Fales Manuscript Collection
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Abstract
The Fales Manuscript collection is made up of some 50,000 items, much of which was assembled by DeCoursey Fales from 1908-1966 and donated to NYU. The provenance of the materials is complicated, however. Following Fales' death in 1966, other collections and purchases were added into the Fales Manuscripts collection. We do not have a comprehensive listing of what Fales owned and what the library later purchased after his death. The collection consists of correspondence, manuscripts, drawings, photographs, realia, ephemera, and other materials primarily about English and American authors from 1700 to the present. There are special strenths in the Victorian, Edwardian, English 1890s, and Transition Period writers.
Biographical Note
De Coursey Fales (1888-1966) was a lawyer, banker, collector, bibliophile and yachtsman. In the last years of his life, Fales devoted himself full-time to collecting. Fales' collecting started with Walter Scott materials, and around that core, his collection grew to around 50,000 items pertaining to various authors spanning the 18th and 20th centuries. He began donating parts of that collection to New York University in 1957, and portions of his collection were also donated to the New York Public Library, Manhattan College, and the Morgan Library (of which he was a life fellow).
Arrangement
Folders are arranged alphabetically.
The files are separated by size:
Missing Title
- Letter sized.
- Legal sized.
- Large flat boxes and Dickensiana.
Scope and Content Note
The Fales Manuscripts Collection consists of correspondence, manuscripts, drawings, photographs, realia, ephemera, and other materials by and about primarily English and American authors from 1700 to the present. The collection is especially strong in materials by Charles Washington Baird, Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, Arnold Bennett, E. F. Benson, Walter Besant, Paul Blackburn, George Borrow, Cyrus Townsend Brady, John Burroughs, Erskine Caldwell, Hall Caine, Tom Clark, Wilkie Collins, Marie Corelli, Pearl Marie Teresa Craigie, George Cruikshank, Esmond Samuel De Beer, Walter De la Mare, Louis Ferdinand Destouches (aka Celine), Charles Dickens, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), George Dowden, Lord Dunsany, Jeffery Farnol, Ronald Firbank, John Galsworthy, Robert Gessner, Allen Ginsberg, Edmund Gosse, Joe Gould, Samuel Greenberg, Christine M. Demain Hammond, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, Holbrook Jackson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Andrew Lang, Richard Le Gallienne, Harry Lewis, E. V. Lucas, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Arthur Machen, John Masefield, Alice Meynell, A. A. Milne, Mrs. Mary Louisa Molesworth, George Moore, Howard Moss, Jeff Nuttall, Eugene O'Neill, Amelia Opie, Baroness Emmunska Orczy, Sean O'Casey, Max Pemberton, Eden Phillpotts, Arthur Pinero, The Provincetown Players, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Sir Walter Scott, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Smith and Austen-Leigh Papers, Bram Stoker, William Makepeace Thackeray, Francis Thompson, Giuseppe Verdi, Sir Hugh Walpole, H. G. Wells, Octavia Wilberforce, Oscar Wilde, Thornton Wilder, and Charlotte Yonge. There are special strengths in the Victorian, Edwardian, English 1890s, and Transition Period writers.
The Fales Manuscripts are arranged by size into three groups: Legal; Flat and Dickensiana; and Letter. Sometimes entire discrete collections are included within this collection (see for example the Tom Clark Papers, the Frank Harris Papers, the Provincetown Players Archive).
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Access Restrictions
Open for research without restrictions. Appointments are necessary to consult manuscript and archival materials.
Use Restrictions
Collection use is subject to all copyright laws. Permission to publish materials must be obtained in writing from the Director of Fales Library and Special Collections. Please contact fales.library@nyu.edu. or call 212 998 2596.
Preferred Citation
Published citations should take the following form:
Identification of item, date (if known); The Fales Manuscript Collection; MSS 001; box number; folder number; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
Provenance
The Fales Manuscripts Collection was begun by DeCoursey Fales sometime after he began collecting books in 1908-09. By 1957 when Fales donated the collection to NYU, it had grown to over 15,000 items. He continued to build the collection until his death in 1966, by which time it is believed that the collection housed some 50,000 items. Unfortunately, subsequent curators did not treat the Fales Manuscript Collection as a separate collection with a distinct provenance. Instead, they added new acquisitions into the collection, sometimes incorporating whole small archives, such as the Provincetown Players Archive, the Tom Clark Papers, the Frank Harris Papers, the Smith and Austen-Leigh Papers, and many others. The collection was processed in varying ways over the years. At some early point manuscripts style processing at the item level was done for letters A-C—the collection is organized alphabetically by author. This processing was very incomplete, though cards still exist for the initial portions of the collection. At some later date, the collection was foldered with several authors in each folder, making it difficult to use the papers and to maintain control over the holdings. The current processing was undertaken to refolder the collection, account for all materials currently held, and create a finding aid that would adequately reflect the collection as it stands today. In addition, we have preserved the original box numbering so that past citations to the box numbers are still identifiable. As much as possible where distinct collections have been identified within the Fales Manuscripts Collection, separate finding aids have been created for those portions of the collection. These collections are still filed within the Fales Manuscripts Collection, retaining their box and folder numbers as originally assigned.
An accretion was added in March 2019. The accession number associated with this gift is 2019.019.
Separated Material
There is no information about materials that are associated by provenance to the described materials that have been physically separated or removed.
About this Guide
Processing Information note
In March 2016, boxes from Legal size boxes and Large Flat boxes and Dickensiana were renumbered to numerically follow boxes in Letter sized boxes. Researchers with citations to previous box numbers may contact fales.library@nyu.edu for assistance with identifying new box numbers.
In 2019, material was refoldered and added to an existing box. A file listing was added to the end of the existing inventory.
