanck in his monumental Bibliography of American Literature.