sept13_b.indd


September 2013 449 C&RL News

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, 
C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; 
e-mail: agalloway@ala.org.

Vassar College has received a grant from  
alumna Georgette Bennett to digitize Vassar’s 
collection of letters, manuscripts, and photo-
graphs relating to Albert Einstein—including 
130 letters exchanged between Einstein and 
his friend Otto Nathan, executor of the sci-
entist’s estate and a member of the college’s 
economics faculty in the early 1940s. Open 
online access to the documents expected to 
begin in early 2014. 

A c q u i s i t i o n s

Archives of cartoonist Al Jaffee, best known  
for his long affiliation with Mad magazine, 
have been acquired by Columbia University 
Libraries/Information Services’ Rare Book 
and Manuscript Library. Jaffee’s career at 
Mad spanned 58 years; during this time he 
created the features “Snappy Answers to Stu-
pid Questions” and, most notably, the Mad 
Fold-In, which debuted in 1964. Jaffee was 
in the first graduating class of the LaGuar-
dia-founded High School of Music and Art, 
where he met his long-time colleagues Will 
Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, and Al Feldstein. 
Jaffee began his cartooning career working 
for Stan Lee on comic books such as Patsy 
Walker and Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal, and his 
Tall Tales comic strip appeared in the New 
York Herald Tribune for six years. He was 
also involved with other Kurtzman humor 
magazines such as Trump and Humbug. 
The archives will arrive in several stages; 
the first phase will include artwork for Es-
quire and Playboy magazines, notebooks of 
ideas for Humbug and Ziggy Pig and Silly 
Seal, press clippings, tracings for cartoons in 

The Moshiach Times, fan mail, photocopies 
of strips never offered for publication, bio-
graphical materials used for Mary-Lou Weis-
man’s biography Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, photo-
graphs, and more.

The archive of the McSweeney’s publishing 
company has been acquired by the Harry 
Ransom Center at the University of Texas-
Austin. Founded in 1998 by Dave Eggers, 
McSweeney’s is considered one of the most 
influential literary journals and publishing 
houses of its time. McSweeney’s publishes 
books, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly 
Concern, The Believer magazine, the food 
journal Lucky Peach, and the DVD-journal 
Wholphin. The bulk of the archive is com-
posed of manuscripts of books, essays, and 
short stories; correspondence drawn from 
the publishing house’s work with hundreds 
of writers; and award-winning design mate-
rials. A current digital copy of all files relat-
ing to McSweeney’s work will be included, 
as well as first editions of all its publica-
tions. In the early days of the journal, Eg-
gers corresponded extensively with such 
notable writers as David Foster Wallace, 
Rick Moody, Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, 
Heidi Julavits, William Vollmann, Lydia Da-
vis, Nick Hornby, and Sarah Vowell, among 
hundreds of others. Their correspondence is 
included in the archive. 

Archives from the inventor of the Moog syn-
thesizer have found a home at Cornell Uni-
versity Library, thanks to a donation from his 
widow, Ileana Grams-Moog. Robert A. Moog 
is the founder of Moog Music, the world’s 
leading manufacturer of analog synthesiz-
ers, and the inventor of the legendary Moog 
synthesizer. His personal archive of notes, 
plans, drawings, recordings, and more will 
be housed in the Library’s Division of Rare 
and Manuscript Collections. 

G r a n t s  a n d  A c q u i s i t i o n sAnn-Christe Galloway