Not Tantamount To Rarity: Fifty Years of Collecting

Children's Literature
Popular Literature & Printed Materials
19th Century Literature - Early 20th Century Literature in Southern California
Twentieth-Century Literature (General)

Children's Literature

Olive Percival's Bookplate The Children's Book Collection (CBC) has been established through the acquisition of several private collections, notably those of Elvah Karshner, Bernard M. Meeks, Olive Percival, May and George Shiers, and d'Alté Welch. The strength of the collection resides chiefly in English and American publications before 1840.

The Curious Adventures of a Little White Mouse; or, A Bad Boy Changed, in a Very Comical Manner, into a Good Boy. London: Printed and sold by all the booksellers in town and country, ca.1780. CBC PZ 6 C926 1780
This is an irresistible story of a troublesome boy (from a dysfunctional family) who, because of his misbehavior, is transformed into a mouse & relocated in London. There he must fend for himself; eventually he learns the manners & attitudes appropriate to civilized behavior &, finally, becomes the king of his realm. The woodcuts were quite obviously made for this story; no other copy is listed in the online English Short Title Catalogue. [Note by the late James Davis]

The Curious Adventures of a Little White Mouse; or, A Bad Boy Changed, in a Very Comical Manner, into a Good Boy. London: Printed for W. Lane, at the Minerva, [ca.1790]. CBC PZ 6 C926 1790
The story was reissued about ten years later, by the Minerva Press, a firm specializing in multi-volume gothick novels. It's interesting to note that although the text is pretty much a line-for-line reprint, with the original woodcut illustrations, the long f has been abandoned. Our collection of children's books from the Minerva Press is very likely the largest anywhere. [Note by the late James Davis. These books were favorite discoveries of his as curator of rare books.]

[Amanda Mathews Chase, ed.] From the Old Pueblo and Other Tales. Los Angeles, 1902. PS 647 C2F9 cop.2
This contains a work by Los Angeles writer and collector Olive Percival, "The Story of Suey Ho Yee." It is not noted in the biography cited in the references. Neither is her story which appears in Chase's The Heart of an Orphan (New York: Desmond FitzGerald, Inc., c1912). There is no copy of From the Old Pueblo noted in OCLC.
Percival also published poetry, a travel book on Mexico, and articles on gardening and houses, including one entitled "The Mexican Patio": "a garden of tropical plants, with fountains .... Enchanting glimpses of these little inner gardens were caught from the street." A short story was also included in Cuentos de California, a book of the California Arts and Crafts period illustrated by Ralph F. Mocine.
She collected children's books because they reminded her of her childhood. One of her distinctive bookplates depicted her Tudor house in South Pasadena, the Down-hyl Claim, which she shared with her mother. When Olive Percival died in 1945, bookseller Ernest Dawson acquired the books and UCLA Librarian Lawrence Clark Powell bought them, the cornerstone of what is now one of the world's great collections of children's literature.

Popular Literature & Printed Materials
Reading matter which reflects popular culture and the history and marketing of printing has been collected. There is a collection of Tauchnitz editions, the first paperback line, which was sold at European railroad stations, followed by yellowback thrillers, dime novels, pulp magazines, and the paperback. The department has a collection of Little Blue Books published by Haldeman-Julius (ca. 1929 - 1940).
Pulp magazine collections represent most popular genres: detective, mystery, romance, science fiction, and western. Other popular literature includes American almanacs (ca. 1730 - 1880), English chapbooks (ca. 1775 - 1850), American hymnals (ca. 1760 - 1870), English and American broadside ballads (ca. 1780 - 1890), American songsters (ca. 1820 - 1900), with an emphasis on California. Additional popular materials, such as postcards pertaining to California and Los Angeles, have been collected by the Department.

Raymond Chandler, 1888 - 1959. Playback. La Jolla, Calif., 1958. Typescript with holograph corrections. 317 leaves total [manuscript leaf numbered 6 shown. Scanned image, enlarged]. Also shown, first American edition: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.
UCLA Special Collections began early collections of popular literature, such as mysteries, eventually focusing primarily on writers and settings in Los Angeles. Chandler's work was among the first to be collected. His crime fiction contains descriptions of Los Angeles beloved by fellow writers such as Christopher Isherwood, as well as the reading public. His method for maintaining action at regular intervals was to tear his paper in half. A page from the manuscript of Playback, his last novel, shows this technique. It also shows a specific Los Angeles setting, in this case Union Station, built at the edge of "the old Pueblo."

Western Publishing & Novelty Co. New Union Station, Los Angeles, California. No. at head of title: LA.25; code: 9A - H637. Los Angeles, early 1940s? In: Collection of California postcards, 1890 - . Collection 1351. Box 13
The station, built 1934 - 1939 by John and Donald B. Parkinson, architects, and others, is an example of a late use of Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival themes combined with the Streamline Moderne style of the times. The card notes: "Typically California, beautiful and spacious - ultra modern ... in a setting that typifies the glamours of the southland, where arriving visitors will see orange trees, olive and pepper trees, palms and beautiful flowers." It could be a mission described by Mrs. Jackson.

