THE ELLIS COLLECTION

Ralph Nicholson Ellis, Jr., the most generous donor of books in the history of the University of Kansas, was born in 1908 to a wealthy Long Island couple. Following his socialite parents on the annual round of their various country estates (Long Island, South Carolina, Maine), he developed an early interest in natural history, particularly in birds and mammals.He began collecting books on natural history in 1926 and this became his consuming passion after the disastrous failure of his health during an Australian natural history expedition in 1931. By the end of his short life in 1945, he had put together a library of over 55,000 items of ornithology, mammalogy, voyages and travels, and bibliography. This he bequeathed to the University of Kansas in gratitude for the encouragement given him in his youth by E. Raymond Hall whom he had known at Berkeley and who had become Director of the KU Museum of Natural History.
Perhaps the greatest collecting period of Ellis' life was his twenty-month London stay in 1936-37 when he spent around $63,000 on prizes for his library. Chief among these was the greater part of the Sotheran Gould stock—he tried to capture the entire lot but even his wealth could not manage this. What he did bring home now stands on the shelves of the Spencer Library where it is the world's major source for the study of Gould's illustrative techniques and the complex relationships among the members of his atelier.

This exhibition has been arranged in honor of Gordon C. Sauer, M.D., who celebrated his 80th birthday on August 14, 2001. Dr. Sauer has advanced Gould scholarship by his own publications, and supported the development of this Library's great collection of original Gould drawings with fifty years of constructive interest and involvement. In 1982 he published John Gould, the Bird Man: a chronology and bibliography, a reference which is essential to anyone working on Gould. He has also published another four books about Gould and edited the first three volumes of Gould's correspondence, with two further volumes complete in manuscript.
He first came in contact with the University of Kansas Libraries collection of drawings by John Gould and his associates in 1951, and over the years has made a series of important gifts of original drawings, particularly by Elizabeth Gould, to enhance the collection. In 2001 he presented a group of drawings made for a book on the eggs of Australian birds which John Gould had planned but never published.
Dr. Sauer was associated with the University of Kansas School of Medicine from 1951 onwards, and a Clinical Professor from 1964 onwards; he was Head of Dermatology from 1958 to 1970. He is the author of seven editions of Manual of Skin Diseases (the 7th appeared in 1996).