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About Rare Books and Manuscripts

This pastoral image of "Costume di Tivoli" is from a book of engravings by Bartolomeo Pinelli Romano Raccolta di Cinquanta Costumi Pittoreschi from 1809.

The oldest institutional collection of rare books in Los Angeles, Rare Books and Manuscripts has acquired holdings in a surprisingly wide range of subjects, ranging from the J. Gregg Layne Collection of western history to the Thacher Tracts collection of American pamphlets 
(1745-1827). 

American Literature Collection

This juvenile magazine Tip Top Weekly no. 449 was published on November 19, 1904. This illustration is for "Frank Merriwell's Jeopardy or The Wolves of the Woods" by Burt L. Standish.

Numbering some 65,000 volumes, this author-based collection of North American writing emphasizes the period from 1850 to 1975. The collection contains Hamlin Garland's (1860-1940) library and Papers, including his voluminous correspondence with the leading literary figures of his period, travel notebooks, and much family material. A younger contemporary and acquaintance of Mark Twain, Garland became known for writing in realistic fashion about the upper Midwest when it was still frontierland a hundred years ago. Later his interest turned to the Rockies and the Far West; and he spent his last decade in Los Angeles, lecturing at USC, where he was welcomed as the "Dean of American Letters."  

The American Literature Collection also contains files of Ambrose Bierce's seldom-seen journalism. Bierce is usually known for his Devil's Dictionary and for the much-anthologized "Incident at Owl's Creek Bridge" and other Civil War stories. Most of his other writing was for various papers and magazines; USC's collection of this material is unusually good. The Collection also includes letters and articles written by his younger contemporary Jack London, including many of his largely forgotten books. 

Another area of strength is the Lawrence Lipton Collection of recordings, magazines, and ephemera from Los Angeles's answer to the Beat Poetry movement in San Francisco, Lipton having been the guru and catalyst of the Venice "coffee-house scene." 

USC holds the sole archive of the "Poets Garden," a group of women writers and reformers in Los Angeles, who gathered for many years (1930s-40s) to talk about literary and spiritual matters under the guidance of Ruth LePrade. 

Another writer represented is Rupert Hughes: screenwriter, essayist and popular magazine journalist (1930s-50s), and uncle of Howard Hughes. The American Literature Collection contains his research files, drafts and typescripts. For a further discussion of Garland, Hughes, and The Poets Garden, see Writers of the Golden State. 

The Kenneth Rexroth Collection features the San Francisco poet and fringe Beat figure, who in later years turned to Eastern religion and translated Japanese/Chinese poetry. It is for this later period that USC's collection includes manuscripts, correspondence, and personal 
files. Among local literary figures, Charles Bukowski is represented by typescripts, galleys, and extensive correspondence for his work in the 1970s and early 80s. 

The Hoose Collection

Professor Ralph Tyler Flewelling, as director of philosophy at USC and with the support of the Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Foundation, began developing the Hoose Library of Philosophy during the mid-1920’s. From the first, his plans embraced the acquisition of books possessing a combination of scholarly and bibliophilic qualities; and by the time it was installed in impressive new quarters in Mudd Memorial Hall in 1930, the library contained a modest group of such volumes. Comprising approximately 2,500 volumes, they include manuscripts, incunabula, and such works as Hobbe’s Leviathan (1651), and Locke’s Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690). 

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are more systematically served. The Gomperz library of philosophy, formed in Vienna by the philosopher-scholars Theodor and Heinrich Gomperz during the latter part of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth, was  widely regarded as the finest of its kind then in private hands. Shortly before World War II, again with the support of the Mudd Foundation, the University purchased a major part of the collection, including some 3,500 volumes of original and early editions of European philosophy from about 1700 to 1850. Amounting to less than a third of the entire acquisition, these so-called "modern" books nevertheless constitute by far the most homogeneous part -- and by reason of their generally high degree of scarcity and importance, the most valuable. Here may be found not only the earliest collected editions of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and the encyclopoedias from Moreri through Bayle and Chauffepié to the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des arts et des métieres, but also such distinguished individual works as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, and Wealth of Nations, 1776; Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754); Helvétius’ De l’esprit (1758); and Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740) -- the latter with marginal corrections in the hand of the author. Here too are all but one (The Inaugural Dissertation, 1770) of the books of Immanuel Kant in first edition, including his three great Critiques and Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (1754); as well as all, or virtually all, of the works of the prolific Fichte, Schelling, Wolf, and Schopenhauer in their original forms. A remarkable group of books by the early mechanist Julien Offray de la Mettrie, most of them rare and some extremely rare, provides introduction to the troubled world of modern materialism.