Columbia Library columns (v.4(1954Nov-1955May))

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  v.4,no.3(1955:May): Page 44  



Our Growing Collections
 

ROLAND BAUGHMAN
 

Authors' manuscripts. Mr. Millen Brand (A.B. 1929) has con¬
tinued to place the manuscripts and scarcer publications of his
works in the Department of Special Collections. Mr. Henry
Morton Robinson (A.B. 1923, A.M. 1924) has presented the
manuscripts of his Key to Finnegan's 'Wake, Fantastic Interivi,
and The Perfect Round (his first novel).

De Lima gift. Mrs. Agnes De Lima presented a valuable collection
of manuscripts and typescripts of books and articles by Randolph
Silliman Bourne (A.B. 1912, A.M. 1913), chiefly relating to edu¬
cation and government. The collection includes notebooks, a
diary, and a considerable correspondence.

Eliot's Indian Bible. One of the most important and interesting
books in the annals of American printing was recently presented
to the Columbia Libraries by Mrs. Seth Low Pierrepont, nee Na¬
thalie Elisabeth Chauncey. It is the Bible in the language of the
Massachusetts Bay Indians, known as the "Eliot Indian Bible"
because it was planned and carried to completion by the Rever¬
end John Eliot as a means of Christianizing the New England
natives. The Algonkin Indians, of course, had no written lang¬
uage of their own adequate to express the nuances of the Bible
text, so this is a phonetic rendering—a transliteration using our
alphabet to form Indian words. The New Testament was com¬
pleted first, in 1661, and the Old Testament followed in 1663.
Mrs. Pierrepont's copy, still in its original binding, is an exemplar
of the first complete edition. The book is one of the monuments
of the early colonial press, having been printed in Cambridge by
Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson barely a quarter of a

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  v.4,no.3(1955:May): Page 44