Collecting area: Arts & literature

Mary Lou Panus documented Polish American life in Massachusetts by collecting newspaper clippings, business cards, programs, and Polish language prayer books and prayer cards.

The Panus collection includes photographs of Polish churches in Massachusetts, reflecting the important role religion played in the culture and in various communities. The collection also includes a doll dressed as a nun.

A long-time librarian at UMass Amherst and Brown University, Barbara Parker was an avid collector of rare books. Interested in the history of printing, binding, and book design, and herself a bookbinder, Parker collected widely, from early printing to the Victorian book artists of the Chiswick Press.

The Parker Collection contains an eclectic mix of books to illustrate various aspects of the history of the book through 1900. Intended for hands-on instructional use, the collection includes eight volumes printed prior to 1600, a leaf from the Nuremberg Chronicles, and an assemblage of works by Charles Whittingham and the Chiswick Press. In addition to fine examples of binding and illustration, the collection includes works printed by Elsevier, Gregorium de Gregoris, and Domenico Farri, five by Joseph Barbou, and two each by the Aldine Press, Simon Colin, and John Baskerville.

View the Parker collection in the library’s catalog.

A prominent member of the Massachusetts Agricultural College Class of 1876, George A. Parker (1853-1926) began a career in landscape gardening and the development of parks shortly after graduation. Shortly after the turn of the century, he was appointed Superintendent of Parks in Hartford, Conn., helping to develop Colt Park and a number of smaller properties that turned the city into one of the models for New England. He resigned from his post in January 1926 and died later that year from heart disease.

The Parker Album is a more extensive version of the standard class album for 1876, featuring not only albumen portraits mounted on thick stock of the faculty and students, but almost fifty views of campus. Among these are uncommon images of the major academic buildings, the chapel, and hash house, but also interior and exterior shots of buildings on campus, such as the Botanic Museum and the Durfee greenhouses, and images of the students in military drill. All photographs were taken by John L. Lovell of Amherst.

Daphne Patai joined the faculty of UMass Amherst in 1978, as assistant professor of Brazilian literature, and retired in 2017. She has published more than a dozen books, in a number of separate fields. These books reflect the range of her research interests, in Brazilian literature and culture; feminism and women’s studies;  utopian literature and thought; literary and cultural theory; higher education; and the “culture wars.”  In each of these areas she has produced substantive articles and books.  She has received several major national grants – from the NEH, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Humanities Center, in support of her scholarly work. In each area, the books she has produced have been considered significant contributions (and some have aroused considerable controversy) and have been widely reviewed.

The Daphne Patai Papers features an extensive collection of her research materials and notes, drafts of published works, book reviews, and professional correspondence. Also included is a vast family archive of correspondence with letters from Daphne Patai and family members: Naomi Nir, mother, Raphael Patai, father, and Jennifer Schneider, sister.

For many years, Charles H. Patterson served as head of the Department of Language and Literature at Massachusetts Agricultural College. Born in Smithsonville, Ont., in 1863, Patterson received both a BA (1887) and MA (1893) from Tufts University before launching his teaching career. He joined the faculty at MAC as an assistant professor of English, in 1916, after 13 years at West Virginia University. A former professional actor, he taught courses in modern literature, with a particular interest in drama, and served as department chair for nearly a decade before his sudden death in 1933.

The Patterson Papers contain a small selection of correspondence and notes on English composition and literature as taught at Massachusetts Agricultural College. Most noteworthy, perhaps, is a draft of Patterson’s unpublished book, The Amazing Boucicault.

Simultaneously prolific and tragic, Cesare Pavese was a major figure in 20th century Italian letters. Born in the Piedmont region in 1908 and educated in Turin, Pavese was drawn to English-language literature as a student, writing his thesis on Walt Whitman (1930). Nearly overnight, he became well known as a translator of modern American and British fiction, from Melville, Faulkner, and Steinbeck to James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, and at the same time, he began to publish his own creative work beginning with Lavorare stanca, a book of poetry, in 1936. Although sentenced to three years of internal exile for his anti-fascist sympathies (1938-1941), he continued to write, capped by the appearance of his first two novels in 1941 and 1942. The war’s end saw Pavese blossom into an exceptionally creative period, however even as his renown grew, the effects of depression and a failed love affair with the American actress Constance Dowling led him to suicide in August 1950. Two months before he had been awarded the prestigious Strega Prize.

This collection of first and early editions by Cesare Pavese, donated by Lawrence G. Smith, includes first and early editions by Cesare Pavese, five of which are inscribed: three to Constance Dowling, one to his friend Leone Ginzburg (and later to Dowling), and the fifth to Doris and Harry. Smith also donated dozens of other volumes by and about Pavese to the Library’s general collection.

The McLean Asylum for the Insane was founded in 1811 though a charter granted by the Massachusetts Legislature. The original campus was built around a Charles Bullfinch-designed mansion in what’s now Somerville, Mass. and was fully completed by 1818, when it was officially opened. It became the first hospital in New England dedicated to the treatment of the mentally ill. The Asylum outgrew its original campus in the 1890s and moved to Belmont, Massachusetts in 1895, where it was renamed McLean Hospital. The Hospital is still active today as a division of Massachusetts General Hospital and is a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School.

The eleven stereographs of what was then known as the McLean Asylum for the Insane were taken by Edwin N. Peabody of Salem, Mass. as part of a larger series called “American Views.” They depict the original Somerville campus of McLean Hospital, including the buildings and grounds and the “Ladies’ Park and Billiard Room,” with women patients on the grounds outside.

Perez Peck (1786-1876) and Asa Sisson (1815-1893) of the village of Anthony (Coventry), R.I., were innovative machinists and manufacturers of cotton looms. Active members of the Society of Friends, they were supporters of the antislavery struggle and sent their children to the Friends Boarding School in Providence, R.I.

Although the Peck-Sisson-White family collection spans three families and three generations, the bulk of material is concentrated on the lives of Asa Sisson and his wife Mary Ann (Peck) and their daughter Emily, who married Willis H. White, with an emphasis on their poetry and their time at the Friends Boarding School in Providence, R.I. The family also copied verse from other writers, including works from George Miller (not otherwise identified) extracting Anthony Benezet and “Remarks on encouraging slavery” and a “lamentation over New England” which touches on the execution of early Quakers in Massachusetts Bay.

Marc Peloquin is a freelance feature photographer who has worked for both the New York Times and Yankee Magazine. He has also worked as a medical photographer for David Hubel’s neurobiology research team at Harvard University (1978-1985), and has been an instructor in the School of Journalism at Boston University (1987-1988).

The photographs in the Peloquin Collection are associated with projects undertaken for Yankee Magazine during the 1980s, and many are accompanied by related correspondence and notes. Most images are 35mm color slides, although there are handful of black and white negatives, and the topics of the sessions include the professional wrestler Killer Kowalski, the New England Aquarium, George Plimpton, Walden Pond, and Henry David Thoreau’s hut.

Photographs of individuals from and scenes of Laos taken by Joel Halpern and Sam Pettingill dating from the 1950s. Also includes grant applications, correspondence, and publicity materials related to an exhibition of the photographs.