Ellery Yale Wood
1 media/EYW Portrait 21st Jan 1992_thumb.jpg 2020-05-05T17:41:52+00:00 Marianne Hansen e5c1491b9c20d37a95fc0356366eeb2ddecf682b 18 2 Ellery Yale Wood with her cat, 1992 plain 2020-08-25T14:58:19+00:00 Marianne Hansen e5c1491b9c20d37a95fc0356366eeb2ddecf682bThis page is referenced by:
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Ellery Yale Wood
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Ellery Yale Wood ’52 moved to London in the early 1960s, got a job at a rare book store, and began buying eighteenth and nineteenth-century books written for girls and young women. Collecting over fifty years, Wood accumulated thousands of volumes, which she left to the College.
The books in this exhibition give the barest glimpse of that magnificent collection. Educational books include illustrated ABCs and early readers. Good children are rewarded and bad ones punished in stories that convey moral counsel. Brightly colored pictures enhance books that stir the imagination — fairy and folk tales, stories about dolls and school, nonsense rhymes. Magazines “for the instruction and amusement of youth,” and books that teach domestic skills serve the needs of older readers. And volumes of riddles and games, paper dolls, pop-ups, and other printed toys demonstrate that some books are just for fun.
Welcome to Ellery Yale Wood’s library! -
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Beyond the Nineteenth-Century Girl Reader
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Ellery Yale Wood’s enthusiasm for books soon expanded beyond her original focus. Her collection extends to the twenty-first century, with particular emphasis on the fantasy novels of the 1930s through the 1990s, many of which she purchased when they were new, for her own reading pleasure. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are joined by Le Guin, Pullman, and J.K. Rowling. Picture books proliferate, from Beatrix Potter to Sendak. Wood collected Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz exhaustively — the original books, their sequels, and later editions and re-imaginings. Hundreds of recent books record folk tales and new versions of fairy tales.
These twentieth and twenty-first century books, like the rest of Wood’s collection, are cataloged in Tripod and are available for research and leisure reading by students, researchers, and anyone who would like to plunge into the worlds of imagination created for young readers.
