44                                Kenneth A. Lohf

He gained special prominence as special deputy attorney general
in the criminal prosecution of John Y. McKane in 1893-1894 for
flagrant election frauds. As a lawyer he rendered memorable ser¬
vice as counsel to the New York Rapid Transit Commission and
to the Pennsylvania Railroad. His other activities include civil
service reform, Grover Cleveland's campaigns for the presidency,
Seth Low's campaign for .Mayor of Greater New York in 1897,
and his own candidacies for ,Mayor of Brooklyn in 1895 and Mayor
of New York in 1901. The correspondence files, which comprise
the largest segment of this collection of approximately twenty-
five thousand pieces, is rich in information about New York poli¬
tics and social life at the turn of the century. There are letters
from numerous important figures of the period, including Frederic
Bancroft, R. R. Bowker, William Jennings Bryan, Grover Cleve¬
land, Hamlin Garland, Richard Watson Gilder, Edward Everett
Hale, Abram S. Hewitt, John La Farge, Henry Cabot Lodge,
Seth Low, George Foster Peabody, Joseph Pulitzer, John D.
Rockefeller, Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt,
Elihu Root, Carl Schurz, and Booker T. Washington.

Random House gift. A major resource was added to the collec¬
tions when Random House, Inc., through the courtesy of its
Chairman, Mr. Donald S. Klopfer, presented the archival copies
of all its publications dating from 1925 to the present day. The
initial gift, numbering 5,591 volumes, comprises copies of the first
editions published by Random House in their trade, juvenile, and
textbook divisions. This outstanding research resource includes
copies of the writing of many major novelists and poets of the
twentieth century, including W. H. Auden, Paul Bowles, Erskine
Caldwell, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Robert Graves,
Christopher Isherwood, Randall Jarrell, Sinclair Lewis, John
O'Hara, William Saroyan, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Penn
Warren. To maintain the completeness of the Random House
Library, the publisher will continue to send first editions of their
publications as they are issued.