The “Merrell-Wolff Library” consists of those books and periodicals found on the shelves of Wolff’s office. At the time of his death, this included the works in his personal collection, those of his wives, and a number of items that had been gifted to him over the years. It does not include any of his own productions (or those of his wives), which are listed elsewhere in the Wolff Archive.

The Merrell-Wolff Library Catalogue contains 965 entries that are sorted by author, with a few periodicals incorporated into the list by title. Some records include an explanatory note. The entries have not been partitioned by ownership, although in most cases this is evident. Works that were referenced by Wolff in one or more of his written or audio productions may be regarded as part of his personal library. Items published in the 1970s and 1980s—when Wolff’s eyesight was failing—are likely gifts or other volumes that found their way to the shelves after his death. Books that belonged to Wolff’s wives can be discerned by attention to their unique interests. For example, Wolff’s first wife, Sherifa, was associated with the work of Alice Bailey, which is well represented in the Wolff Library; older novels (such as those by Marie Corelli), were also Sherifa’s books (other than a few science fiction works, Wolff did not read much fiction). A number of older biographies that belong to Sherifa are not included here. Wolff’s second wife, Gertrude, had an interest in music and other arts, as well as the history of her family, which she believed traced back to John Adams. The catalogue also contains a number of book series that belonged to Gertrude (such as the Time-Life and Newsweek collections). Some of Gertrude’s books (such as her Reader’s Digest compendiums and an assortment of biographies) are not included in the catalogue.

The Merrell-Wolff Library Catalogue is based on three sources of information about the books and periodicals in Wolff’s office.[1] The first is an inventory generated from scans of the title and/or cover page of each item on the shelves in the office (a total of 1394 scans were made over three days in June 2013). A bibliographic list was compiled using these scans, which in some cases did not reveal all of the facts of an item’s publication. It was also evident that a good number of items that Wolff regularly cited had not been found during this inventory, notably Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, the Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition), a volume of The Secret Doctrine, many works by Aurobindo and Jung, all but one of Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan titles, and many others. In addition, Wolff’s references and other records indicate that his library included runs of the Theosophist, The Temple Artisan, The Herald of Light, The Disciple, and other journals and magazines that were not found during the scanning process.

It may be the case that some of Wolff’s students—per his wishes—removed books from the office after his death. Other titles (some quite valuable) may have been sold by his family or taken for their personal collections. It is also likely that many periodicals have been discarded. In light of this situation, all of Wolff’s written and recorded work was scoured for citations to references that were not scanned. In addition, old photographs of Wolff’s office were used to identify missing works. Finally, the bibliography of the 2009 draft of Doroethy Leonard’s biography of Wolff refers to works that were not found. With this information, a list of 131 missing items was compiled, and this register is the second source used to produce the Wolff Library Catalogue. Records added to the catalogue on this basis are marked with an ending asterisk (‘*’).

The third source of information comes from a flyer in the Wolff Archive titled “The Merrell-Wolff Library” that lists “Books and Manuscripts from East and West” for circulation, reference or sale. This list is from the time that Wolff and his first wife were involved with Inayat Khan’s Sufi Order of the West (1923). There are 22 records added to the catalogue on the basis of their listing on this flyer, and these records are marked with an ending double asterisk (‘**’).

Endnotes