Cushing Library will travel back to the 20th century, as it opens the exhibit “Hand to Hand: Selections from the J. Lawrence Mitchell Collections,” with a reception at 5:30 p.m. in Cushing Thursday evening. The collections will feature items related to 20th century English writers, dictionaries, philology and pugilism as well as items related to boxing over the years.
The reception will host guest speaker Nicholas Basbanes, author on several cultural history works and noted authority on book history and culture.
The exhibit, which will run through Dec. 11, 2015, is a nod to Mitchell, who has been employed at Texas A&M for 25 years and who is retiring after this semester. The collections will become a permanent part of the Cushing archives after that.
Mitchell said he donated his collections because as a collector, he’d like his collections to be seen, and he hopes the library will allow these materials to be available for future generations of students and faculty.
“I’d like to encourage students to think that Cushing is where they can see things that might be of interest to them once they take a look,” Mitchell said.
Outreach and public services curator of Cushing Library Kevin O’Sullivan said
“So, in a nutshell the exhibition is really meant to be an introduction to these collections,” O’Sullivan said.
O’ Sullivan said the two collections are fun and interesting and he hopes students will come out and see them.
“And so the two collections that he has donated to the libraries are, one is a boxing collection, it’s sort of the history of boxing from it’s early forms in the 18th century all the way to contemporary 20th century materials,” O’Sullivan said. “And the second collection… kind of follows his academic interests which are the writers between… World War I and World War II in England primarily, the history of the English language — philology, and sort of dictionaries, sort of early dictionaries and dictionaries of slang language and stuff like this.”
Mitchell said he has been collecting since 1972 and he thinks students would be very interested to see the large collections he has accumulated for over 40 years.
“They might be interested in seeing the variety of material that can go into a collection built up over a long period of years, since about 1970, so more than 40 years,” Mitchell said.