Breman Collection on View

Selections from the Heritage Collection formed by Paul Breman (1931–2008) are on view on the first floor of Sawyer Library through February 3rd. Dutch-born and educated, Paul Breman was known among black poets as “that crazy white boy who takes us seriously”.

Breman’s collection encompasses in depth the poetry of black Africa and of the diaspora of black Africans into the Caribbean and the United States. It also includes a wide selection of plays, fiction, and other prose literature, and is further enriched with Breman’s substantial library of reference books and studies of black literature, music, and culture. Altogether, some 4,000 books, pamphlets, broadsides, and recordings, and another 4,000 pieces of manuscript and ephemera, comprise this latest major addition to the Chapin Library’s collections.

Three of the books on display are representative of Breman’s own works studying and promoting black literature. Another two volumes are examples of the amazing 400 anthologies of black-authored poetry Breman collected.

The Heritage Collection is also replete with more than 1,000 graphics by black artists that accompany the literary compositions. Nothing, though, breathes life into the collection better than do the readings by over a hundred poets for whom Breman found commercial recordings, private tapes, or conducted reading sessions himself.

Paul Breman’s distinguished collection came to the Chapin Library in 2012 through the generosity of his widow, Jill Norman, and the advice of her friend Darra Goldstein, Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams College. News stories about this donation may be found on the Williams website, in the Williams Magazine, and in the Williams Record, while the collection itself may be consulted by appointment in the Chapin Library at the Southworth Schoolhouse. – RLV

Addendum, February 4th: The display from the Breman Collection in Sawyer Library has been extended during Black History Month.

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