Catalog of the Leyzer Ran Collection in the Harvard College Library
ENTe essays published in this catalog (pp. 3-42) pay tribute to Leyzer Ran and his prodigious accomplish-ments. Te information in the catalog regarding the contents of the Leyzer Ran Collection offers a more detailedaccount of the collection and attest to the depth and breadth of the Ran Collection. Te catalog (pp.75-124)includes a listing of some 820 publications—books and pamphlets—added to the Harvard Judaica Collectionthanks to this gift. Tere are also several examples (pp. 43-49) of that most elusive of genres—ephemera—thatare representative of the hundreds of single-sheet printed materials to be found in the Ran Collection, and which are in the process of being organized and digitized; these will gradually be made available online. TeRan Collection is especially rich in archival materials, which are described in a preliminary catalog at the folderlevel (pp. 51-62) and to which a preliminary index is available (pp. 63-71). Photographs in the Ran Collection will also be digitized and put online. Te materials in the Ran Collection are chiefly from Eastern Europe, especially Lithuania and Leyzer Ran’sbeloved Vilna, but the Collection includes materials from all over the Jewish world—special mention shouldbe made of Cuba (where Leyzer Ran lived from 1946 to 1953)—as is evident from a perusal of the cataloginginformation in this volume. However, we hasten to add that this catalog does not do justice to the Leyzer RanCollection. It will take many years of work with these materials by librarians and scholars before the extraordi-nary richness of this collection can be fully known and truly appreciated.
