Archivist Issayas Tesfamariam describes his long relationship with Professor Leslie Gottesman, whose archive of Eritrea-related materials was recently donated to Hoover Archives.

Some time ago, I began cataloging a book from our backlog. Entitled Das deutsche Reich: ungekurzte Sonderausgabe (The German Reich, unabridged special edition), it was written by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and published in Hamburg in 1934. As always, I searched first to determine whether Hoover or Stanford already had a copy.  When none was forthcoming, I then searched the national bibliographical database, WorldCat, to see which other libraries have a copy. It is not listed in WorldCat. I also checked several European libraries but did not find any copies there either. Given that the author was prolific, I found this somewhat strange and began to look at the book more closely... 

Simon Ottenberg was an anthropologist and faculty member at the University of Washington, Seattle, from 1955 to 1991, where he specialized in West Africa, southeastern Nigeria in particular. In the course of carrying out field research in Nigeria in 1952–53, 1959–60, and during a visit there in the summer of 1966, he collected many published materials, including pamphlets, booklets, serials, government documents, and other types of publications. His collection of materials was filmed in 1970 to create the Simon Ottenberg Collection. A complete inventory is available online.

Another long lost historical item has just been discovered: The silent film version of Sherlock Holmes starring William Gillette!