Established by Lois Barber in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1992 with their first campaign at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, EarthAction has been organizing international campaigns ever since. As the world’s largest action network, the group’s campaigns address a variety of global issues from climate change and nuclear weapons to children’s rights and empowering women to protect the land. With a mission both to inform people about pressing problems facing the world and to move them to action, EarthAction creates and distributes information kits aimed at different audiences: individuals and groups, policymakers, and journalists.

The collection includes administrative files that illustrate the process of building a campaign, financial records, and publications, as well as action, legislative, and media kits created for many of the group’s international campaigns.

The concept of product marketing in a Communist state may seem slightly incongruous, but in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, consumer goods were packaged and sold with much the same care as they were in the west. The Packaging Design Collection contains examples of quotidian products sold during the post-war period, ranging from boxes for soap powder to toothpaste, shampoo, and sugar sacks. The collection documents the visual language used on consumer products in East Germany and the evolution of graphic design in the Communist states of Eastern Europe from the 1950s through 1980s.

Organization created to sponsor and conduct all fundraising for, and to distribute funds to, relief and social agenices in the town of Easthampton, Massachusetts. Contains records of minutes, campaign reports, Presidents’ and Treasurers’ reports, and correspondence. Also included are scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and other printed material.

Ebert in his studio, ca.1965

The graphic artist Siegfried Ebert had an important influence on the visual language of East German television and animated motion pictures. Born in Eibau on July 20, 1926, Ebert was drafted into the Luftwaffe in 1943, but shortly after going on active duty, he was severely wounded and taken prisoner by the English. After his release, Ebert shifted course in life, studying commercial art at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zittau and film at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst in Wiessensee. He became one of the earliest artists to specialize in the new medium of television, working for Deutscher Fernsehfunk, doing graphic design and animation. A member of the Verband Bildender Künstler Deutschlands, he later worked on animated films for the DEFA studios. Suffering from ill health for the last several years of his life, Ebert suffered a heart attack in November 1985, and died at home shortly after his sixtieth birthday in 1986.

The Ebert Collection includes a small assortment of correspondence, awards, and biographical materials, along with examples of his graphic work for television and film. Among other unusual items in the collection are attractive handbills (small posters) for Progress and DEFA films, some original sketches, photographs and mockups of his artwork for television, and an assortment of personal and professional ephemera.

Beauvais Missal

The scholar of book history Otto F. Ege disassembled works from his personal collection of medieval manuscripts to create forty portfolios of fifty leaves each, offering these sets for sale to individuals and institutions under the title “Fifty Original Leaves From Medieval Manuscripts.” Marketing his portfolios as a resource for study of the history of the book, book illustration, and paleography, Ege justified his biblioclastic enterprise as a means of sharing the beauties of Medieval books with a wider audience.

The majority of the texts scavenged for Otto Ege’s “Fifty Original Leaves From Medieval Manuscripts” (all but one in Latin) are liturgical in origin — Bibles, psalters, missals, breviaries, and Books of Hours — however Ege also included a few less common works such as the 15th-century manuscript of Livy’s History of Rome and a version of Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. The leaves range in date from the late twelfth to the early sixteenth century and represent a number of distinctive regional styles in paleography and illumination from throughout western Europe, including Italy, France, Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and England. The UMass Amherst set is number six of 40.

F. C. Ellert

Frederick C. Ellert, a professor of German at the University throughout the fifties and sixties, had deep local roots, was a leader in University Athletics, and was one of the most instrumental founders of the Massachusetts Review, where he served as the journal’s first editor from 1959-1961. Born in Holyoke, Mass. in 1906, Ellert attended the University as an undergraduate and made notable contributions to the football and basketball teams. Ellert would return to the University after his graduation in 1930 to coach the basketball team before studying in Heidelberg University and Columbia University and eventually earning his M.A. from Amherst College and Ph.D. from Stanford. Ellert was a very active translator of 19th Century German poetry and a passionate teacher, developing his own German textbook. Ellert died in 1983.

Representing his work as a translator and teacher, the Frederick C. Ellert Papers contain a number of his published and unpublished translations of Goethe, Heine, and Morgernstern, some including Ellert’s handwritten notes as well as typescript copies of his German textbooks.

During a long career as Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, James Ellis wrote on the Victorian stage and the work of Gilbert and Sullivan. A founding member of the Valley Light Opera Company, he was also an actor and director of theatricals in the Pioneer Valley.

The Ellis Collection contains approximately 8,000 published works on the Anglo-American stage, 1750-1915, including individual plays and anthologies of English and American playwrights; biographical works on performers; works on the theatre in London, the provinces, and America; periodicals, playbills, prints, broadsides, and ephemera; and works that provide cultural context for interpreting the stage. Although the collection includes some works from the 18th century, it is deepest for the English stage in the period 1850-1900.

Jefferson Davis

During the earliest days of the Civil War, publishers began to issue large numbers of “patriotic covers,” cheaply produced but often colorfully-illustrated envelopes commemorating the personalities and events of the war. The topics were highly varied, ranging military and political figures, significant battles and other events, nostalgia for home, slavery, and southern versus northern character.

Collected by James Ellis, the Patriotic Cover Collection contains over 250 envelopes published during the Civil War, primarily in the northern states. All envelopes are unused and in relatively pristine condition.

The journal of Marcus A. Emmons of Hardwick, Massachusetts, includes his accounts beginning in 1862, the year he joined Company K of the 21st Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. The journal also contains a list of Hardwick volunteers; casualties in the regiment; recruits for Company K on September 8, 1862 and a record of their service; and members of Company K, their hometowns (largely in the Swift River Valley), and dates of discharge, transfer, or death. Account records from 1858-1859 are in a different hand than those that document Company K. The collection also includes two letters addressed to his brother from Annapolis in 1864.

The collection consists of photographs of the town of Enfield and its inhabitants from ca. 1916 until the late 1930s, just before the town was flooded in the making of the Quabbin Reservoir.