University of Virginia Library

Manuscripts—Two Years of Rapid Growth

The introduction to our last report (for the years 1945-1947)
was said by some to be too brief. It was indeed shorter than the introductions
to previous reports, but perhaps we may be pardoned

for departing from our usual modesty to point out that the textual
description of new acquisitions was of necessity much longer than
in past years. That report listed 426 newly acquired collections comprising
more than half a million manuscripts. The present report
describes as adequately as available space permits the million and a
quarter manuscripts contained in the 541 new collections acquired
between July 1947 and June 1949.

To the 447 generous friends (listed in an appendix to this
report) who have given manuscripts, or funds for their acquisition,
we can only say, as we did to the 320 donors listed in our last
report, that their talent is not being buried. Every collection received
during these two years (all gifts and every deposit except two
or three temporarily restricted by the depositor) has been processed
and made available to investigators within a few weeks of its
reception. The handling of such a flood of materials has taxed our
small staff, and detailed immediate indexing is impossible for most
collections, though all are catalogued upon reception, with as many
index tracings furnished as time permits. Careful arrangement
makes up in part for cataloguing shortcomings. Each new donation
or deposit is sacredly preserved as a separate collection, and the
collections are being used by an ever increasing number of local
and visiting researchers.

In the World Almanac, in which this Library appeared for the
first time in 1947 (in the distinguished company of Texas and
Duke) as one of the three Southern libraries among the two dozen
principal libraries in America, our manuscript collection is described
as particularly strong in the papers of Virginia's public men. Papers
of recent public men (Carter Glass, for example, and Claude Swanson,
Miles Poindexter, and Edward R. Stettinius) have been actively
sought by the University. Since these recent collections are often
voluminous, the suspicion might well arise that emphasis has been
put on twentieth century quantity to the neglect of the rarer materials
of earlier periods. An analysis of the pages that follow should
provide a sufficient answer to this question. Of the 541 new collections
reported, 12 fall in the years before 1699, 114 between 1700
and 1799, 339 between 1800 and 1899, 193 between 1900 and 1949.
Many of the larger collections (about a third of the total), it will be
noted, fall in two or more of these periods.

A word as to geographical spread and subject matter. Like
Mr. T. S. Eliot's patriotism, our interests and, we feel, our responsibility
extend outwards in concentric circles. Hence the continuing
emphasis in this year's collecting on the University, on Charlottesville
and Albemarle County, and on Virginia. Beyond Virginia (and
indeed within the State) we are inclined to steer regional materials
to the most appropriate depository, but we also welcome for preservation
here manuscripts and other source materials of broad
general interest—political, institutional, social, literary, religious,
economic, educational and bibliographical—with emphasis on
American history, especially of the southeastern states. Among such
European materials as have been obtained, chief interest has been
in British manuscripts related to our colonial beginnings and to our
own later history, or in literary manuscripts of general interest to
the inheritors of Anglo-American culture.