Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Libraries of Famous Women

Karen Schneider over at Free Range Librarian notes our efforts in the LibraryThing "I See Dead People['s Books]" group, and makes a very good point: "There is one interesting omission … the list of prospective authors is all male. Do we know the library of Eleanor Roosevelt, or Gertrude Stein?"

She's right, and it's something I'd very much like to rectify. We can, for various practical purposes, only add those libraries that have a) been compiled and b) are at least fairly widely accessible to allow the teamwork necessary for projects like this, but surely there must be a something out there. I'm going to be doing a little digging to see whose libraries I can find, but I want to throw it out to you all and see if there are any that spring to any of your inquiring and wide-ranging minds. As we find them, I'll start compiling a list. Feel free to submit in comments, by email, or over on the LT talk page.

[Update: The first discovery, by LT member andyl: Bibliothèque de la reine Marie-Antoinette au Petit Trianon; and the second, by MMcM: The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.]