Redwood is the delighted recipient of part of the personal library of Thomas Stanley Matthews (1901-1991), a shareholder from 1947 until his death and a generous benefactor. Matthews, who summered in Middletown for over 50 years, began his journalism career with The New Republic, where he served as assistant editor between 1925 and 1927 and as an associate editor between 1927 and 1929. He was then hired as books editor at Time, where over the next 20 years he held the positions of assistant managing editor, executive editor, and managing editor. In 1949 he succeeded the magazine's founder, Henry Luce, as editor. Upon retiring in 1953, he moved to England.

Matthews edited The Selected Letters of Charles Lamb (1956), for which he wrote the introduction. He published two volumes of memoirs, Name and Address: An Autobiography (1960) and Jacks or Better (1977; published in England as Under the Influence); two volumes of poetry; The Sugar Pill: An Essay on Newspapers (1957); O My America! Notes on a Trip (1962); Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (1974); a volume of character sketches, Angels Unawares: Twentieth-Century Portraits (1985); and eight volumes of aphorisms, witticisms, and verse.

Shortly before his death, Matthews expressed the desire that all his books be left to Redwood Library. Through the generosity of his widow, Pamela Peniakoff Matthews, and his four sons, this wish is being fulfilled. The portion of the library belonging to his eldest son, Thomas S. Matthews, Jr., was received this summer after the latter's death. Primarily poetry, this group includes books by Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice, Ezra Pound, Laura Riding, Edward Arlington Robinson, W. H. Auden, e e cummings, and Robert Graves.

Of particular interest are the 16 volumes by Graves, most of them autographed by the author, and the 12 by Riding, both of whom are principal characters in Jacks or Better. There are also five volumes printed by the Seizin Press, which Graves and Riding founded in 1928, and the first volume printed by the New Seizin Press, founded by Tomás Graves (youngest son of Robert and godson of Matthews). Matthews first met Graves in 1923-1924 while a student at Oxford, although his friendship with Graves and Riding dates from a six-month stay at their home on Mallorca in 1932.

A quotation taken from an essay written by Matthews in 1988 suggests the depth of his attachment to Redwood: "I have been only a summer visitor to the Redwood Library, but the few hours of my life spent there are unforgettable. No other rooms, visited so seldom, are so ineradicably and happily remembered. Like the generations before me, I have been fortunate to know them."

This library of a 20th-century man of letters is a perfect complement to Redwood's 18th-century Original Collection, the libraries of such 19th-century figures as George Henry Calvert, James Emott, Gardner Blanchard Perry, Charles Timothy Brooks, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and the 20th-century Greenvale Poetry Collection. The intrinsic value of the Matthews gift is magnified many times when incorporated into Redwood Library's present holdings.

We are enormously appreciative for the generosity of Thomas Stanley Matthews and the Matthews family.