As with each of the past millionth volume purchases, the Hanes family, working in recent years through the John Wesley and Anna Hodgin Hanes Foundation, provided the necessary funds. The acquisition was further facilitated by the creator and owner of the collection, Professor George M. Harper, who donated to the Library a significant portion of his materials - the imprints of the Cuala Press, the small private press closely associated with Yeats's family and the poet's own publications. The entire collection arrived in Chapel Hill in July 1999 and has since been housed in the Rare Book Collection in the Louis Round Wilson Library. We offer the present exhibition as part of the celebration of this important acquisition and landmark in the UNC Library's development. The exhibition focuses on Yeats the man as well as his works and aims to give a sense both of the breadth of this important writer's contributions to twentieth-century literature and of the great depth and research potential of the new Yeats Collection.
All materials are from the Yeats Collection in the Rare Book Collection unless otherwise identified.
We want to thank the Manuscript Department here in Wilson Library for their loan of materials from the A. P. Watt Collection and the Special Collections of Emory University Library and the Beinecke Library of Yale University Library for their permission to display reproductions of photographs and drawings from their collections. Finally, we wish to express our deep appreciation to the Hanes family and the John Wesley and Anna Hodgin Hanes Foundation for making this occasion possible.