LIBRARY NOTES
Barbara H. Stanton
The Wallet
Wednesday, June 1, 1994
The first use of "wallet" is in Chaucer as a word for a bag that holds provisions and books. A century and a half later, the meaning had expanded to include "a beggar's bag." What better metaphor could there be for a library's fund raising endeavors? Currently the Library is asking that two wallets be provisioned at the same time: for the Annual Appeal and for the 1993-95 Capital Campaign.
For the Annual Appeal, the Library hopes to draw roughly 10 percent of each year's operating budget. Since November, this wallet has been filling up at a gratifying rate. As of the end of April, 545 members/donors have given $72,710, the highest total to date in three years. This bodes well to provide for the approximately 3000 new titles we buy annually.
A separate grant of $30,000 over three years from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund will allow the Library to develop a program exploring the aspects of biography through a series of lectures and round tables with distinguished authors. This program is being developed with Geoffrey Ward, Library member, biographer, and writer of the prize-winning television series, "The Civil War."
The Capital Campaign wallet - to conserve, upgrade, and house our collection - also is filling up in a heart-warming manner. Capital contributions and pledges total nearly $620,000. Of this roughly $250,000 has come from the trustees and $300,000 from members. In addition, the Library has received two much-appreciated $25,000 bequests, one from the estate of Phyllis Goodhart Gordan, a trustee for thirty-five years; the other form the estate of Irene Sharaff. Also much appreciated are a $15,000 grant from the Achelis Foundation for the retrospective conversion of our Children's Collection and a $5,000 grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for conservation and computerization.
We are new turning to a number of other foundations and to Federal and State funding sources. We have just submitted a joint application with the Mercantile Library Association of New York to the National Endowment for the Humanities for on-line cataloguing of the 10,000 works of 19th century fiction in our two collections. If funded, this would be an undertaking of national importance to scholars.
The Library gratefully thanks all those who are helping provision our two equally important wallets (in their present sense of "a pocket-book for holding paper money without folding" originally U.S., 1845). Contributors' names will be listed in full in the next Annual Report.
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