William Peter Kaldis Modern Greek Collection
William Peter Kaldis (1923-2021), professor emeritus of History at Ohio University (Athens, Ohio), collected an impressive selection of books related to Modern Greece, the core of which are titles rare in U.S. repositories that he purchased during his Fulbright study in Greece in 1956-1957 and 1966-1967. Professor Kaldis had the majority of these books bound in leather and cloth at a bindery in Athens, Greece. The collection encompasses a wide range of topics related to Greece–biography, description & travel, finance, history, literature, politicians & government, social life & customs, war & revolutions–with a focus on the modern period. The majority of the titles are in Modern Greek, although there also are books in French, English, Italian, and German. Click the link above to explore the collection's holdings in the Library catalog.
Professor Kaldis also donated almost two dozen comic books in Modern Greek, including retellings of ancient Greek myths, tales from Byzantium and the Greek War for Independence, translations of Laurel and Hardy, etc, which are housed at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.
Pimen Maksimovich Sofronov, an Old Believer iconographer, was born in the Russian Empire in 1898. Sofronov worked and taught in Estonia, Latvia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and Rome, until he was invited to the United States after World War II and emigrated. In America, he worked on churches in California, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, and New York. He died in Millville, New Jersey in 1973. This collection consists of Sofronov's library of over 1,100 books, as well as part of his personal archives and some of his sketches and drawings. Also included is an original icon by Sofronov and a portrait of Pimen M. Sofronov (ca. 1930) by artist A. Tolstoy. His library includes many rare iconographic and other portfolios, as well as Russian editions of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to iconography and art, the library's contents reflect Sofronov's interest in Russian Old Belief, religion, homeopathic medicine, Russian classical literature, and illustrated Russian children's literature. Materials are in Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Church Slavonic, Italian, French, English, and German. Click the link above to explore the collection's holdings in the Library catalog.
View an interactive exhibit created by Hope Wilson (former RCMSS/HRL graduate research associate and MSSI 2013 alumna) based on Sofronov's Tselebnik... or 'A Book of Healing: An Indication of What Kind of Healing Graces Were Given to Various Saints by God, When Their Feast Days Occur, and in What Manner and Colors Iconographers Represent Them' (Paris, 1931) for the 2013 exhibit "From Pattern to Painting: The Religious Iconography of Pimen Sofronov" (31 May 2018 - 16 September 2018).