The Mel B. Yoken Collection: Belles letters in profusion

We recently had the honor and pleasure of meeting Professor Mel. B Yoken — the very same Mel B. Yoken whose collection of 200,000 letters from great personages is housed at Brown University.

The Mel. B. Yoken Collection was profiled, some years ago, in The Indy, a Brown student newspaper, by Ellora Vilkin. The full article is online. Here are snippets:

DEAR MEL

One man. 200,000 letters.

There was a time when people wrote letters. So when Mel Yoken, then studying for a Masters degree in French at Brown University, sent a letter to Jules Romains in 1961, he wasn’t surprised to get one back. He had just read Romains’s play Knock, ou le triomphe de la médicine in a literature class and, having “laughed [his] you-know-what off,” wrote Romains to tell him so. Yoken recalls the exchange easily: “He wrote me back and I wrote him back and we started a friendship. And over the years, thousands and thousands of friendships have started that way.”

The resultant correspondence forms the peculiar Mel B. Yoken Collection, housed in the Hay since 1999. With new boxes of letters arriving each year, the archive now holds the missives of some 4,000 French, Spanish, American, Canadian, Scottish, Irish, and British luminaries. More recently, Yoken has enriched his personal correspondence with purchased items from some of history’s greats: the archives now contain letters from Zola, Monet, Matisse, and others bought at auction. Most, though, are written in English and French and addressed directly to Yoken; at last count, there were more than 200,000.

Post man

Yoken, 74, stands in the lobby of the Hay wearing a sensible blue suit and square-toed shoes. He gestures towards the Reading Room with a sweep of his arm and an “après-vous.” A Fall River, RI native, he has just driven up from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, where he is Chancellor Professor Emeritus of French.

Besides his archives, Yoken loves baseball, collects postcards and stamps, and dabbles in meteorology. “Every single day of my life for the past 55 years—90 percent correct,” he boasts. As for the letters, he says they sprang from his natural curiosity. “I always wanted to get to the crux of the poem or the paragraph or the play. If I read a poem and I didn’t understand a line or something, I would write to the author,” he explains. The practice served him well while at Brown. “I always got good grades because I’d added quotes from the authors,” he chuckles….

In 2010, the John Hay Library mounted a special exhibition of letters from The Mel B. Yoken Collection. The Library issued a proud announcement of the event:

For academic as well as personal reasons, Dr. Mel B. Yoken has been in correspondence with thousands of notable individuals from around the world over the past five decades, and has collected their letters to create an invaluable archive in the Mel B. Yoken Room on the third floor of the John Hay Library. This exhibition, which is located on the first floor of the library near the entrance, offers a small glimpse of the collection, which ultimately consists of more than 200,000 sheets of correspondence from notables worldwide.

These letters are of extremely significant historical value, as they are clearly one-of-a-kind, and offer insight into the minds of some of the world’s most influential people, present and past; therefore, this exhibit is something one should not miss.

The collection is also featured in the library’s guide to “Special Collections of the Brown University Library” [see the image, above, which reproduces part of that announcement].

Professor Yoken informs us (1) that the collection has now grown to include more than 400,000 letters, and (2) that he is happily, almost constantly adding new items to it.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that those two totals — 200,000 or 400,000 — represent approximately ten (10) or twenty (20) letters per day, every day, over what is now a span of approximately sixty (60) years.

BONUS: Here’s Mel on Chinese TV:

EXTRA BONUS: Here’s Mel with Sha Rene’ and Meryl Streep:

BONUS (mostly unrelated): Postal experiments