University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: September 22, 2005

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

The UB Libraries are about to offer the public an opportunity to see some of the greatest treasures in its magnificent Rare Books Collection, an assemblage of priceless books and other material dating back to the 15th century.

"The Angel and the Child" by Arthur J. Gaskin, from "Stories & Fairy Tales" (1893) by Hans Christian Andersen.
THOMAS B. LOCKWOOD COLLECTION

"Rare Books: An Exhibition," curated by John Edens, assistant director of the libraries for technical services and interim director of the Archives, will be held in the Special Collections Research Room, 420 Capen Hall, North Campus, from Sept. 30 through Oct. 21. It will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays.

This exhibit will mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of UB's Thomas B. Lockwood Memorial Library, which was dedicated in 1935, and the anniversary of the receipt of the Thomas Lockwood Collection, which forms a major component of the UB Rare Books Collection. It also will celebrate the completion of a lengthy Archives project that cataloged the Rare Books Collection in the Libraries' Special Collections.

Among the items to be shown from the 20,000-volume Rare Books Collection are the first portfolios of Shakespeare plays; first editions of major works by Milton, Hawthorne, Darwin and Whitman; and rare editions of work by Livy and Publius Papinius (a favorite of the despotic Roman Emperor Domitian).

Also featured will be a collection of exquisite book bindings; rare children's books and editions illustrated by the leading illustrators of the 19th and early 20th centuries; a first edition of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Hound of the Baskervilles"; and first editions by Charlotte Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and the Shelleys, including a first edition of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," published in 1818.

The exhibit, which will employ a reproduction of an 1897 watercolor, "A Great God's Angel," as its principal image, will feature five graphic panels combining images and text devoted to authors and donors of the work featured: Lockwood; Julian Park; private presses, 1891-1935; the Romantic Movement in Britain; and classical authors.

The Lockwood Collection includes the donor's extensive personal collection of rare British and American literature and other landmarks in the history of letters and printing. Lockwood's gift included an endowment that has supported the purchase of materials for the Special Collections for 70 years.

"At the time the Lockwood Collection was donated," says Edens, "Charles Abbott, then the university's library director, called it 'a princely gift,' and 'the nucleus, around which may grow a new library, dedicated to learning and to the culture that it seeks to inspire.'"

Items to be exhibited from the Lockwood Collection alone include many that have not been seen in decades, says Edens. Among them are the first four collected editions of the works of William Shakespeare. Known as the first four folios, they were published between 1623 and 1685. Also on display will be the extremely rare first edition of Edmund Spencer's "The Faerie Queen" (1590), first editions of Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" (1621), Milton's "Paradise Lost" (1667), "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman and a signed copy of the first edition of Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter."

Selections from Lockwood's extensive holdings of the output of British presses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries will be presented as well, including what Edens calls "the spectacular English Bible from Doves Press, published in 1903."

From other segments of the Special Collections will come rare first editions of Greek and Roman authors—many issued by the foremost printers of the 16th century—and, from the 2005 gift of Richard V. and Susan B. Lee, a first edition of Darwin's "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication," published in 1868.

The original Lockwood Library building was designed by noted Buffalo architect E.B. Green, with whom Lockwood worked closely, and was built on what is now UB's South Campus with a $500,000 donation from Lockwood and his wife, Marion Birge Lockwood.

"In 1979, the library collection was moved to the new North Campus," says Edens, "and the original building renamed Abbott Hall for Charles Abbott. Between 1983 and 1985, it underwent a $5.5 million renovation and enlargement, and today houses the university's Health Sciences Library."

Photographs of the original Lockwood Library and the process of moving it to the North Campus can be found in an Archives online exhibit about the 25th anniversary of the dedication of Lockwood Memorial Library in 2004 at http:// ublib.buffalo.edu/archives/exhibit.html.