Publishers'
Bindings from the
Louisiana State University Libraries’ Special
Collections
In
2007, the Louisiana State University Libraries signed on
to help the PBO project staff test the feasibility of having
institutions beyond the University of Alabama and University
of Wisconsin-Madison contribute to PBO. In May, 2008, 106
titles drawn from the Libraries’ Special Collections
were successfully added to the PBO database.
The Louisiana
State University Libraries organized its Special
Collections division in 1985 to administer the
rare books, manuscripts, and other specialized research
collections already held by the Libraries. The division's
principal mission is to preserve these collections and
add to them while making them available for use. Housed
in historic Hill
Memorial Library, Special Collections
offers resources for original research in many fields,
ranging from the humanities and social sciences to the
natural sciences, agriculture, aquaculture, the fine
arts, and design.
Foremost among the Libraries’ collections,
the Louisiana
and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections (LLMVC) documents
the history and culture of this region. The largest accumulation
of materials on Louisiana and the lower Mississippi Valley
in existence, LLMVC includes a comprehensive collection
of books, periodicals, maps, prints, pamphlets, Louisiana
state documents, and microfilm of Louisiana
newspapers,
as well as a growing collection of oral histories from
the T.
Harry Williams Center for Oral History.
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More than 5000 manuscript groups encompassing
over 10 million items are preserved in LLMVC. Recognized
as a premier
repository for materials relating to the antebellum plantation,
Civil War, and Reconstruction South, LLMVC includes the
papers of individuals and families, records of plantations,
merchants and financial institutions, and the records of
political, social, and labor organizations. Subject
guides to the manuscripts collections are available, as are some
complete
findings aids.
In addition to its
rich manuscript collections, LLMVC includes more than 200,000
historic photographs, some
of which are
available in the Louisiana
Digital Library. Complementing
these unique materials are more than 120,000 volumes
of books, periodicals, maps, newspapers, and other
published
material.
In addition to LLMVC, Special Collections includes a general
Rare
Book Collection, the E.A.
McIlhenny Natural History Collection, the Codrescu Collection of Outsider Literature,
the William Morton Bowlus Collection of Comic Books, the
Laughlin Collection (science fiction, the occult, and photography)
and a host of smaller collections on topics such as book
arts, chess, poker, crayfish, and Abraham Lincoln.
The
selection of bindings from the LSU Libraries' Special
Collections was drawn primarily
from LLMVC. It features
books published in Louisiana and by Louisiana authors,
as well as those that reflect Louisiana topics, such as
sugar and life in New Orleans. Some works were chosen
from two plantation libraries, which came to LSU from Rosedown
Plantation, a cotton plantation north of Baton Rouge, and
Acadia
Plantation, a sugar plantation south of Baton Rouge.
These reflect the taste and interests of the men, women,
and children living in Louisiana from the ante-bellum period
to the 1930s.
Titles range from Tales
and Novels by Maria
Edgeworth (1835) and Up in Maine: Stories
of Yankee Life Told in Verse by
Holman Day (1900), to Anne Hollingsworth Wharton’s Heirlooms
in Miniatures … with
a Chapter on Miniature Painting (1898)
and Elisha Kent Kane’s The U.S. Grinnell
Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin (1854).
The nation’s ongoing struggle
in the 1880s to come to terms with the Civil War is reflected
in books
such as The Boys of ’61: or, Four Years
of Fighting (1883)
and Drum-beat
of a Nation (1888) by Charles
Carleton Coffin, and Joseph A. Joel’s Rifle
Shots and Bugle Notes (1884), “dedicated to
the ex-soldiers and sailors of the late civil war and
to the People of the United States – One
flag! One people!” Almost half the books (45 of
100 titles) are by or about women. Two titles, Wilson’s American
Ornithology (1878) and Edward Samuels’ Our
Northern and Eastern Birds (1883) represent the
rich trove on natural history bindings found in the E.
A. McIlhenny
Natural History Collection, an area for future additions.
For more information about the LSU Libraries’ Special
Collections, visit our website at http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/.
Access
the PBO database for bindings
for all Louisiana State University Libraries,
Special Collections,
Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections
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