Known for its eclectic assortment of holdings - including a 500-volume collection on the history of recreational fireworks and 80 volumes recovered from Adolf Hitler's personal library - the Hay will add more than 4,000 volumes to its gay and lesbian catalog to form the Ronald Smith Collection, named after the donor. The collection includes more than 1,300 scholarly works, 2,000 works of fiction and 40 volumes of male nudes.
Why did Smith choose Brown as the recipient of his collection? "They were willing to take it," he said. Smith said he worried that the Northeast did not have a collection of this sort and "spent several years trying to find a school or a public library ... that would provide a home for it."
Smith contacted the public library in Provincetown, Mass., but he was told the library was not equipped to acquire the collection. Fortunately, Provincetown's librarian was in touch with an informal network of people interested in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) materials and was able to direct Smith to the Hay.
Smith "essentially found us," said Rosemary Cullen MA'72, American literature and popular culture librarian at the Hay.
The Smith Collection won't be open to the public for about three to four years, Cullen said, because of the time needed to properly catalog the material.
The library has been specifically collecting gay and lesbian works for almost 20 years, Cullen said, and already boasts at least 5,000 LGBT-related volumes as well as the papers of several prominent figures from the gay and lesbian communities.
The 1991 donation of the sizeable Katzoff Collection provided the John Hay with its first primarily gay and lesbian collection. Since then, the presence of that collection has attracted numerous related donations, Cullen said.
According to the Hay's Web site, the Katzoff Collection itself has been augmented by some 30,000 works of gay pulp fiction from the 1950s and 1960s. The Hay also features a collection exclusively containing gay and lesbian pulp. It boasts such titles as 1989's anonymously authored "Coming Cousins," released by publisher Gay Incest, and 1968's "Those Hollywood Homos!" by Todd Martin.
After receiving the Katzoff Collection, the Hay acquired the Preston Archives - the papers of John Preston, an author of gay literature, erotica and nonfiction. As a result of Preston's relationship with Anne Rice, who authored the "Vampire Chronicles" series, the Hay acquired her papers as well, Cullen said. Rice wrote erotic and sadomasochistic novels under the pen names Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure.
Smith and Cullen both said they hope the gift will prompt still more donations to Brown. "My collection will not at all be the end" of the Hay's gay and lesbian acquisitions, Smith said.
The Hay's gay and lesbian holdings also benefit from the occasional smaller gifts of a handful of donors with collections of their own. The most recent such donation featured several works from the "Romentics" series, including the novel "Spare Parts" about a mechanic and a man posing as a prostitute.
Much of the fiction in these collections simply features gay and lesbian characters, Cullen said. She cited the sizeable body of mystery novels featuring gay and lesbian detectives. Examples include Greg Lilly's "Fingering the Family Jewels," a mystery of family intrigue set in North Carolina.
For his part, Smith's tastes run more toward the scholarly. His primary interests are biography and history, he said. Smith's collection focuses on the history of the gay rights movement.
Smith first grew interested in gay and lesbian material in the 1950s, but relevant works were few and far between before the 1969 Stonewall riots, he said. Following the riots, widely considered the starting point of America's gay rights movement, the volume of gay and lesbian literature increased dramatically and Smith said he began collecting to preserve a record of what he knew would be one of the major social movements of the 20th century.
Smith said he built the collection by visiting used bookstores wherever he went and asking to see "the gay books." At this, the employees' "eyebrows would go up," but he would frequently find a handful of new titles in a single store.
Previously, students have used Brown's LGBT collections for classes on both literature and social history, Cullen said. She said she hopes the collections will continue to be used for research. "The more you publicize it, the more (students) come in," she said.
Smith said he believes the use of his collection by students would be "a great service to the social movement."
And though the collection has been an important part of his life for half a century, Smith and his wife, Betty, are happy to let go.
"We have room in our basement for the first time in years," she said.
