Knickerbocker Literature in the Benjamin Collections 2 7

were gone, that William Evarts Benjamin should have approached
President Nicholas iMurray Butler with a plan for establishing at
Columbia University a collection of books and collateral material
built about the life and times of his father. The nucleus of the col¬
lection was made up of Park Benjamin's own books, some of them
association copies autographed by such longtime friends as Long¬
fellow, Lowell, and Holmes. But around them were gathered
other books, manuscripts, and periodicals covering the period in
New York from the mid-1830's to the mid-i86o's, the period of
which Park Benjamin stands as symbol. Some 2,500 items were
brought together, and a place planned for them where they could
be used to best advantage by readers and scholars alike.

W. E. Benjamin died in 1940. In 1944 his son and daughter,
Henry Rogers Benjamin and Beatrice Cartwright, made a further
gift to the Columbia Libraries, of books and manuscripts which
had belonged to their father. They also provided a fund which
would allow the University to supplement their father's books by
further purchases and which would provide appropriate housing
for both "The Park Benjamin Collection" and "The AMUiam
Evarts Benjamin Collection." The continuing generosit}' of mem¬
bers of the family, (particularly of Henry Rogers Benjamin, who
in 1950 was appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the
first chairman of the Development Program for the Columbia
University Libraries and who has subsequently served as an active
and interested member of the Council of the Friends of the
Library) has made it possible for these interlocking memorials to
become the center for an assemblage of books, periodicals, manu¬
scripts, and pictures that throw light upon the later Knicker¬
bocker period in New York. As the collections grow, they will
provide the student, the general reader, and the lover of rare books
and manuscripts with a unique opportunity to know more of those
years which not only produced Park Benjamin and Irving and
Cooper and Bryant, but which saw also much of the most intense
literary activity of Melville, Whitman, and Poe.