The Hannah Arendt Collection: A History

Recently, we made a trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College to snap more photographs of Arendtian marginalia. We are excited to share with you our readers these images, all of which are forthcoming.

Acknowledging the generosity of the staff at Bard College's Stevenson Library for letting us continually access this most valuable resource, we felt it important to dedicate a post that relates the history of the Arendt Collection. This history is sourced from the Collection's official website and is reproduced below.

"The central goal of the project is to preserve and catalog all items in Hannah Arendt’s personal library. The collection was acquired in 1976 through the efforts of co-executors Lotte Kohler and Mary McCarthy; Alexander Bazelow (Bard College, Class of 1971); Irma Brandeis (Bard College faculty 1944 - 1979); Librarian Fred Cook; and Bard’s president, Leon Botstein. The collection represents approximately 4,000 volumes, ephemera and pamphlets that made up the library in Hannah Arendt’s last apartment in New York City. Of particular significance are the many volumes containing considerable notes, underlinings and other marginalia, as well as many volumes inscribed to her by Martin Heidegger, Gershom Scholem, Rudolf Bultmann, W.H. Auden and Randall Jarrell, among others. A large collection of materials in the collection related to the work of her second husband Heinrich Bluecher are fully described at the digital Bluecher Archive.

[caption id="attachment_16291" align="aligncenter" width="530"] The official plaque commemorating the Hannah Arendt-Heinrich Blücher Library Collection[/caption]

"In addition to preserving and cataloging the collection, we have begun to digitize selected materials with the aim of sharing some of these unique resources with the international scholarly community in order to expand the rich contemporary dialogue on Arendt’s significant contribution to public discourse.

"Alexander Bazelow's ('71) generous support and encouragement has been vital to our endeavor to keep these materials available and useful.

"Thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2008) we have nearly completed the stabilization and cataloging of the Hannah Arendt Collection. The goal of our work is to create a single, comprehensive, and easily accessible discovery tool for the collection that will show not only the titles in her library, but also indicate the presence of annotations, marginalia and other markings in individual volumes."

Want to share pictures of your own Arendt library?

Please send them to David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at [email protected], and we might feature them on our blog!

The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection's digital entries, please click here.

For more Library photos, please click here.