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This report on activities related to the Papers of Katherine Anne Porter and other Porter-related manuscript collections at the University of Maryland at College Park Libraries covers the period between January and April 1997. The demand for information about and access to the collections, particularly for photocopies of materials in them, remained heavy. Professors and graduate students from academic institutions across the United States continue to be the majority of those seeking access to the Libraries' Porter collections. However, undergraduates and high school students have begun to contact me in increasing numbers, largely through Internet searches. Information about the Libraries' literary manuscript holdings and the Katherine Anne Porter Room has been available on the Libraries' homepage since 1995. (The URL for literary manuscripts is http://www.lib.umd.edu/UMCP/ARCV/litmss.html. There is also a page for Miss Porter's library at http://www.lib.umd.edu/UMCP/RARE/797hmpgM.html.) On-site researchers included residents of the states of Connecticut, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Telephone, mail, and e-mail inquiries have also been received from Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin as well as from Canada, Mexico, and Spain.

Popular interest in Porter also remained high. In the last four months, there have been more than 300 visitors to the Katherine Anne Porter Room. Prominent among them were Clark Dobson, whose recent donation of Miss Porter's coffin was featured in the last issue of this newsletter, and Joe Mayhew, who painted the floral decorations on the coffin. In that issue, I failed to mention the Porter Room visitors at a reception held on December 10, 1996. The event celebrated the gift of a valuable hand-drawn 1853 map of the Riversdale plantation, commissioned by its owner Charles Benedict Calvert. Calvert played a key role in founding what is now the University of Maryland at College Park and provided the land for the campus from his Riversdale holdings. This occasion provided another opportunity to introduce Katherine Anne Porter to a new audience.

The primary reason for the large number of visitors during the four months covered by this report was the popularity of the exhibit, "Jim Henson and Sesame Street," mounted in the Porter Room exhibit space between February 6 and March 21, 1997. Part of a campus-wide celebration of the life and work of Jim Henson, a graduate of UMCP, the exhibit in the Porter Room focused on Henson's creative association with the popular children's television program, Sesame Street, and featured materials from the Jim Henson Production Archives in New York and from UMCP Libraries' National Public Broadcasting Archives. With the cooperation of departmental colleagues, the Porter Room was open to the public Monday through Saturday afternoons for the duration of the Henson exhibit's run. The seven Porter Room docents, Freddy Baer, Shirley Bauer, Esther Birdsall, Dorothy Galvin, Rose Ann Jackson, Beverly Lewoc, and Betty Warner, served extra afternoons to make the extended operation possible. The high profile of the Henson exhibit raised awareness of the existence of the Porter Room and the Libraries' valuable Porter holdings. Jane Henson, Jin Henson's widow and professional colleague, was one of those absolutely captivated by Miss Porter's coffin at a February 13 reception.

After March 21, the hours of operation of the Porter Room returned to Monday and Thursday afternoons for the remainder of the semester. The unselfish support of the docents continues to make a significant contribution to the Libraries.

Important gifts have been added to the Libraries' Porter holdings since my last report. Miss Porter's nephew Paul Porter was again prominent among the donors. Occasioned by his relocation from Austin to Houston, Texas, Mr. Porter's most recent bequest consists of significant and highly valuable items of memorabilia that formerly belonged to his aunt. The donation includes numerous items of tableware: silver serving pieces (a covered bowl on plate, a soup ladle, a coffee pot, a Russian basket, a brandy warmer, and a serving fork), five gold-encrusted Wedgwood soup bowls, and four green and gold wine glasses. Other silver items include a pill box and three ornate frames, one of which holds a photograph of her mother, Mary Alice Jones Porter, annotated by Miss Porter. There are also significant pieces of Mexican folk art acquired by Miss Porter in the 1920s: two polychrome unglazed pottery vases, a glazed polychrome Tonala water jug and glass, a polychrome tole tray, three hand-carved coconut banks, and two museum-quality retablos (primitive religious paintings). Perhaps of most interest to the general public are Miss Porter's nativity scene and Easter egg tree. The former includes pieces that she acquired in Mexico in 1930 and to which she added over time. The latter was made for Miss Porter by Paul Porter and contains a dozen exquisitely hand-painted chicken eggs. The donation also includes a framed print of Miss Porter's photograph entitled "Rain and Sunshine," taken in Basel, Switzerland, and inscribed in her hand and a French wooden block used to print fabric that Miss Porter used as a wall decoration. All of these items are currently on display in the Porter Room and adjacent exhibition space.

