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Damon Collection
Foster Damon had a fine Blake collection of some 300 items (not including manuscripts). Besides copies of most secondary works on Blake, standard and non-standard editions, and Trianon, Dent, Muir, and other facsimiles, the collection contains original editions of some of Blake’s source materials and of his own works, including several early editions of Blair’s The Grave, Hayley’s Ballads, and works by Flaxman and Cumberland on which Blake collaborated. There are also such items as an excellent collection of sheet music for Blake’s poems, a wide variety of prints, a Blake Bible, and so forth.
The collection also has value as “Damoniana,” including as it does many books bearing Damon’s marginalia, his notebooks, a good deal of correspondence, and some unpublished manuscripts.
Damon was associated with the John Hay Library at Brown University for some years, and at his death in 1971 the collection (in its entirety, as far as I have been able to determine) passed to the library, where it presently awaits cataloguing. The library intends to keep the collection together (a very reassuring decision), and is building it up through such acquisitions as the Trianon facsimile of the Gray illustrations. (Our thanks to John Kupersmith for this item. He is now preparing for the Newsletter an account of the history and principal contents of the Damon collection. Eds.)