Special Collections & Archives: Lininger Children's Literature Collection

Items from the Lininger Children's Literature collection were donated to the Lipscomb Library by Fred and Nancy Kirkpatrick Lininger, R-MWC class of 1938. 

Lininger spent more than four decades of her life building a collection of more than 2,400 volumes of children's literature, simply because she wanted her children to grow up surrounded by books.  Primarily focusing on 20th-century publications, Lininger collected first editions of every Newberry Medal winner and all but six Caldecott Medal winners between 1922 and the early 1990's, in addition to many rare editions dating to the late 1800's.

As well as providing a rich resource for anyone pursuing children's literary studies, the titles in this collection provide a look at the cultural evolution of storytelling and illustration techniques during last century. 

A few favorite titles from this collection include:

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll with illustrations by John Tenniel, 1876
• The Old Woman Who Lost Her Dumpling, Japanese Fairy Tale series rendered into English by Lafcadio Hearn, 1903
• Winnie-the-Pooh, written by A.A. Milne with illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard, 1926
• Just So Stories for Little Children, written by Rudyard Kipling with illustrations by Nicolas Mordvinoff, 1952
• A Child's Garden of Verses, written by Robert Louis Stevenson with illustrations by Charles Robinson, 1896
• The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again, written and illustrated by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1938