If you find yourself stuck at a boring conference with a few days to kill, you'll want to have Dee Gee Lester's book with you. Her volume has been in progress for over half a decade. Few of us in Irish Studies have not gotten form letters from her, asking for information about private and public collections in our area, a request that in most has evoked a ho-hum attitude. But through perseverence and doggedness. Lester stuck to her vision and the result is a magnificent volume of valuable information. Lester's book provides details about collections of Irish material in achieves and libraries. Most of the entries are well annotated and every page yields a line or two that will raise an eyebrow or arouse curiosity. For instance, just in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin are, inter alia, diaries of three brothers during their voyage from New York to Clare in 1849; three boxes of Joseph P. McDonnell papers from the period 1847-1906; three boxes of Henry Higgins (honest!) letters between his mother and father in Northern Ireland in the early 1900s. Looking for a project? There are hundreds of leads in this book, notations to follow up on, avenues to explore. There are more gems. University of California harbors 1000 volumes from the library of the Maria Edgeworth family in their Research Library and 4500 items relating to Oscar Wilde, plus this: W.B. Yeats and Irish Theatre Movement (1899-1951) Collection: about 560 titles and 20 ms. At Pennsylvania State University are the Eva Gore Booth papers. At Washington and Jefferson College is the Molly Maguire Collection. So if you're near a library with time to kill, pull out Lester's book and pass the hours browsing through some fascinating, relatively unexplored material. It's a most valuable book to possess. - ILS
