The Niver collection is a wide-ranging collection of publications, photocopies, literary and other journals, manuscripts, letters, programs, newspaper clippings, newsletters, and photographs touching on four lives -- that of Walt Whitman in his later years; that of Horace Traubel, Whitman's amanuensis; that of Gertrude Traubel, Horace's daughter, a singer and editor of her father's work; and finally that of Joseph Niver, admirer of Horace Traubel and editor of a literary/radical journal, Earth.