I
 

Three Lively Ladies of
the Overbury Collection

TOLA S. HAVERSTICK
 

N October of 1950, Barnard Librarian Esther Greene wrote
to an alumna of the College as follows:

How I wish I could have been there when your gift arrived to share
in the excitement and enthusiam! This is the first time in Barnard's
history that such a delivery of airmail has been received and the event
was shared bv the staffs of the Library, Buildings and Grounds, and
the Public Relations office. Buildings and Grounds to help us open the
well-packed boxes—the Library to carefully lift up individual pack¬
ages and slip off the newspaper wrapping and Public Relations to
commemorate the event in pictures and newspaper accounts.

The event that Miss Greene, now Barnard Librarian Emeritus,
referred to was the arrival of the initial shipment of books—first
editions of modern British authors—which were donated to the Col¬
lege by the late Bertha Van Riper Overbury of the Class of 1896.

Important as this gift was to Barnard, then in the throes of plan¬
ning for a new and more spacious library, it proved a mere fore¬
taste of what was later to accrue to the College. For, as it turned
out, Mrs. Overbury was in effect clearing her bookshelves to
make way for another collection that had attracted her interest
as early as 1933. The subject: American women authors. The ob¬
ject: the eventual bequest of this collection to Barnard College.
The end result: Barnard's acquisition in 1963 of over nineteen
hundred rare editions of books by American women along with
nearly a thousand related manuscripts.

The books in the Overbury Collection range from a third edi¬
tion (1758) of Several Poems Compiled With a Great Variety of
Wit and Learning___By a Gentlewoman of New England, a vol¬
ume of poems by America's earliest female poet, Anne Bradstreet,