The Manuscripts Division is pleased to announce that Peter C. Bunnell, McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art Emeritus, is donating most of his extensive papers to the Princeton University Library. They comprise about 110 archival boxes of materials documenting his long and distinguished career devoted to the study of modern photography. The papers include his correspondence with modern photographers, historians of photography, curators, publishers, and members of the Princeton University community. His correspondents include Ansel Adams and members of his family, Ruth Bernhard (whose papers are already in the Manuscripts Division), Alvin Langdon Coburn, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Beaumont Newhall, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Jerry N. Uelsmann, and others; extensive research files of printed materials and additional correspondence relating to the history of photography and particular exhibitions, much of it organized alphabetically by names of photographers; drafts and corrected typescripts for his many books, exhibition catalogs, journal articles, and other scholarly publications; lectures, lecture notes, and other teaching files; and photography by Bunnell or pertaining to him. He has also donated files for two organizations that he chaired: The Society for Photographic Education (SPE), organized in 1963, when art departments were first offering courses on photography; and the Friends of Photography, founded in 1967 by Ansel Adams and others.

Bunnell was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and was an undergraduate at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied with Minor White. He earned graduate degrees from Ohio University (1961) and Yale University (1965). He served as Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, then in 1972 joined the faculty of Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology. At Princeton, Bunnell became the first McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art. He also served as director of the Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM), 1973-78; and acting director, 1998-2000. For 30 years, Bunnell was Curator of Photography at PUAM, where he was also responsible for acquiring the Minor White Archive and the Clarence H. White Collection. He has had a long association with the journal Aperture, established in 1952 by photographers by Ansel Adams, Melton Ferris, Dorothea Lange, Ernest Louie, Barbara Morgan, Beaumont Newhall, Nancy Newhall, Dody Warren, and Minor White. He also taught at New York University, Dartmouth College, and Yale University, and has lectured widely. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.

Bunnell is the author of the monograph Minor White: The Eye That Shapes (1989) and he edited Photography at Princeton (1998). Bunnell has published two volumes of his collected essays: Degrees of Guidance: Essays on Twentieth-Century American Photography (1993) and Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography (2006). He edited A Photographic Vision: Pictorial Photography, 1889-1923 (1980) and Edward Weston on Photography (1983); and Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952–1976 (2012). He was the coeditor of two Arno Press reprint series The Literature of Photography and The Sources of Modern Photography.

The Bunnell Papers will be available for research after processing. Please note: The papers donated to the Library are complemented by his recent gift to the Princeton University Art Museum of more than 30 years of his correspondence and other materials relating to its Minor White and Clarence H. White archival collections. See announcement. For more information, contact Don. C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, at dcskemer@princeton.edu

Peter C. Bunnell

Bound volumes of diaries and journals are one of most common genres in the Manuscripts Division. They are often consulted for research value as first-person, day-by-day narratives of travel, exploration, warfare, politics, academic life, and other activities. Particularly interesting are those that document historical events or trace the movement of people and ideas across geographical and cultural boundaries. A simple search of Voyager for the keywords “diaries” or “journals” and format “manuscript” identifies more than 400 individually cataloged manuscript diaries and journals in the Manuscripts Division. American and British examples are most numerous, but other areas are represented as well, generally dating from the 17th century almost to the present. In addition, a search of the Manuscripts Division’s finding aids for the keyword “diaries” or “journals” produces over 1500 hits relating to collections of personal and family papers that contain one or more diaries and journals, and occasionally constitute the entire collection.

Holdings of diaries and journals continue to grow by gift and purchase. The most significant recent addition was a series of three diaries kept by Walter Dundas Bathurst (1859-1940), which he kept as an officer of the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC), 1883-86 (C1544). These diaries relate to African colonization efforts of King Leopold II of the Belgians (r. 1865-1909) in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and to the related activities of the British journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904). Other recent acquisitions include a diary kept in 1739-40 by the French aristocrat Abraham-Guy de Migieu, who traveled through Italy with the writer Charles des Brosses (1709-77). Around 1754, additional Italian travel journals by other people (1623-64) were bound with De Migieu’s manuscript (C0938, no. 839). Reproduced below is a two-page opening from one of these diaries, containing an antiquarian’s transcriptions of ancient Roman inscriptions. Another recent 18th-century acquisition is Antonio Josef de Vera’s Spanish-language narrative a voyage to the Holy Land in 1780, Breve description de los Santos lugares de Jerusalén (C0938, no. 840).

More recent diaries and journals include a series of 22 diaries kept 1822-65 by Emily Treslove of London, who was married to Thomas Crosby Treslove (a barrister in the Queen’s Counsel and a member of Lincoln’s Inn), which provide personal glimpses into London society as well as travedls on the continent (C1544). The Treslove diaries and related papers were the gift of Bruce C. Willsie, Class of 1986. Of considerable interest for intellectual history is the recently acquired reading journal of Lidiia Andreevna, Countess Rostopchina (1838-1915), a chronological journal kept 1867-73 by a highly literate Russian woman of her readings in Russian, French, and even some English literature (C0938, no. 748). For assistance, contact Public Services, at rbsc@princeton.edu

C0938, no. 839

The Manuscripts Division is pleased to announce that Professor Theodore Ziolkowski has donated his Hermann Hesse Collection (C1618) to the Library, along with additional literary correspondence. From the time that Ziolkowski joined the Princeton faculty in 1964 as a professor of German, he has been a leading interpreter of the work of German-born author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), Nobel Laureate in Literature (1946), who became a Swiss citizen in 1923. Ziolkowski published several books on Hesse, beginning with The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure (1965), as well as dozens of other books and editions on German and comparative literature. In 1969, he was appointed Class of 1900 Professor of German and Comparative Literatures, and also served as dean of the Graduate School from 1979 to 1992. Professor Ziolkowski went to emeritus status in 2001, but has remained very active in the world of scholarship.

The Hermann Hesse Collection includes eight boxes of materials on the posthumous reception of Hesse in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Hesse was propelled to the ranks of popular icon and prophet of alienated youth with the help of English translations of celebrated works originally published in German: Demian (1923); Steppenwolf (1929); The Glass Bead Game (1943), first published in English translation in 1949 as Magister ludi; and Siddhartha (1951). Professor Ziolkowski’s collection helps trace Hesse’s American reception in everything from serious scholarly publications to the Hessomania of mass-market magazines and comics, calendars, posters, and even naming opportunities in popular culture. Some of these printed materials are annotated and accompanied by additional letters. The collection also included several autograph letters received from Hermann Hesse and his son Heiner Hesse; cards and photographs of Hesse; and Ziolkowski’s own literary and publishing files related to publications about Hesse. There is also additional literary correspondence between Ziolkowski and leading German authors, editors, and scholars. Correspondents include Heinrich Böll (and Böll family members), Friedrich Christian Delius, Hilde Domin, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Max Frisch, Günter Grass, Thomas H. Mandl, Ijoma Mangold, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Paul Schallück, Margot Scharpenberg, and Johannes Urzidil, as well as a file of correspondence with Lebanese poet and translator Fuad Rifka, who translated Hesse into Arabic.

As soon as the Ziolkowski Collection has been organized and described, it will be available for study in the reading room of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Additional Ziolkowski papers are found in University Archives (AC402). For more information about holdings of the Manuscripts Division, Public Services at rbsc@princeton.edu

Hermann Hesse. Undated sepia-tone photograph from the Ziolkowski Collection.