Our Growing Collections
 

ROLAND BAUGHMAN
 

IN AN announcement made at the Spring meeting of the
Friends of the Columbia Libraries, the University voiced its
decision to establish a full-fledged graphic arts program. It
will naturally take some time for the envisaged program to reach
its fullest stage, but already the announcement has resulted in
several gifts of unusual and highly useful graphic arts materials.

Mention was made in the last issue of Columbia library
COLUMNS of Mr. Frank Altschul's gift of fifty-three hard-to-find
items printed at his Overbrook Press. Early in the summer the
Sun Chemical Corporation of Long Island City presented a
valuable collection covering the first hundred years in the develop¬
ment of the lithographic process since its invention by Alois
Senefelder early in the 19th century. The principal part of the
gift consists of about a thousand pictorial lithographs, selected to
show various applications and techniques, and including a number
of very scarce and costly prints. Not only does the collection
contain some of the earliest lithographs ever made; it carries the
process well into the present, culminating in a full set of Joseph
Pennell's superb Panama Canal construction scenes issued in 1912.
The gift also includes nearly two hundred volumes, mainly
works on the technical aspects of lithography. Among the many
scarce editions and treatises dealing with the early days of the craft
are two copies of the first printing of Senefelder's original ex¬
position of his process, published in Munich in 1818, as well as the
first edition of the English translation, issued by Ackerman in
London in 1819.

The collection was originally formed by the officials of the
Fuchs & Lang Manufacturing Corporation, makers of lithographic
inks, in order to document the development of the craft. For

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