What do Charles Darwin, Maya Angelou, J. Edgar Hoover, Margaret Mead and T. S. Eliot have in common?

Signed letters from all of these individuals — and more than 200 other notable people — are part of the Ward M. Canaday Center’s new exhibition, “Letters of Luminaries: Notable Correspondence in the Collections of the Ward M. Canaday Center.”

The free, public exhibit opened last week and will be on display in the Canaday Center located in the Carlson Library on the UT Main Campus weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. through July 31, 2014.

“The signature of an important person from our past is a singular, proven connection to a significant individual’s life,” said Barbara Floyd, director of the Canaday Center. “There is a significance to those signatures that cannot be easily described, but which draws one to whatever it is they signed.”

The staff of the Canaday Center spent the past year culling through its 6,000 feet of manuscript collections to locate letters signed by important persons. They located letters from political leaders, business innovators, intellectuals, celebrities, sports figures, authors, foreign dignitaries and famous Toledoans.

The Canaday Center also organized a smaller exhibit titled “Celebrity Sightings” that features enlargements of signed photographs of famous people from the Canaday Center’s holdings; these include Orson Welles, Katherine Hepburn, H.G. Wells and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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