The St. Louis Mercantile Library has been an avid collector of these narratives almost since its beginnings. In fact, one of the early scholars in the field was Horace Kephart, Head Librarian of the Mercantile from 1890 to 1904. Kephart built the captivity narrative collection and the general collections on the history of the American Indian into an extremely strong body of research material. He used this collection in his own edition of such classic accounts, Captives Among the Indians (1915). It was left to Gifford, buying from such scholarly bookselling firms as that of William Harvey Miner in St. Louis, to round out these collections. But even long before Kephart, much captivity lore came to the Library. John Dyer, Librarian here in the 1860's and 1870's, for example, bought heavily in a succession of Americana book auctions-most notably at the sale in New York in 1876 of noted ethnologist E. George Squier's personal library.

The following selective checklist is meant to show some of the strengths of the collection, and how it has grown since the first edition of Adventures and Sufferings in 1988 and especially to call attention to some lesser known titles which have captivity narrative content. It accompanies a new exhibition which has brought together briefly once again one of the most romantic of all forms of Americana physically an on the Mercantile Library's and the Woodcock Foundation for the Appreciation of the Arts's websites. Both sites continue to highlight American studies and art. As usual many people were responsible for making this exhibition possible. Robert Behra, former Mercantile Library Cataloguer, deserves particular thanks in verifying authors' names and in solving a myriad of fine points concerning the earlier edition of this catalogue. Likewise Sidney F. Huttner, formerly Curator, Special Collections at The University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library and now at the University of Iowa, was kind to offer his help and advice. Perhaps most of the credit goes, however, to a series of Librarians here at the Mercantile in the early part of this century who brought this collection together for us, and to such later ones as Clarence Miller, Elizabeth Kirchner, and Charles Bryan who ensured its preservation for future generations of scholars. Thanks should be extended as well for the new edition and its associated digital formats to Christopher Dames of the Reference staff of the University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries; James P. Rhodes, Manuscript Curator of the St. Louis Mercantile Library, Marybeth Brown, and Lisa Mosby, Graduate Research Assistantship holders at the Mecantile, and as always, Jerry Maschon and Chelmsford Printing.

Today, thanks to the affiliation between the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association, more scholarly use of the collections has been made in the past five years than in the previous five generations of the Library's history and the institution's potential as a research center is becoming increasingly realized. Thus it is with pleasure that we could time the reprinting of one of the Mercantile's most successful past catalogues to the use of the Indian captivity collections in a special, ongoing readings seminar (History 403) organized by the history department and the Mercantile, and I wish to dedicate this new edition to the group of graduate students who studied Indian captivity literature this fall in my class, and who read and interpreted this age-old prose through the eyes and emotions of a new century-one in which the old tales seem to have added relevance for the cultural and human truths and insight they impart to the reader.

John Neal Hoover

Director

November 7, 2002