The Yale Collection of American Literature is pleased to announce the acquisition of The G. Thomas Tanselle Collection of American Imprints. Donated by scholar, bibliographer, and book collector G. Thomas Tanselle, this outstanding and unusual collection brings together the output of more than 50 trade publishing houses operating between 1891 and 1930 in the United States. Publishers including Boni & Liveright, Harcourt, Brace & Howe, Alfred A. Knopf, Stone & Kimball, the Vanguard Press, and others published innovative or socially progressive work not often welcomed by major, well-established firms. Representative authors include Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, and John Reed, as well as the first American publications of European authors such as James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and E.M. Forster.

The main collection consists of 7,750 items, both first editions and later printings, organized to illustrate the development of trends in printing and publishing styles. To further demonstrate changing styles in bookmaking over the years, an additional 4,000 items from other American publishers, dating from the eighteenth century through the end of the twentieth, are included in the collection, as well as 250 items that serve as examples of salesmen’s samples, and a collection of early dust jackets and slipcases. Cataloging and description of the collection is underway; roughly 6,000 of the more than 11,000 titles in the collection have been cataloged to date (Search Orbis: Local Call Number Search – Tanselle). Additional information about the collection (including a list of all major publishers) and details about the Beinecke Library’s plans for fully describing the collection can be found online: Tanselle Collection of American Imprints (CM).

G. Thomas Tanselle, former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and adjunct professor of English at Columbia University, is president of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and co-editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the writings of Herman Melville. He has previously served as president of the Bibliographical Society of America, the Grolier Club, and the Society for Textual Scholarship. His books include Guide to the Study of United States Imprints, Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing, The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers, Literature and Artifacts, Bibliographical Analysis, and most recently Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use.

Image: Detail from The G. Thomas Tanselle Collection of American Imprints bookplate.