Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Image not available
Manuscripts
The collection is comprised primarily of the manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and ephemera of Paul Theroux. His works are often semi-autobiographical and are based on his experiences living and traveling around the world. He is noted for his rich, sometimes ironic, description of people and places. The material comprises almost his entire career as a writer and includes multiple drafts of various works from working notebooks to printed galleys. The collection includes novels (1967-2016), short story collections (1972-2014), non-fiction and travel books (1972-2016), and shorter works including reviews, articles, short stories, plays, and lectures (1960-2015); the collection also includes Theroux's working and travel notebooks (1968-2014). The collection also contains professional papers and business correspondence (1963-2015), with publishers, agents, other authors and reader's letters; included in this material are letters from, among others, Eve Auchincloss, Peter De Vries, Margaret Drabble, Nadine Gordimer, Graham Greene, Blanche C. Gregory, Hamish Hamilton Ltd., Houghton Mifflin Company, V.S. Naipaul, Jonathan Raban, Oliver Sacks, Muriel Spark, Stephen Spender, William Styron, and Auberon Waugh. There is also a smaller amount of family material and personal correspondence (1939-2015), with family and friends; this correspondence includes Eugene Theroux, Alexander Theroux, Peter Theroux, Marcel Theroux, Louis Theroux, Anne Theroux, and various other family members. The ephemera consists of photographs, printed material and magazines (1941-1915).
mssTheroux
Image not available
Manuscripts
This collection contains research files of English art historian R. B. Beckett, chiefly consisting of study photographs and clippings collected from the late 1940s to early 1960s documenting the works of John Constable and other English artists including William Blake, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Rowlandson, J. M. W. Turner, and Richard Wilson. In addition there are also images and clippings related to English portraiture, as well as sporting and comic images. The artist research files contain study art photographs and clippings, with some occasional correspondence and notes and manuscripts by Beckett. Six artists (Blake, Constable, Gainsborough, Rowlandson, Turner, and Wilson) are distinguished as their own subseries, and their files typically contain study photographs, article clippings, some scattered manuscripts and correspondence, and exhibition catalogues. The largest of these are the John Constable files (Boxes 3-9), which includes seven boxes of study images. Other art images in the collection are arranged either in the "Artists (various)" subseries (Box 13) or in the "Portrait artists" subseries (Boxes 14-15). While some of the images are professional photographs acquired from museums, most of the images are clippings from British magazines such as The Connoisseur and Burlington. Most of the images are not annotated or only contain brief handwritten identifications typically of the artist, painting title, date, dimensions, etc. Overall there are very few manuscripts by Beckett in the collection. Exceptions consist of a sketchbook from the late 1920s containing pencil sketches of landscapes by Beckett and a few documents. The correspondence is chiefly from galleries, museums, and publishers related to Beckett's research and publications.
mssBeckett
Image not available
Manuscripts
This collection contains the papers of English art historian Katharine Ada Esdaile (1881-1950), with the bulk of the materials relating to her research and writings on British monumental sculpture, sculptors, and church monuments from the medieval period to 19th century. Material types include personal writings, diaries, correspondence, business papers, family papers and photographs, research files and research notebooks, and miscellaneous published and unpublished materials. Notably the collection includes more than 600 chiefly pre-World War II visitor booklets and pamphlets produced locally by British churches and approximately 3500 photographs taken or collected by Esdaile of sculpture, often funerary monuments in English churches, ranging from large churches like Westminster Abbey to small rural parishes. This collection provides a resource for viewpoints on monumental sculpture in the early 20th century (for instance as represented in book reviews by Esdaile) and for information about Esdaile's experience as a woman art historian in the early 20th century. Given the broadness of Esdaile's scope, from medieval to 19th century British monumental sculpture, the collection is less useful for specific information about monuments or sculptors. In addition, many of Esdaile's attributions in her notes appear to have been based primarily on her own instincts and do not have citations. Many of Esdaile's notes are handwritten on small scraps of paper or are fragments, sometimes making the information difficult to parse. The collection is chiefly Esdaile's files, but the dates on some items (such as post-1950 booklets) indicate the collection was added to and used after her death, presumably by her son Edmund Esdaile, who also made notes on items in the collection and appears to have done the preliminary organization of the papers after Esdaile's death.
mssEsdaile