William A. Speck papers

William Alfred Speck, the founder of the William A. Speck Collection of Goetheana, was born in New York City to German immigrants, Otto Speck, a pharmacist, and Natalie Adolphine Haase. He was married twice, to Lillie Day Robinson in 1893 (she died three years later) and to Sara Rennie Speck, the widow of his brother Oscar. His professional training was at the Pharmaceutical College in New York City, and from 1883 until 1912 he worked in the family drug store in Haverstraw, New York. All the while, he was amassing a major Goethe library, and in 1913 he accepted Yale's invitation to come to the university and deposit his collection in the library. He acted as its curator from 1913 until his death in 1928 and as lecturer in the Yale Graduate School beginning in 1916.

A more detailed biography of Speck may be found in the National Cyclopedia of American Biography (vol. 29) and in Goethe's Works with the Exception of Faust: A Catalogue. Edited by Carl F.Schreiber (New Haven, 1940), p. 21-42. Schreiber's account of Speck's early years is based on a text written by Sara R. Speck and preserved among the Speck Collection manuscripts (YCGL MSS 6, folder 657).

Yale acquired the Speck Collection in 1913 through a set of fortuitous coincidences. Speck's niece, Charlotte Keeney, belonged to the Vassar College Class of 1912. Perhaps at her uncle's suggestion, she took several Goethe courses in college, at least one of them taught by Marian Parker Whitney, a daughter of Yale's distinguished Sanskrit scholar William Dwight Whitney. In February 1912, Charlotte Keeney arranged for Ms. Whitney and a group of Vassar students to visit Uncle Will's Goethe collection, already numbering some 6,000 items, at his home in Haverstraw, New York. Recognizing the importance of the collection and perhaps encouraged by her father (who had studied in Germany and taught German at Yale), Marian Whitney suggested to the Yale University Librarian John Christopher Schwab (Class of 1886 and grandson of the German writer Gustav Schwab) that he might visit the remarkable collection on the Hudson. The German literary scholar Julius Petersen, visiting professor at Yale during the year 1912/13, also saw the collection and arranged for part of it to be exhibited at the University. Hanns Oertel, another native German and dean of the Yale Graduate School, lent his support to the project, as did Alfred Lawrence Ripley, Yale Class of 1878, who had taught German at Yale before becoming a banker and Fellow of the Yale Corporation. Within a year, Yale had negotiated the acquisition of the Speck Collection, bringing William Speck to New Haven as its first curator. These events are documented in the correspondence files of Marian Whitney, John Christopher Schwab, Julius Peterson, Hanns Oertel, Anson Phelps Stokes, and the material filed under Yale University, Office of the Secretary, which includes the drafts of the original contract between Speck and Yale.