Martha's Vineyard Museum

Table of Contents

Summary Information

Biography/Historical Note

Scope and Content Note

Administrative Information

Controlled Access Headings

Collection Inventory

Descriptive Summary

Repository	Martha's Vineyard MuseumGale Huntington Research Library59 School Street P.O. Box 1310 Edgartown, MA 02539 (508)627-4441
Call Number	RU 409
Creator - creator	Sherman, Stuart C.
Title	Stuart C. Sherman papers
Date [inclusive]	circa 1851-1974, undated
Extent	1 box and 2 oversize folders (0.504 cubic feet)
Language	The materials are in English.
Abstract	This is a collection of documents relating to Stuart C. Sherman. Included are documents related to his work as a librarian, bibliographer of the whaling industry, and defender of free speech. Most of these documents were written by persons other than Mr. Sherman, and collected by him in the context of his work as a bibliographer.

Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

There are no restrictions to access.

Use and Reproduction Restrictions

Requests to reproduce material from this collection should be directed to museum staff. Reproduction fees may apply.

Acquisition Information

The Stuart C. Sherman papers were acquired by the Martha's Vineyard Museum in 2006 from Nancy Walker.

Publication Information

Martha's Vineyard Museum

Gale Huntington Research Library
59 School Street
P.O. Box 1310
Edgartown, MA 02539
(508)627-4441

Processing Information

This collection was originally processed and its finding aid originally prepared by Joshua Pitt in the summer of 2012. Additional materials were located during the Martha's Vineyard Museum's CLIR Hidden Collections grant project, and the finding aid was then revised and machine-encoded by Nathaniel Janick in July 2014. During reprocessing, the intellectual arrangement of the collection was removed to facilitate access for researchers; the physical arrangement remains intact as the original scope and content read "all efforts have been made to preserve the organizational system these items were in when they were first donated to the Martha’s Vineyard Museum." New folder titles were supplied to more accurately and concisely describe the contents, and date ranges for each folder were also added. When deemed appropriate, description related to individual folders in the original finding aid has been attached as a note to the corresponding folder description.

 Creation of this finding aid was sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Biography/Historical Note

Stuart C. Sherman was born in Amherst, MA. He attended Brown University and later Columbia University, where he studied to be a librarian. In 1943, he joined the Providence, Rhode Island library system as a branch supervisor, and later became an assistant librarian, and eventually, librarian emeritus at the Providence Public Library. It was during his tenure in Providence that he first began collecting whaling ship log books, eventually amassing a catalog of over 4,000 ship log books chronicling over 14,000 voyages, many of which were published in two books: The Voice of the Whalemen and  Whaling Logbooks and Journals, 1613-1927. During this time, he also defended Henry Miller’s  Tropic of Cancer against obscenity prosecution and became a vocal advocate of what he termed the “freedom to read,” and the integral role of the public library as a democratic institution. Following his departure from the Providence Public Library in 1968, Sherman became the librarian of the John Hay Library at Brown University, where he also served as a professor of bibliography. He retired in 1978 and moved to Martha’s Vineyard, where he died in 1983.

Scope and Content Note

The collection contains correspondence, clippings, articles, and other research material collected by Stuart Sherman, mostly regarding whaling. The correspondence contained within this collection is mostly between Mr. Sherman and various libraries and booksellers, and is predominantly related to either Mr. Sherman’s attempts to acquire books on whaling, or interested parties soliciting recommendations for books on whaling from Mr. Sherman. Many of the other materials contain annotations made by Sherman. In addition to the materials on whaling, there are also a few items pertaining to Martha's Vineyard, including an 1882 tourist map and a 1928 map which was drawn and annotated by Stuart C. Sherman himself. There is also a copy of Sherman's academic paper on the censorship of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

Arrangement

The materials are arranged as they were during initial processing:

Within Series I, all efforts have been made to preserve the organizational system these items were in when they were first donated to the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. The miscellaneous materials contained within Series II were not organized in folders when they were donated to the Museum, thus explaining their separate cataloging.

In the original arrangement, Series I was comprised of what is now folders 1-24. Series II was comprised of what is folders 25-27 and the 1928 map. All other items were located during a 2014 survey of uncataloged materials and were not a part of the RU 409 as it was originally processed.