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The Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection

In his British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, an Annotated, Chronological Bibliography, Lyman Tower Sargent, the leading utopian bibliographer, acknowledges the help he received from major libraries in America and abroad, and he generously credits Penn State with "having established the best Utopia Collection in the world." These were welcome words, and we took special pleasure in knowing that the judgment was made by the person most qualified to make it, but at the same time nothing is as intimidating to a curatorial staff as living up to the word best. We lack some obvious treasures (like the 1516 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, for example), but our collection is indeed wide-ranging and includes communal studies, the works of utopian theorists, and fabulous voyages. The collection gathers together as many utopias and dystopias in major languages as we can find. Works written in England and America predominate.

Nearly everyone involved in utopian studies acknowledges one scholar, Arthur O. Lewis, Associate Dean Emeritus of the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State, as the father figure. His annual Directory of Utopian Scholars, which he began compiling in 1958, was one of the publications that eventually brought about the establishment of the Society for Utopian Studies (whose papers are also collected at Penn State) and the Associazione Internazionale per gli Studi sulle Utopie. The pursuit of a definition of utopia occupied Professor Lewis for many years, and during that time we added books to our shelves to support his research and the publication of Of Men and Machines (1963) and American Utopias: Selected Short Fiction (1971). On March 25, 2003, the collection was named The Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection in honor of Professor Lewis's many contributions to Penn State's collection and to the field of utopian studies.

Cover of Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (2000-1887) or, Life in the 2000 A.D. (London, William Reeves, [1895]).

The utopia collection, which now contains over 4,000 titles, is valuable for the study of such communal societies as the Rappites, the Owenites, and the Icarians, but its real strength lies in imaginative fictional utopias and, by extension, dystopias. Here are some sample titles: a presentation copy to Georgianna Burne-Jones of William Morris's large-paper trade edition of News from Nowhere (1891), as well as the Kelmscott Press edition (1892) of that work; plate page proofs for Edward Bellamy's Equality (1897); Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), inscribed to his editor, R. A. Streatfield; Butler's "private" copy of Erewhon Revisited (1901) with his corrections, a summary of royalties, and a list of forty-one people who received presentation copies; the marked page proofs for Marie Louise Berneri's seminal Journey Through Utopia (1950), a book the author did not live to see in print; Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre Australe Connue (1676), in which the author solves many of utopia's problems by creating a race of ten-foot-tall unisex religious skeptics with twelve digits on their hands and feet; and John Symmes's Symzonia (1820), whose account of a place where the ocean flowed into the earth's interior led to a United States Naval expedition to the Pacific in search of Symmes's hole. There is much else, from 10,000 Ans dans un bloc de glace (1897) to You'll See (1957). The obscure and the forgotten jostle shoulders with Skinner, Orwell, and Zamiatin.

Researchers may search the holdings of the Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection from the Penn State Libraries catalog The CAT (the online catalog) and choosing "Advanced Search." Under the heading "In Library," scroll down to the bottom and click on "Special Collections." Under the heading "Location," scroll down to "Rare Books & Mss, Utopia Collection." (Hitting the SEARCH button without entering a specific title will bring up a list of all of the books in the Utopia Collection.)

Copies of Arthur O. Lewis's Utopian Literature in the Pennsylvania State University Libraries: A Selected Bibliography (1984) are available on request.

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