I don’t care who you are, this is the type of letter you like to get:
This gift was truly a milestone in Rice’s development, both because we could not become a modern university without a modern library and because it provided the impetus for further philanthropy and growth in other areas.
The university was appropriately grateful:
I was quite happy to come across these letters in the W.W. and Ella Fondren Papers but the best thing in the file for my purposes was something else altogether. It’s a plat of campus, apparently drawn in early 1946, that gives an awfully neat picture of the state of affairs, including some pretty obscure little buildings:
It made me realize how far I’ve come in understanding our collections since back in 2010 when it took me a solid month to figure out where those barns were. (Here, here, and here.) What a baby I was!
Bonus: Lights on in the day time.
