Rhetoric-Lit: The motherlode

Ohio State University’s library houses speechwriting guru-of-guru Jerry Tarver’s 3,000-book “Elocution, Rhetoric and Oratory Collection.”

Most of the books are from before 1900, and the collection contains “many rare and some unique items … notably, extensive paper ephemera dealing with elocutionary performance.”

Click here to peruse the collection, on which Tarver is still working, happily and gratefully.

“It’s a hoot getting all this together,” he tells Vital Speeches. “And the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Ohio State has my total respect for its willingness to preserve, along with obviously important literary material, items that tell us something about the byways of our culture.”