Another update on some Legacy Libraries folks have added recently or are working on now:

Since I wrote last we’ve had one library completion, that of author Norman Mailer. Mailer’s library is at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, and we were able to bring it into LibraryThing by importing the MARC records. Thanks to jburlinson for adding in the records that didn’t import and for sprucing up Mailer’s profile page.

Mailer’s 851-title library contained a huge number of his own books in various editions and translations: check out his author cloud! Volunteer jburlinson commented on the author cloud “I think he would have been pleased with how it looks.”

If you have any information on additional Mailer books, &c., please let us know in the discussion thread.

Another author’s library in the works is that of Arthur Ransome, being cataloged by LTer cynfelyn. Ransom’s catalog so far includes more than 700 identified titles, with a bunch more still to be added.

My favorite collection from Ransome’s library so far is Lakes & Pirates, a list he drew up for children who enjoyed his books and were looking for other reading material.

Know of other Ransome books? Tell us in the discussion thread.

Legacy Libraries volunteer ColmGuerin is hard at work on the library of Galileo Galilei. Nearly 300 titles have been entered so far, with more to come.

Galileo’s library was collected by his student Vincenzo Viviani, and bequeathed by Viviani to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. The books are now among the collections of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, the National Central Library in Florence. You can get a sense of the books entered so far from Galileo’s tag cloud.

As always, we’d appreciate any assistance or additional information on this library: jump into the Talk thread!

Another recent addition is the library of the Marquis de Sade, being cataloged by lolawalser from a transcription of a 1776 inventory of de Sade’s chateau, La Coste. So far a total of 295 titles have been identified and added, including a fair number of works by Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Hobbes, and Voltaire.

Speaking of Voltaire, his library still has many books to be added, so if you’re feeling adventurous (and/or have pretty good knowledge of French), join us! There’s a discussion thread where we’re working out the details, and a wiki page where you can claim a section and add some books.

We’ve started work on the library of Julia Child, a good chunk of which is now in the collections of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. To help out with this one, please join us in the Talk thread and we’ll get you set up with some books to catalog (much easier to manage than Voltaire’s, to be sure).

Finally, on the Libraries of Early America front, I’ve been working on adding the books of Francis Dana (1743-1811), a Massachusetts lawyer and diplomat. Dana’s library is pretty neat in that it’s drawn from not only some lists of books, but also an impressive collection of receipts and order lists which document his book purchases, loans, and other things quite nicely. I’ve been a little busy what with moving and all, but I hope to finish Dana’s library off before too much longer.

How can I help? We’re always looking for volunteers to help catalog Legacy Libraries. Come join the Legacy Libraries group: introduce yourself, tell us some authors or other historical figures you’re interested in, and we’ll come up with a good Legacy project that would benefit from your help. If you know of somebody important we’re missing, let us know: if we can add their library, we will!

Four recently-completed Legacy Libraries to report!

Frederick Douglass – working from a National Park Service inventory of the books at Douglass’ home, Cedar Hill, a small group of volunteers flash-mob-cataloged more than 1,300 books to Douglass’ LT catalog. Thanks to amandafrench, benjclark, Elizabelle, goddesspt2, JBD1, thornton37184, waitingtoderail, and wendellkate for their kind assistance! Douglass acquired an impressive collection of government documents, which make up a pretty hefty portion of his library. Member meburste holds the most books in common with Douglass so far, at 47.

Harry Houdini – A large portion of Harry Houdini’s library (which was huge!) is now at the Library of Congress, and we’ve now added that to LibraryThing, along with a few other books in the collections of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Other significant portions of Houdini’s library are not yet accounted for in LT, but we’re hopeful that other information might allow us to fill in some more segments of his very interesting and extensive collection. I’m sure we’ll never be able to add another library so heavily focused on magic and spiritualism! One of the top members with whom Houdini holds books in common? Jackie Gleason.

Carson McCullers – The library of Carson McCullers is now at the Harry Ransom Center, which also houses McCullers’ papers. While it’s not quite clear that McCullers herself collected all the different editions and translations of her own works included in her library at the HRC (check out the author cloud), and some of the books in the collection almost certainly belonged instead to other family members, we thought it was still very much worth adding. Not surprisingly, McCullers shares quite a few books with fellow Legacy subjects, including E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, and Ernest Hemingway.

Douglass, Houdini, and McCullers don’t share a single book in common, but Douglass and Houdini share ten books, while Douglass and McCullers share two titles (the Bible and Les Misérables). Further combination work and additions could change this, of course.

Just as I was getting this blog post ready to go, I realized that I never blogged about the completion of Evelyn Waugh’s LT catalog back in December (shame on me!). This was accomplished by member jburlinson, who added the titles from July 2010 through the end of 2011.

I also added the small, three-book library of Godbert and Sarah Godbertson yesterday afternoon: this is the first joint husband/wife probate inventory in the Plymouth (MA) Colony records, taken in October 1633 after both Godbert and Sarah died in a smallpox epidemic.

Other projects continue chugging along! We were really hoping to be able to work on adding the Titanic libraries (there were two, one for first-class passengers and one for second-class passengers), but we’ve had no luck in finding a catalog of the books. If you can help us out there, we’d be very grateful.

I know for sure that there are more Houdini books out there, and it’s very likely that more Douglass and McCullers books remain to be added, so if anyone knows of others for these as for any of the Legacy Libraries, please do let me know.

NB: Both the Houdini and McCullers libraries were added through a new tool we’ve got that allows for the direct import of MARC records (once they’re in they still need some cleanup to make them display correctly, and often require the addition of copy-specific notes, &c., but this tool certainly speeds along the process). So, if you know of a possible Legacy Library that’s out there in some library catalog, let me know about it and if we can add it directly using this method, we’ll certainly do so! Some more from the Harry Ransom Center are already in the pipeline, for example.

Come chat about this Legacy Library update here.