Word: houghtons
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...great part of the Houghton collection lies in the vast, rambling stacks which run underneath the building, with an annex under Lamont, reached by a long echoing corridor. The stack area is air conditioned, with the air being washed, filtered, and run between electrically charged plates, to prevent disintegration of the books. The temperature is kept constant, and the walls are fireproof. In fact the library is so carefully constructed that the only possible danger is that at some time a water pipe might leak and inundate the stacks. To guard against this remote possibility, the library has a number...
...another are Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev (Houghton's collection of works of Russian authors is the strongest outside of the Soviet Union, and, says William H. Bond, Curator of Manuscripts, "May be the best in the world for all we know...
...most important, and certainly the best known, of all the collections at Houghton is the William B. Wisdom collection of virtually all the literary remains of Thomas Wolfe. This collection occupies rows and rows of the black boxes, all fielled with manuscripts pencilled in Wolfe's illegible scrawl, or typed drafts with autograph corrections. In the boxes are the complete manuscripts of three of Wolfe's four published novels (Look Homeward, Angel is in ledger form), all the short stories, most of the letters, and the tremendous amount of unpublished miscellaneous material which he had written along...
...Homeward, Angel at a public auction, to raise funds for the relief of Jewish refugees (a bit of irony for Wolfe had an avowed tendency toward anti-Semitism.) The book was sold under the stipulation that it was to go to a university, and the buyer gave it to Houghton...
When the Wolfe papers arrived at Houghton, they came in eleven large packing cases, with an aggregate weight of two tons. It took the best part of a year to get them organized and catalouged, and now they remain in the black boxes on the stack shelf, a little yellowing around the corners, perhaps destined to be the raw material from which another great work may in time be carved...