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This
collection comprises book
reviews from the morgue of a
newspaper clipping service,
for the period 1927-1970. An
older general business,
Hemstreet Press Clippings,
had been purchased by
Estelle L. Boyd in 1927, and
moved out of New York City
to Walton, New York. In
1929, the emphasis was
changed to book reviews and
the name became Literary
Clipping Service, offering
subscriptions to authors. If
an author did not subscribe,
or let his subscription
lapse, his reviews were
nonetheless filed
systematically, creating the
morgue. At its peak, some
3000 authors subscribed, and
over time clippings were
filed for more than 18,500
different authors. The
current subscription section
was sold off in 1960, by
Mrs. Boyd's daughter Dorothy
Brandt, who continued to add
new items to the
non-subscription morgue
under the name Reviews on
File. Mrs. Brandt's
estimate of her holdings in
1990 was over 5 million
clippings. However, in her
80's, Mrs. Brandt made quite
systematic efforts, with
some success, to sell off
her clippings on more
prominent authors to
libraries and individual
scholars. In 1996, Thomas
Cooper Library acquired the
remainder of the morgue
(some 50 boxes).
The clippings
were stored folded in
recycled billing envelopes,
packed in small candy or
shoe boxes, and sorted only
by author, not date or work
reviewed. By the time of
transfer, storage conditions
hand led to much of this
packing material becoming
moldy, and many individual
clippings are extremely
brittle; in 2004, following
review, a decision was made
to preserve and re-house only
the author-collections that
related to the library’s
other special collections or
to recurrent teaching or
research interests. It is
worth noting also that the
clippings for several major
authors for which the
library is well-known
(including Faulkner,
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and
Rawlings) either went
directly to the author or
had been successfully sold
off by Mrs. Brandt before
the library acquired the
balance of the morgue.
The finding
list indicates the sixty
authors now represented in
the collection. Areas of
interest include: literature
(Nelson Algren, Willa Cather,
James Dickey, Robert Lowell,
Anne Tyler, Robert Penn
Warren); drama (Eugene
O’Neill, Thornton Wilder);
science fiction and fantasy
(Algernon Blackwood, Ray
Bradbury, Lord Dunsany,
Robert A. Heinlein, J. C.
Powys); African-American
writers (Arna Bontemps,
W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale
Hurston, Martin Luther King,
LeRoi Jones); and political
figures (Presidents
Eisenhower, Nixon,
Roosevelt, and Truman–mostly
reviews of memoirs or
biographies). For some
authors, the clippings
relate only to a single work
or a limited time period
(nearly all the Dickey
clippings, for instance,
relate to Deliverance).
The collections have been
boxed alphabetically by
author, with two boxes for
the most widely reviewed
authors (Churchill,
Maugham), and with two or
even three authors grouped
in a single box with an
internal divider where the
clippings were fewer.
PGS
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