For a last minute whirlwind journey before fall semester in grad school began, I trekked via several modes of transportation (train, plane, automobile, and Greyhound bus) to New York City and back. The primary reason was to visit the newly-accessible collection of papers that Emmett Grogan left with his friend Harvey Kornspan in 1968 before taking off for new horizons, never to return and retrieve the odd stash of documents. Instead, Harvey sold the collection in 2014 to a London dealer of ephemera who in turn “placed” it with the Special Collections department at the New York Public Library. Located in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building (the main branch of NYPL) at 42nd street and Fifth Avenue, the Special Collections department is impressive and spans three floors in numerous divisions. Over a four-day period, I studied all the documents in the Emmett Grogan Papers and made several discoveries that will be of interest to historians and bibliographers of the Digger movement. I will make a report in the coming weeks/months in this blog space.

First, the only two photographs contained in the papers, these are of Emmett before he arrived in San Francisco. I thought it appropriate to share these first. Thanks to Max, Emmett’s son and heir, for permission to publish these here.