Eaton Collection

}} J. Lloyd Eaton was a pulmonologist specializing in the treatment of tuberculosis. While still in high school he collected science fiction and fantasy pulp literature. By the 1940s he communicated with book dealers in London and New York to acquire more books, expanding to the detective and western genres at a time when science fiction was an obscure interest. Eaton had particular interest in stories of future war or lost race from before the 1920s by authors such as John Polidori, Frank Aubrey, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Eaton was also the first president of the Elves, Gnomes, and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder, and Marching Society, and served as the editor of the group's sercon fanzine, The Rhodomagnetic Digest. When Eaton's family sought a home for his collection, science fiction was considered an inferior literary product—pleasant enough as a diversion, but unworthy of serious academic study. As even public libraries did not regularly acquire science fiction, there was no comprehensive collection available anywhere outside of private hands. ==History of the collection==

Dr. Eaton's collection, acquired by UCR's University Librarian Donald Wilson in 1969, consisted of about 7,500 hardback editions of science fiction, fantasy, and horror from the late nineteenth century to 1955. The development of the collection continued under University Librarian Eleanor Montague, who created the position of Eaton Curator, hiring for the position George Slusser, a Harvard-trained literary scholar. When Hal W. Hall catalogued the growing Eaton Collection in 1975 for his then-upcoming Anatomy of Wonder bibliography, he determined the collection consisted of "over 8,500 volumes, and is particularly rich in early and scarce items published from 1870 to 1930, along with some important eighteenth-century titles." During Slusser's 25-year curatorship, the Eaton collection grew to more than 100,000 volumes, ranging from the 1517 edition of Thomas More's Utopia to the most recently published titles. The collection includes first editions of Bram Stoker's Dracula, H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Fantastic Four #1, and Action Comics #1. Foreign works of science fiction have been added systematically, including works in Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish. The collection also includes journals, comic books, and fanzines, primarily acquired as donations from collectors Terry Carr, Bruce Pelz, Fred Patten, and Rick Sneary. In 2014, George Slusser was asked how he assembled the world's largest SF collection: "By silence, exile and cunning", he replied. "And I did have allies in the library, who found funds to buy books, even when academics sought to block purchases. Librarians love books, and SF had a lot of them, with interesting covers and formats." ==Eaton Conference on Speculative Fiction==

As part of its scholarly mission, the Eaton Collection hosts the Eaton Conference on Speculative Fiction, which was inaugurated in 1979 The Conference has produced more than twenty volumes of critical essays, From 2009-2013 the conference was held biennially during odd-number years. Following another hiatus, this time a decade long, graduate students and faculty in UCR's English department organized the return of the Eaton Conference, starting with a one-day Eaton Symposium on Speculative Fiction held May 25, 2024. The conference made a more formal return the following year, with a two day conference held April 4th-5th, 2025 on the theme “Reimagining the Archive”. ==Eaton Award==

The now biennial conference sponsors the J. Lloyd Eaton Memorial Award. From 1979 to 2001 it recognized the "best critical book of each year", although it was not precisely annual. From 2008 it is a lifetime achievement award, in full the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction, recognizing "contributions of lasting significance to the field". The four recipients to 2011 were Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl, Samuel R. Delany, and Harlan Ellison. Ursula K. Le Guin is the Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award winner for 2012. Both Ray Harryhausen and Stan Lee have been named for 2013 "to honor both science fiction film culture and science fiction comic book culture". ==See also==