Kohler Collection of British Popular Poetry

I thought the information below might be interesting to people concerned
with 19th century British publisher's cloth bindings.

    The General Library of the University of California at Davis has
    received a Higher Education Act, Title II-C grant of $306,025 to
    process the Kohler Collection of British Popular Poetry.

    The Kohler Collection, assembled by the British Bookseller C.C.
    Kohler, was acquired by UC Davis in 1983.  It includes some 10,000
    titles of popular, non-canonical poetry from the years 1789-1918,
    the great majority of which are bound as issued.

    The poets represented in it concerned themselves with almost all of
    the themes associated with the British social and cultural history
    of the period--themes such as India and Empire, orientalism,
    medievalism and chivalry, childhood, the family and the cult of
    domesticity, women as wives and as "angels in the house", and
    nature, viewed both scientifically and romantically.

    There is a substantial amount of verse celebrating, often
    sentimentally and nostalgically, rural and village life. There are
    numerous historical narratives and romances, some set in classical
    or exotic locales, and others illustrative of an emerging popular
    historiography and mythology of the nation's past. Throughout the
    collection there appears poetry, frequently didactic and morally
    improving, intended for children. The sense of local identities and
    sense of place is striking in the many poets whose subject was the
    character and folklore of their area, and who chose to write in one
    of the many regional dialects then still surviving. The religious
    poetry of the collection includes numerous examples of devotion and
    piety, but has also material related to evangelicalism,
    Tractarianism, and renascent Anglo-Catholicism.

    The collection includes work of some 6,500 individual authors, some
    twenty percent of whom are women. Also noteworthy is a genre of
    verse by working class poets.

    Many of the titles in the Kohler Collection are presently difficult
    or impossible to locate in other sources. About forty percent of the
    10,000 titles cannot be found in either OCLC or RLIN.

    During 1994/95, the UC Davis General Library will catalog and do
    preservation microfilming for the entire collection. Catalog records
    will appear in both OCLC and RLIN, and film copies of works in the
    collection will be available through interlibrary loan.

    For additional information contact:

        Clinton Howard
        Associate University Librarian for
        Collections and Technical Services
        General Library
        University of California, Davis
        Davis, California 95616
        916-752-2110
        Fax: 916-752-6899
        cnhoward [at] ucdavis__edu

Charlotte

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                   Conservation DistList Instance 8:8
                  Distributed: Tuesday, July 19, 1994
                        Message Id: cdl-8-8-013
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