Bill Wilkins, who with his wife Fern has previously donated memorabilia for the Porter Room, generously parted with thirty-two audio recordings he had acquired from Miss Porter's estate. Primarily of music, these recordings augment the collection of 693 audio discs already in the Papers of Katherine Anne Porter.

A happy development of these last four months is the successful completion of negotiations to purchase Mrs. Toni Willison's collection of correspondence written by Miss Porter to Mrs. Willison and her husband between 1935 and 1978. My husband and I had a delightful visit with Mrs. Willison at South Hill in September 1996, when I learned that she wished to sell the collection. In 1946, Mrs. Willison and her husband George bought South Hill, the only house Miss Porter ever owned, directly from her. Mrs. Willison had met Miss Porter in 1934 in Paris. Miss Porter's next contact with the Willisons came when she reviewed George Willison's Saints and Sinners in 1945. At that time, Mr. Willison, who wrote speeches for Averill Harriman when he was governor of New York, was one of the main editors on the WPA state guide series. In fact, it was the Willisons' intense dislike for the climate in Washington, DC, where they were living at that time, that led to their buying South Hill. Between 1946 and 1954, the Willisons carried on frequent and lively correspondence with Miss Porter as they paid off South Hill. Miss Porter's letters to them spell out the details of this transaction as well as her financial state during these years. But they include much more: lively discussions of her activities, politics, gardening, illness, reading, and mutual acquaintances. Over the years, the Willisons apprised Miss Porter of the renovations that they were making to the house--very few actually: changing entrances, enlarging what KAP called the "hidey hole" into an office, digging a pond, landscaping the grounds. When KAP received her honorary degree from Skidmore in the 1970s, she stayed at South Hill and asserted her approval of these changes.

The assistance of a small group of donors, including W. Hewitt Bayley and E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., has made purchase of this collection possible. Mr. Bayley of Scarborough, Canada, is the husband of the late Isabel Bayley, former Literary Trustee of the Estate of Katherine Anne Porter. Mr. Prettyman, a prominent Washington attorney, was Miss Porter's lawyer for the last twenty years of her life. Mrs. Willison has selected the Papers of George and Toni Willison as the formal name for the collection which will include all the Porter-related correspondence and materials she owns. The Libraries expect to make the collection available to the public shortly after its arrival in College Park.

The Libraries and Professor Jordan Pecile, who teaches at the United States Coast Guard Academy, have agreed to remove most of the restrictions on access to his correspondence with Miss Porter among her papers. In 1991, the Libraries agreed to restrict access to this correspondence except to those individuals granted written permission by Professor Pecile. The restriction now applies only to a few passages in the entire correspondence. Professor Pecile has graciously complied with the Libraries' request to alter this agreement in order that the forthcoming microfilm edition of Miss Porter's papers can be as complete as possible.

Formal notification that the National Endowment for the Humanities has fully funded the Porter proposal submitted last June came in mid April. The endowment will provide in excess of $158,000 to fund a project archivist, student support, and microfilming of 100,000 of the most fragile and valuable pages of the collection. The grant period will run eighteen months. During part of this time, portions of the collection will be closed to researchers at different periods while the preparation and actual filming take place. The proposal calls for a third of the 100,000 images (half of the correspondence) to be closed to researchers in September 1997, the second portion (remaining half of correspondence) in January 1998, and the third portion (clippings; financial, legal, and personal materials; manuscripts and notes) in June 1998. Those seeking to consult the papers will be inconvenienced during this period, but, ultimately, conducting research on these materials will be significantly easier. The microfilm edition will enable the Libraries to circulate portions of the papers by means of inter-library loan.

Progress continues on processing Porter materials. As part of an internship, graduate student Patty Rettig is completing the work on the Prettyman papers begun by docent Esther Birdsall. The guide to these papers should be completed in early May. As I write this report, we are racing to complete the reprocessing of the Papers of Katherine Anne Porter and the writing of an entirely new guide to the collection. All of the collection except Series II, the manuscripts, has been arranged into final order. Student assistants Jim Harmon and Jennifer Pitts are making a final check of the materials before they are transferred into new boxes. Only the arrangement and description of Series II, my portion of the work, and the final physical preparation of the clippings remain to be completed. With some luck, I will make a presentation of the completed guide at the society's business meeting at the American Literature Association Conference in Baltimore on May 23.

Please direct any questions about this report or the Libraries' Porter holdings to Beth Alvarez, Curator of Literary Manuscripts, Archives and Manuscripts, McKeldin Library, UMCP, College Park, MD 20742. My e-mail address is ra60@umail.umd.edu. My telephone number is 301-405-9298. FAXes reach me at 301-405-9191.