FAU Library Special Collection Weiner Spirit of America Collection

Intro Description

In his appraisal of Marvin Weiner’s collection, David Szewczyk of the Philadelphia Rare Books & Manuscripts Company describes Mr. Weiner of Philadelphia as “a dedicated, knowledgeable, and savvy collector for more than sixty-five years” whose focus in collecting has been the concept of freedom and liberty as developed from Greco-Roman and Hebrew times to the mid 20^th century. Mr. Szewczyk reports that the Weiner American Revolution pamphlets and books constitute the largest in private hands and rank among the top ten such collections in the United States, comparable with the collections of the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress, the Clements Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Items from the collection have been exhibited at the University of Pennsylvania, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and the National Constitution Center.

Historical Note

Research value of the collection was evaluated by Dr. John Van Hook of the University of Florida Libraries. His observations include:

“Most of the books owned by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans were imported ones. The question to explore is whether the collection accurately represents those imports that a gentleman of culture would have owned. We can do that in a number of ways, including comparing holdings to those of the American Antiquarian Society or Thomas Jefferson. For example, the collection includes Doctor Johnson's dictionary, but not in its original London, 1747 edition: it has the Dublin, 1775 ed, just as most Americans would have done in their day.

“The 2000 French Revolutionary pamphlets and broadsides in the Weiner Collection represent a large percentage of what is available. UF records 2810 pamphlets in a finding aid published in 1971, while Princeton's printed catalog lists 2,365 pamphlets and a further 293 periodicals from the same period. Meanwhile, FSU published a bibliography that covers its roughly 6,000 imprints from the combined Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.”

In the Weiner's Cherry Hill home, the 13,000 volume collection dating from 1501 to the mid-20th century occupied five rooms, the contents of over 300 linear feet of shelving being “rare,” and nearly 650 linear feet secondary scholarly references or general works. A sampling of volumes from the collection were exhibited at the press conference announcing the donation to FAU in June 2006, and at the dedication of the Wimbish Wing in March 2007.

The collection’s condition was evaluated by conservator Robert Muens, formerly of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, who confirmed the observation that Mr. Weiner collected for content, not appearance. Many bindings show the signs of hundreds of years of use, but text blocks are almost universally complete, including title pages and end papers.

Transferred to FAU in Spring, 2006, more than three quarters of the Marvin & Sybil Weiner Spirit of America Collection of Colonial Imprints remains in storage as of Fall, 2007. A total of sixteen pallets of books were shipped from Cherry Hill, NJ, to Florida, where they are warehoused in climate controlled storage, and delivered to the Boca campus one at a time for processing. Staff of the Special Collections & Archives Department are presently unpacking these pallets and producing an inventory database. Special Collections will include monthly updates of the inventory on this Web page until the collection is fully cataloged, and can be found both in FAU’s library catalog and in WorldCat.