A Lavish Literary Gift

First edition of Doyle's The Valley of Fear (1914)

Over the past twenty-five years a series of generous gifts and a few judicious purchases have combined to endow the library's Special Collections Division with a relatively strong collection in the fields of nineteenth and twentieth century English and American literature. The most recent boost for these collections has recently arrived in the large collection of modern literary first editions formed by the late Gerard Previn Meyer, in all numbering almost 3,000 volumes, the gift of his children, Eugene Meyer and Deborah Meyer DeWan.

While the collection includes works by more than a hundred different authors, there are, nonetheless, areas of focus: Nearly 700 volumes document Meyer's lasting interest in a "short list" of eighteen writers, evenly divided by nationality between Britons and Americans. The two largest sub-collections are devoted to two writers not previously held by Georgetown in any considerable strength at all: D. H. Lawrence and Robert Louis Stevenson. In each case, more than 100 titles by and about the writer go far beyond the two dozen titles by each already held in the rare book stacks.

Besides Lawrence and Stevenson, other British writers whose works Meyer accumulated in significant numbers include W. H. Auden, Max Beerbohm, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Spender, and Virginia Woolf, including in the latter case a fine copy of her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). The American authors most extensively collected by Meyer, and thus best represented here, include Erskine Caldwell, e. e. cummings, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and William Carlos Williams.

Some of the finest individual items in the collection, however, are by other authors such as Herman Melville, represented by a first edition of Typee (1846); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the first edition of The Valley of Fear (1914), in dust jacket; James Joyce, the first American edition of Dubliners (1916); and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose eleven-volume collected works of 1886 are embellished with an 1852 autograph fair copy of his memorable final stanza of the "The Day is Done":

The Night shall be filled with music
And the cares, that infest the Day,
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.