The W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies

The W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies, founded by the College of Arts & Science of Vanderbilt University in September 1968 is a joint project with the Department of French and Italian and the Central Library in which it is located. Its core is the personal collection of the eminent Baudelaire scholar, W.T. Bandy, who continued to work with the collection until his death in 1989.

The Center's most important holdings consist of:

•  all the first editions of Baudelaire's works

•  magazines and newspapers (originals or microfilm) in which he first published his writings

•  subsequent reprintings of his works that are of scholarly interest

•  all collected editions of his works

•  practically every book published on Baudelaire

•  several thousand volumes containing materials on Baudelaire and related topics

•  thousands of articles from periodicals (scholarly journals, newspapers, etc.)

•  several hundred volumes of translations of his works into various languages

The critical center of the collection is an exhaustive bibliography of writings by and about Baudelaire. Titles of books and ephemera in the Center are available through the Baudelaire database . Current articles are being added to this catalog when they are received. The Center is open to visiting scholars during regularly scheduled hours and by appointment. Material in the Center does not circulate. For those who are unable to visit the Center, a reference service is available. It is hoped that scholars who use the Center's services will donate reprints of their studies so that they can be carefully preserved and made available to other scholars.

Pascal Pia Collection

Pacal Pia, literary critic, poet, and editor, occupied a prominent place in 20th century French literary and intellectual circles. The Pascal Pia Collection contains French literary works, periodicals, and ephemera. Most of the publications are from the modern period, with emphasis on prose and poetry since the mid-19th century. A very large number of signed copies are in the Collection, many of them gifts of such major authors as Camus and Malraux, both good friends of Pascal Pia.

Gilbert Sigaux Collection

Gilbert Sigaux was an author, a translator, a professor of theater history at the "Conservatoire national d'art dramatique" in Paris and secretary of the "Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques." Over a period of many years until his death in 1982, Sigaux gathered an enormous personal library of play texts and books and other valuable documents on the theater.

The Gilbert Sigaux Collection contains some 6,000 volumes, including monographs, theater journals, and primary texts, as well as almost 75,000 items on authors, directors, actors, and theaters. These files contain such items as press clippings, programs, publicity releases, Sigaux's personal notes, and articles from journals, many of which are no longer available.

By its emphasis on theater, The Sigaux Collection complements the Pascal Pia Collection. "The collection represents," according to Dan M. Church, Associate Professor of French, "the single most valuable resource for research on theater in France in the 20th century."

Morris Wachs Collection

Due to a generous donation from the estate of Professor Morris Wachs, Vanderbilt is pleased to announce the acquistion of this one thousand volume collection which is particularly rich in popular fiction of the eighteenth century. As a whole, the collection is representative of eighteenth-century taste, ranging from orientalism and translation to satire, epistolary fiction, almanacs and colportage extracts.