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A NOTE ON ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY'S GEORGE MOORE COLLECTION By Edwin Gilcher (Cherry Plain, New York) By one of those happy coincidences (which perhaps could be called an act of serendipity), a chance discovery by me enabled the special collections division of A.S.U. s Hayden Library to add a unique item to its George Moore collection by completing a set of scrapbooks, which had a volume missing when the set was presented to the library several years ago. In 1974 the library had purchased the extensive Moore collection which I had assembled. This recalled to Mrs. Dorothy Cohen of Phoenix, one of the library's faithful friends, that her father, Edward Charles Neill (1899-1957), had collected Moore. She found a number of his books and a set of five scrapbooks which she gave to the library. There had originally been six scrapbooks, but Mrs. Cohen did not know what had become of Vorume III. The scrapbooks contained clippings of items by and about Moore, from American, British and other newspapers and magazines, dating from the mid 1890s to the late 1920s, with the exception of a short period in the middle of the latter decade, which apparently were in the missing volume. The clippings gathered together in these volumes proved to be of the greatest importance to Moore scholars, including Hal Gerber who found in them many items to be included in George Moore: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him (AMS Press, 1987), portions of which appeared in several early issues of ELT. When I learned of this gift and went to Tempe to see them, I also found them useful for my forthcoming Supplement to my 19/0 A Bibliography of George Moore. More recently, as I sought further items for inclusion, I borrowed another scrapbook containing clippings of Moore items from Florian Shasky, a collector, former librarian and now a rare book dealer in California. He purchased the volume about twenty years ago from a west coast dealer, and had unsuccessfully attempted to discover who had compiled it. As I unwrapped the book it had a familiar look and on closer examination I was certain this was the volume missing from the Neill set in the Hayden Library. I quickly informed both Mr. Shasky and Marilyn Würzburger, curator of the Hayden special collections, of the discovery. In the course of time, following negotiations by the two principals, a sale was arranged and the missing volume now completes the set at A.S.U. Another unusual Moore item was also recently acquired by the library. It is one of the three sets of sheets printed in 1904 of an early version of Elizabeth Cooper, a comedy written by Moore in collaboration with Mrs. Pearl Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes"). The two had previously collaborated as playwrights and following disputes and reconciliations, they began writing another play. But the couple had another falling out, and Moore in an effort 386 to protect his interest in it asked Dr. James Starkey (Seumas O'Sullivan), a Dublin friend, to have the comedy printed for copyright purposes. Three sets of sheets were printed but, perhaps due to Mrs. Craigie s sudden death, they were never used for their intended purpose. Moore gave one set to his friend William K. Magee (John Eglinton), and it is this set that is now in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Another set was given to Dr. Starkey, and later owned by Ernest Boyd. It is this set which is thought to be the one recently added to A.S.U.'s collection. These two acquisitions further expand the scholarly value of the A.S.U. Moore collection which has not only a complete run of the usual first and limited editions, but has a number of prepublication variants, as well as virtually all other variants and revised editions, plus many extremely scarce pamphlets. One of these has a special A.S.U. association, for it was printed in Tempe by Edwin B. Hill, the 1948 first (and possibly unauthorized) American edition of The Talking Pine. The "highlight" of the collection is the probably unique copy of Les...

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