sept08c.indd


Ann-Christe Galloway G r a n t s  a n d  A c q u i s i t i o n s  

Columbia University Libraries will receive 
$371,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon 
Foundation for a two­year project to pre­
serve 820 recordings containing almost 
1,200 hours of sound. The audiotapes are 
part of the Oral History Research Offi ce’s 
collection of recorded interviews and 
memoirs, and have been selected because 
they are among the most important and the 
most threatened by imminent deterioration 
due to the inherent fragility of the media. 
Among the recordings are oral histories of 
politically and socially active fi gures, such 
as Nikita Khrushchev, Walter Lippmann, 
George Meaney, Clarence Mitchell, Nel­
son Rockefeller, Gloria Steinem, Robert 
F. Wagner; historians and literary fig­
ures, such as James Baldwin, Jacques 
Barzun, Isaiah Berlin, William Buckley, 
Robert Heilbronner, Irving Howe, Anita 
Loos, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Isaac Bashevis 
Singer, C. Vann Woodward; and members 
of the arts and entertainment community, 
such as Judith Anderson, Gene Autry, Frank 
Capra, Joseph Cotton, Joel McCrea, Otto 
Preminger, Richard Rogers, Virgil Thomson, 
Mies van der Rohe, and King Vidor. This 
project will enable the libraries not only to 
preserve these specific recordings, but also 
to build up its audio digitization program to 
address future recordings after the project 
ends. Columbia will be working with an 
outside vendor to digitize the recordings. 

Acquisitions 

The letters of Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize­
winning poet who began writing in the 1950s 
as one of the writers of the Beat Generation, 
have been acquired by the University of Cali­

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, 
C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; 
e-mail: agalloway@ala.org. 

fornia (UC)­San Diego. Snyder, 78, has been 
named the 2008 recipient of the $100,000 
Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the highest prize 
given in the fi eld of poetry. A Zen Buddhist 
who has been described as the Henry David 
Thoreau of the Beat Movement, Snyder’s 
papers reflect his love of the wilderness, 
which can be traced back to his childhood 
in the Pacific Northwest and, subsequently, 
through his travels in Japan, China, and 
India. Snyder has published 16 books of 
poetry and prose, and received the Pulitzer 
Prize for poetry for his book Turtle Island 
(1974) and an American Book Award for Axe 
Handles (1983). The bulk of his papers are 
housed at the UC­Davis Library. 

A major gift from the family of the late 
Morton J. “Morty” Savada—the complete 
inventory of his Manhattan record store, Re­
cords Revisited, including more than 200,000 
78­rpm records, along with a related print col­
lection of catalogs, discographies, and other 
materials—has been given to the Syracuse 
University Library’s Belfer Audio Laboratory 
and Archive. With the addition of the Savada 
Collection, Belfer’s holdings now total more 
than 400,000 78­rpm recordings—second in 
size only to the collections of the Library of 
Congress. The Savada Collection, valued at 
just over $1 million, is a treasure trove of 
popular music, including unique and hard­
to­find genres. It is strongest in big band 
and jazz, but also represents a wide variety 
of other musical genres, including coun­
try, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway, 
Hawaiian, and Latin. It also contains spoken­
word, comedy and broadcast recordings, 
as well as V­disks, which were distributed 
as entertainment for the U.S. Armed Forces 
during World War II. In addition to the 
popular labels of the day—such as Colum­
bia, Decca, and Victor—Savada collected 
rare and specialized recordings. Dates of 
recordings in the collection range from 1895 
to the 1950s. 

C&RL News September 2008  500 

mailto:agalloway@ala.org