Hannah Arendt's Library

   I recently posted some photographs of the libraries of Eric Hobsbawn and William T. Vollman and here is another one. This one belonged to Hannah Arendt and it looks to be sizeable. I wondered what happened to those books.

  When she died in 1975 the books were acquired by Bard College. There were about 4,000 of them and "Of particular significance are the 900+ volumes containing marginal notes or lining, endnotes or ephemera, as well as many volumes inscribed to her by Martin Heidegger, Gershom Scholem, W.H. Auden and Randall Jarrell, among others."

Sources: 
  The photograph is found in a review of a new book about Arendt: "A Dense Life of Hannah Arendt Doesn’t Justify Its Prodigious Research," by Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times, Aug. 12, 2026. The book is: HANNAH ARENDT: A Life of the Mind, by Thomas Meyer.
  For more details see Bard's description of the Hannah Arendt Personal Library. 
While many university libraries are hollowing out, a few are still collecting books and other material with intellectual and/or aesthetic value.

The Bonus: 
  You will note in it that a co-executor of Arendt's estate was Mary McCarthy. Her son was  a retired Professor Emeritus who taught at UWO/Western University and passed away in June 2026.
  Another, more detailed review is provided by David Denby in The New Yorker: "The Uses of Exile," Aug. 17, 2026. In it McCarthy is said to be Arendt's "closest American friend", and supported her after she was attacked when Eichmann in Jerusalem was published.