Susan Braudy. Who Killed Sal Mineo? New York: Wyndham Books, c1982. SCB 142790
Mysteries, particularly those written about or set in Los Angeles, are a strong part of the Department's holdings in popular literature, beginning with Raymond Chandler. This work set in Los Angeles, where actor Sal Mineo was murdered, has ties to the motion picture and gay and lesbian communities of the city.

Francis Ray. Only Hers. New York, NY: Kensington Pub. Corp., c1996.

Shown is this and two other African American romance novels. Those published by Brandon House in Los Angeles are also collected as local imprints.

Nineteenth-Century Literature / Early Twentieth Century Literature in Southern California

Sadleir Collection Bookplate
The strength of the literary collections of the nineteenth century period is British, anchored in the Michael Sadleir Collection which the university acquired en bloc in 1951. The collection is housed in the Bradford A. Booth Memorial Room and includes most significant novelists of the period.
Book collections support the study of primarily British and American literature of this period. There are collections of books and papers of British writers, for example, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Lawrence Durrell and D. H. Lawrence, and American writers, for example, Haniel Long, Edouard Roditi, and Tennessee Williams. Gilbert A. Harrison's collection of Gertrude Stein is supplemented with works of writers and other members of her circle in Paris.
The department has papers and editions of writers whose broad ranges include California and Los Angeles, for example: Mary Austin, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Kenneth Rexroth, and Carolyn See. There are also papers and editions of European and American writers settling in or around Los Angeles, many of whose later works interpret Los Angeles, for example: Norman Cousins, Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Edward James, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Franz Werfel. Books and papers of writers associated with California and Los Angeles include those writers who helped to create as well as comment on the culture of 20th century Los Angeles: bookman and librarian Lawrence Clark Powell and journalists and writers such as Remi A. Nadeau, W.W. Robinson, Paul Jordan Smith, Lee Shippey, John Weaver, and Matt Weinstock.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1797 - 1851. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London, Printed for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818. PR 5397 F85
This is a sought after book by one of the earliest feminist writers. UCLA has several editions, one through the generosity of the Bradford Booth family.

Mary Hunter Austin, 1868 - 1934. The Land of Little Rain. Boston, New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
Early California writers were associated with northern California and San Francisco and didn't interpret Los Angeles. At the turn of the century there were Los Angeles writers such as Margaret Collier Graham and others associated with Pasadena and the Arts and Crafts period.
Mary Austin's prose gives a spiritual dimension to the local color of authors such as Collier Graham: "Blue lupine sprung up as though pieces of the sky had fallen." This work about the Owens Valley begins: "East away from the Sierra, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile." Another copy of the book has corrections in her own hand.
The area would later include the Japanese War Relocation center at Manzanar.

Twentieth-Century Literature (General)
Henry Miller, 1891- . Tropic of Cancer. Preface by Anaïs Nin. Paris: Obelisk Press, [1934]. Author's autographed presentation copy. Special Collections SRLF
Henry Miller, 1891- . Tropic of Cancer. With an introd. by Karl Shapiro. New York: Grove Press, c.1961. Special Collections SRLF
This was one of the first American works written under the influence of English novelist and essayist D. H. Lawrence. Both Miller and Nin wrote works about Lawrence. Tropic of Cancer was not available in the U.S. and at the bottom of the wrappers is the statement: Not to be sold in Great Britain or the United States.
Lawrence's work also begins a chain of influence at the UCLA Library. After library school, Lawrence Clark Powell was first hired by bookseller Jake Zeitlin and Powell's first task was to catalog and sell the Lawrence manuscripts remaining with his widow Frieda.
Lawrence's works and others broke the censorship barriers in the 1960s when reprinted by Barney Rossett's Grove Press. Miller's was published with a plain cover and a twenty five page introduction by a respected poet of the time, who discusses Miller's work in relation to Lawrence and James Joyce. Miller's work also altered censorship after several trials around the country, some in Los Angeles in which Jake Zeitlin and Lawrence Clark Powell, among many others, testified on the book's and author's behalf.

C. P. Cavafy. Translations from the Poems of Kavaphis of Alexandria [by] Lawrence Durrell. No date. 1 preliminary leaf, 11 leaves. Typescript. Shown is the title page typed by Durrell and two poems: "Afternoon Sun" and "Their Beginning" [scanned copies and scanned copy, enlarged]. In: Durrell, Lawrence. Papers. 1934 - 1966. Collection 637. Box 2 f.17

These translations were found "jotted down in an old notebook" and typed by Durrell in Rhodes in 1946. These versions differ greatly from some of the same titles published later in his The Alexandria Quartet (late 1950s). Durrell has written that the poems of Cavafy were the greatest love poems since those of the Greek Anthology.
He wrote of his own translations: "I once earned a mild protest from [George] Seferis for running some of my rather idiosyncratic versions of Cavafy into the "Alexandria Quartet"; he felt I had taken liberties. So I had. But he accepted my defense -- namely that Cavafy was not "real," he was simply a character in a fiction in whose name I had borrowed some poems from a real man." The poem "Their Beginning" was a particular favorite of the English poet W. H. Auden, who wrote a preface to translations of Cavafy by Rae Dalven published in 1961.

LGBT Studies References Literature References

Introduction | Special Collections Home Page | UCLA Library | UCLA Home Page

© 2001 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.