Namen- und Titelregister zu den Jahresberichten über ostasiatische Neuerwerbungen der Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1912–1941

Abstract

The Library of Congress owns one of the largest and most important collections of East Asian books. Owing to the support of the farsighted Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, every effort was made to build a model collection that covered all fields of knowledge and that excelled all other Western libraries. What most scholars do not realize is that during Putnam’s time in office regular annual reports were published on new acquisitions, which included careful bibliographic descriptions of books and manuscripts, among them many rare items. While Walter Swingle and Michael Hagerty were responsible for the presentation of publications from the fields of materia medica, medicine, botany, agriculture, Naxi manuscripts, encyclopedias, as of 1928 A.W. Hummel signed the annual reports while descriptions of natural history items still continued in a parallel fashion. These texts, their style and their meticulous research remind the reader of the fabulous Eminent Chinese of the Ch‘ing period (1943–1944) whose editor was no other than A.W. Hummel. These reports were usually not found in seminars or in the East Asians sections of university libraries and thus remained widely unknown to East Asian experts. Now, after more than eighty years some people may consider this material “archival” and “outdated” but the researcher will find much information not detected easily otherwise. The indices of book titles (Part 1) and personal names (Part 2), with the Chinese and Japanese characters added by the editor – as far as possible – may facilitate access to the reports which are nowadays easily available on the website of Hathi Trust.