A "Dukedom Large Enough": The de Grummond Collection.

Figure 1.

Cover of Randolph Caldecott’s Queen of Hearts London; Routledge, 1881.

Figure 2.

Alphabet cards (ca. 1820).

Reflecting on the loss of his dukedom, the dispossessed and philosophical Prospero in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” says, “My library was dukedom large enough.” That must be the conviction of many a book collector whose holdings are properties of sentimental attachment and small universes of knowledge. Many of the major research libraries of the world—the Bodleian at Oxford; the Huntington in San Marino, California; the Houghton at Harvard; and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.—were once in private hands.

Two of the major children’s literature research collections in the United States—the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota and the de Grummond Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi—were the creation of indomitable collectors whose holdings helped to preserve original materials and rare books and to shape the nature of scholarship in the field. Irvin Kerlan, M.D., donated his collection of award-winning books and manuscripts to the University of Minnesota to build a collection. Lena de Grummond, Ph.D., built a collection herself while working on the faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi. The legacy of both these collectors is enormous in the field, but my interest is in Lena de Grummond and her unique kind of collecting and institution-building.

I worked at the de Grummond Children’s Literature Research Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for five years (1987–1992) as an assistant curator which is when I became intimately involved with the collection. I met Lena de Grummond on ceremonial occasions before her death in 1989, and I have written about the collection. ¹ This is my first reflection on the collection after five years away, actively working as a scholar and teacher. From this distance, I am struck by how formative the collection was in shaping my own contextual sense of scholarship and the importance of the study of print culture. I am still so impressed with how much one person can do; how a particular passion can work to such high purpose.

Lena de Grummond (1899?–1989) came to the University of Southern Mississippi in her retirement. Born in Centerville, Louisiana, her education included an undergraduate degree from the University of Southwestern Louisiana and a master’s degree in library science and a doctorate in education from Louisiana State University. I like to speculate that Lena de Grummond was influenced in her library education by the powerful role model of Anne Carroll Moore (1871–1961), the legendary New York Public Library supervisor of work with children who trained a host of librarians and library educators in her expansive style, a style that involved much celebration of literature, an identification of the librarian as writer, and a sense of outreach. Dr. de Grummond worked in Louisiana for many years in various aspects of librarianship and teaching: a staff member of the Louisiana State Library, a high school teacher-librarian, and, until her retirement in 1965, a state supervisor of school libraries for fifteen years. She also wrote several historical novels with her daughter, Lynne Delaune, that were particularly significant in shaping her own perspective as an author interested in the authorship of others. ² With the prospect of several teaching positions, Dr. de Grummond chose Hattiesburg for its sense of place—a picturesque college town in the piney woods of the neighbor state of Mississippi.

When beginning to teach children’s literature in the library school, she became inspired by a new possibility in pedagogy. Teaching from one of the standard textbooks of the mid-1960s, she was frustrated by the flat presentation, the dry recitation of titles. How little could these textbooks communicate the creative process by which children’s books come into being! From her administration of school libraries across the state of Louisiana and from her own writing experience, she had met many authors and illustrators and had viewed firsthand the materials that...