Digital Bookplates at Academic Library Services

The Jack and Mary Spain Collection on Travel, China, and Marco Polo ranks among the most significant donations to Special Collections and Academic Library Services. The 1,700 maps and books in this collection provide a comprehensive look at the historical accounts of European explorations through Central Asia into China.

Especial strengths of the collection include seventeenth and eighteenth maps and accounts of travel to Central Asia and China. From trade voyages and religious missions to diplomatic visits and adventures, the collection includes many first-hand accounts of nineteenth century travel.

Twentieth century materials include many memoirs and eyewitness observations of the changes that accompanied the end of imperial China, the brief-lived Republic of China and the advent of Communism. Other materials document traditional arts, culture, and religion in China.

The donation also includes selected materials on the Roanoke voyages, early explorations of North America, as well as early American agriculture.

Jack and Mary Spain met while attending Harvard Law school, and both pursued lengthy law careers after settling in Richmond, Virginia. Their interest in Marco Polo is reflected not just in this book collection, but in a 1985 trip that they took with their two young sons attempting to retrace the explorer’s journeys from Italy to China. Their collection was received in the summer of 2024 and will take several months to be fully cataloged and available for use.

Gene and Susan Roberts are natives of Wayne County, North Carolina. After a long and distinguished career as a reporter, newspaper editor and professor of journalism, Gene Roberts co-authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.

Many of the more than 1,100 volumes in this collection reflect his research on the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the involvement of the American press in bringing attention to that crusade for social justice. Authors include Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton. From W.E.B. DuBois to Coretta Scott King Lewis and James Baldwin, many of the authors of many memoirs were eyewitnesses or contemporary observers of the events in question.

Finally, the contributions of reporters and editors to the reporting of the era are chronicled in numerous biographies and memoirs of journalists and histories of newspapers.

Catherine Billingsley, a native of Wisconsin, earned multiple degrees in weaving and textile design. She has enjoyed a lifelong love of books and reading, taking many opportunities to meet authors at book readings and literary festivals.

During her forty-year residence in North Carolina, she developed a particular interest in North Carolina and southern writers. From Clyde Edgerton and Reynolds Price to Jill McCorkle and Anne Tyler, she amassed a significant collection of contemporary regional writing that she ultimately chose to share with students, faculty, and other users of Joyner Library.

Her donations include over 500 novels and volumes of poetry. Many of the volumes are signed by their authors. Her other donations include literary journals, broadsides, and examples of her weaving and woven bookmarks intended to honor selected writers.

Artist Margaret Wheeler Worthington of Wilmington donated this collection of rare North Caroliniana to honor of her grandfather, Samuel Wheeler Worthington (1875-1956) of Bertie County.

A businessman by trade, Samuel Worthington was a pioneering collector and bibliographer of rare and obscure materials related to North Carolina. His personal collection included some of the earliest compilations of North Carolina laws and court decisions. From the revolutionary account of Banastre Tarleton to the twentieth century account of the Alaskan gold rush by Pitt County native Bruce Cotten, his collection documents American history through events playing out in the state or the participation of North Carolinians in wider events.

Many church and association histories as well as theological treatises track religious controversies in early North Carolina. The contributions of social and professional associations are traced in early meetings of Wilmington’s Thalian Society, Masons, militia groups, and the North Carolina Medical Society.

Both the eminent and the notorious are traced in numerous biographies. Among the latter are accounts of the moonshiner Lewis Redmond and prison escape artist Otto Wood. Numerous nineteenth century novels and collections of poetry mark literary milestones. Advances in science and agriculture are apparent in geological reports and early plant catalogs.

Ultimately, some 280 will appear in this collection.