In November of 1993, Paul Heinerscheid, the honorary
Consul of Luxembourg for Minnesota, representing the Luxembourg Heritage Society of
America, presented to the University of St. Thomas a collection of more than 270 books,
periodicals, and maps related to the history and civilization of Luxembourg.
The Department of Special Collections in the
O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library was chosen as the recipient of this collection because St.
Thomas is a Catholic, urban university (Luxembourgers almost exclusively are Catholic)
located in the heart of the area of Luxembourger settlement in the United States. The
society intended this gift to constitute the core of a collection of Luxembourg materials
which the university and the society together would develop in order to make St. Thomas a
center of Luxembourg studies in North America.
The core collection was purchased by the society from Dr.
Julian Plante, a Luxembourg-American, formerly head of the Hill Monastic Manuscript
Library at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. Maria Bach Dunn, born in
Luxembourg and the wife of James Taylor Dunn, former head of the Minnesota Historical
Society Library, provided the Luxembourg Heritage Society with the funds necessary to
purchase the collection. In January of 1994, she and her husband also made an additional
gift of almost 200 items acquired during the course of their 45-year marriage.
Subsequently, Mrs. Dunn established a generous endowment for the collection in memory of
her brother Camille Bach, 1904-1993, also born in Luxembourg.
There is considerable variety both in the subject matter
of the collection and the languages in which its constituent works were written. Thus the
user will find books of art, bibliography and biography; children's literature, genealogy
(family history), and general and local history; heraldry, language, literature and
travel; plus atlases, maps, sheet music, newspapers, and periodicals.
Roughly 60 percent of the collection's titles appear in
French, 20 percent in English, 10 percent in German, and 8 percent in Luxembourgeois, the
Germanic tongue, with many early-Celtic, Latin, and French influences, so widely spoken by
persons in "Greater Luxembourg" (the area of the present Grand-Duchy and of
roughly 1,000 adjacent square miles in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany). The
remainder of the collection is comprised of works in other languages or in multi-language
formats.
The "Bach-Dunn Collection of Luxembourgiana"
was dedicated at the conclusion of a day of festivities on December 18, 1994. His Royal
Highness, Crown Prince Henri of Luxembourg; Mrs. and Mr. Dunn; and His Excellency Alphonse
Berns, Luxembourg Ambassador to the United States; were among the dignitaries who
participated in the day's events.
Subsequent donations from individuals and organizations
in Luxembourg and the United States, and purchases made from the Bach-Dunn and other
endowments, have increased the size of the collection to over 1,900 volumes.
For more information or assistance in your research, please
contact the Special Collections Department by electronic mail
(amkenne1@stthomas.edu), regular post (Mail 5004,
University of St. Thomas, 2115 Summit Ave. St, Paul, MN 55105-1096), or phone
(651-962-5467).
The Bach-Dunn Collection
