Paul Merchant
"Individuals leave behind records of their creative thought in a wide variety of fields: in paintings, sculptures, books, handwritten journals, architectural designs and civic planning in formal gardens, in exploration and the history of scientific discovery. Less attractively, individuals have entered history through military adventures, as dictators, and by theft on a national scale. All of us great and small, leave our mark. It was with these thoughts in mind that I began collecting the relics of a German physicist who died in Breslau in 1827." - Paul Merchant, "Acquisition History"
Paul Merchant, who donated this collection to Lewis & Clark College in 2018, was born in Wales and taught for many years at Warwick University. Since 1988 he has lived in Oregon, where he was Director of the William Stafford Archives in Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College. His volumes from Five Seasons Press include Bone from a Stag’s Heart (1988 Poetry Book Society Recommendation), Some Business of Affinity (2006 Oregon Book Award finalist), and Bread & Caviar (2016). His translations from Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, and Welsh have been published by Five Seasons, Trask House, and Tavern Books.
Starting in 1985, with half a dozen teaching exchanges in Breslau (now the southern Polish city of Wroc?aw), Paul became aware of Ernst Chladni's presence in the city at the end of his life by looking through the British Museum catalogue Printing and the Mind of Man. For three decades, he collected various artifacts as examples of Chladni's scientific studies.
Along with gathering a plethora of Chladni's work, he was able to purchase three handwritten letters, one by Chladni himself, one by Johann Theodore Mosewius, and another by Ernst Heinrich Weber (a German physician who is considered one of the founders of experimental psychology). These letters along with a variety of materials can be found in the "Ernst Chladni Collection, 1777-2016," housed in the Lewis & Clark College Special Collections and Archives.