GLEETT - University of Washington

EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY' S
SLAVIC COLLECTIONS:
Era of A.C.Coolidqe, coOt.
1895 Harrassowitz purchase, cont.
Significant number of relatively early imprints:
21% (495 titles) published 1850 or before
6.7% (155 titles) published 1800 or before
2.6% (60 titles) published 1700 or before
.69% (16 titles) published 1600 or before
The collection contains many bibliographies, descriptions
of manuscripts and manuscript collections; editions of
primary source materials; works of historiopraphy and
ancillary historical disciplines; travellers' and e:p1orers'
accounts; editions of belles-lettres, and critical and historical
literary studies; ethiiography, folklore; general and specialized
historical studies; descriptive and comparative lir.luistic
studies, including grammars, dictionaries, and other fundamental
reference works; studies of the arts; Biblical and liturgical
texts---all in all enough to form the nucleus of a serious
research collection overnight.
Coolidge donated it outright. It arrived at Harvard in two
shipments, registered in the handwritten accessions records:
volumes pamphlets maps Total
July 1, 1895: 1664 264 42 1970
Oct.29, 1895 415 180 -- 595
2079 444 42 2565
In the decades that followed, Coolidge was personally responsible
for the addition of many thousands of volumes to the Harvard
Slavic collections. Some examples:
In 1919 he acquired 4,000 volumes on the history of Central and
Eastern Europe while in Vienna working for the american
Commission to Negotiate Peace.
In 1921-22 while in Russia with the American Relief Administration,
he acquired over 3000 volumes (30 cases' worth) not
counting 10 cases of books for the Harvard Law School. In
this he worked closely with one of his students, Frank
Colder, who was acquiring a splendid coll.nction of materials
on World War I and its aftermath for the Hoover Institution,
whose first Director he was.
He was largely responsible for increasing the Slavic coljections
at Harvard from Ca. 2000 Volumes in 1890 to over 30,000 volumes
by the time of his death in 1928.
His work and influence were far broader and deeper than what
is sketched above. For further discussion, see R.P. Byrnes,
Awakening American Eduatjon to the World; The Role of.. .Coolidgc
1866-1928 (Metre Dame. Univ. of Notre Dame rrens, C 1982).
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