John Mackay Shaw (front row, left) went to school in Scotland. Here he is with his class and his teacher.
The John MacKay Shaw Collection includes thousands of volumes of predominantly English and American 19th and 20th Century poetry, literature, criticism, biography, and reference. Many of the great poets, such as Longfellow, Wordsworth, and Milton, are represented in first or other early editions, and nearly all of these writers have been inspired by the theme of childhood. The Shaw Collection also includes works by Charles and Mary Lamb, Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and many books written under the influence of the "Alice" books. John Shaw collected notes on the authors of poetry and children's works included in his collection as he compiled the multivolume index to his collection Childhood in Poetry. Most of the note material is reproduced in those volumes. Manuscript materials by authors in the collection collected by Shaw, and Shaw's own correspondence, are currently being processed.