Many know of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, be it his spine-tingling tale of a raven calling out “Nevermore!” or the heart-gripping guilt of a murder driven to madness in Tell-Tale Heart. Poe’s writings have fascinated countless people of all ages for well over a century now, and Iowa Bibliophiles and University of Iowa’s Special Collections hope to present a Poe-themed event about one huge fan of his tales. 

The collection is from Thomas Ollive Mabbott, a scholar of Walt Whitman and John Milton, who is famous for his love for Baltimore writer Edgar Allan Poe. The Mabbott collection is about 27 linear feet of materials and covers a wide demographic of readings.

The collection came to the UI from Mabbott’s family during the late 1970s, said Peter Balestrieri, the head of Special Collection for Science Fiction & Popular Culture. Balestrieri curated the Mabbott Poe Collection.

“As a scholar, he is the Poe scholar,” Balestrieri said. “So if you’re working on Poe, whether you’re an undergrad, grad student, or professor, sooner or later you have to come to Mabbott.”

Balestrieri will be leading “The Man Who Loved Poe: Thomas Mabbott” event for the public Oct. 9. He plans to showcase many of Mabbott’s essays, collectible books, and Poe-themed correspondences to the public.

“Thomas Ollive Mabbott was an academic, he was a collector, and he was a fan,” Balestrieri said. “Those are the three parts of my talk. I’m dividing him and the collection up in scholar, collector, and fan.”

This love for Poe lead Mabbott into a collection of not just magazines, books, and pamphlets Poe wrote for, but also anything published from the time period that may have inspired some of these chilling stories. Outreach & Engagement Librarian and a member of Iowa Bibliophile Elizabeth Riordan said she was blown away by the amount of variety that is found in the Mabbott’s Collection.

“He [Mabbott] was collecting a bunch of work around the time period when Poe was alive,” Riordan said. “You’ll find the most bizarre things in this collection, things like animal magnetism, things about spiritualism, all of these things that were really big when Poe was alive that might have inspired his own work.”

When planning this months Iowa Bibliophile event, Riordan said it was an easy choice to use the Poe Mabbott collection as the theme for October.

“I try and make it a little thematic if I can. I think [about] The Raven every time Halloween comes around,” Riordan said. “Poe is such a good solid subject matter. He’s fascinating. I’m really interested in what Pete [Balestrieri] will say about the man who studied Poe.”

Poe’s work has stood the test of time, fascinating academics like Mabbott, but the poet still haunts new readers even more than a century after his death. UI Horror Writing professor and author Bennett Sims said he thinks Poe remains in the modern literary atmosphere due to his way of capturing how the mind can work.

“Something that Poe captures well is the hyper-rationality of madness,” Sims said.  “The way, you can keep reasoning from inside unreason, marshaling uncanny coincidences, echoes, and phantasms in a mirror image of a logical argument.”

This look at a diehard Poe fan will be all the talk at Oct. 9 at 6:30 p.m. at the UI Special Collections and University Archives, where The Man Who Loved Poe will be on full display.