What Does It All Mean?

On July 1, The Providence Public Library became a different institution. As has been reported in the news, we have turned over the 10 neighborhood branches to a group calling themselves the Providence Community Library (GIVING them all the books, computers, and furniture in the buildings and leasing those buildings for minuscule sums). While everyone hopes they can make a go of it (because NO ONE likes it when a library closes), there are simply no guarantees. But the branches are now their problem.

The Central Library, where I work, and which contains over 1 million items, has experienced an almost 70% staff reduction, and so a crew of 32 people are attempting, rather valiantly, to do what more than 80 people did a few weeks ago.

So, my posting has slowed down because I have more work to do in general. Readers can add our story to the nationwide plight of libraries--all libraries--no matter what funding streams or sources (private or public) they have, what leadership they are under, or what socio-economic slice of the public they serve.

In this emerging time of trimmed budgets, streamlined functions, and general re-tooling, I am often under a bit more pressure to explain why special collections is still vital--and I suppose I'll be using this blog as more of a think-through-it venue than a "look what I found" dump, which is how it started.

Top of the Heap

The unofficial motto of the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is “give, get, or get out.” A seat on it will run you at least $10 million. The boards of non-profits in Providence should take note of it, as a sort of stellar goal to which they might aspire. This is the mentality of a serious institution--one which, after 138 years, has an endowment worth several billion dollars, a staff of almost 2,000, generates almost $300 million in revenue per year, is visited by over five million people a year, and can actually claim to be “the most encyclopedic, universal art museum in the world” (bar none).

Of course, “The Met,” as everyone knows it, has been at the pinnacle of New York’s socio-cultural scene for generations, counting among its benefactors old families like Morgan, Rockefeller, Astor, and Houghton. Its challenge now, says Michael Gross, who has charted a fine topography of the major players of the Met’s history in Rogues’ Gallery, is to find the right path to its own identity going forward. It is a challenge shared by many institutions with similar missions—how can an organization based on traditional cultural values and aesthetics make itself relevant as those values and aesthetics morph and change beyond recognition?

Gross had to approach writing Rogues’ Gallery as an investigative reporter does with powerful people unwilling to cooperate. Phillipe de Montebello, who was director of the Met when Gross began his inquiries in 2006, said “the museum has no secrets.” And yet, some months before, the curatorial staff had been told not to speak to Gross. “With the stakes so high and money and egos involved so big,” writes Gross, “the Met has always had to operate in the shade, whether it was acquiring art under questionable circumstances, dealing with donors hoping to launder very sketchy reputations, or merely trying to appear above reproach in a world where behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that a sin or a crime.”

Excavating the Met’s history in six chapters from 1870 to 2009, Gross reveals the personalities and relationships between donors and directors, curators and dealers, and the city of New York and its cultural crown jewel. It is astonishing what people will do for money, power, and social prominence, and we see a great deal of what they will do in Rogues’ Gallery. In the end, Gross wants the Met to succeed—he is not lobbing stones at the cathedral, but rather revealing what the men and women at the pulpit have been up to behind closed doors.

I Walk the Line

Conventional wisdom (or, What We Are Taught In Library School) about special collections includes a cardinal rule: the stacks (i.e. shelves) are NOT browseable.

This idea is reinforced with every report of rare book theft and at every conference which touches on security.

What bothers me is that, of all the places in a library, special collections is the place where browsing can generate the MOST inspiration. Especially when you are dealing with the sort of patrons who are using my collections the most: ARTISTS.

An artist, unlike a scholar, does not generally welcome the idea of searching, be it through an online or card catalog. Artists need to SEE what they are looking at, and often need to touch it as well.

What I want is a way to let the patrons browse the books without worrying about security. The few times I have let this happen, controlling it as much as possible, there have been fabulous results--very excited people who revere the materials and respect them for what they are, and use them to further or even engender their creative or intellectual projects.

THAT is the great function of special collections.

My 15 minutes

A nice article about PPL's special collections in today's Providence Journal (original link followed by text):

Bob Kerr: The third floor is where the treasure is
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 28, 2009

http://www.projo.com/news/bobkerr/kerr_column_28_06-28-09_TNERTTD_v13.2bca026.html

Sometimes, it takes an out-of-towner to find the treasures the locals pass by. It takes fresh eyes to see past the familiar, everyday blur. So Piper Smith, a social worker from New York, found the Providence Public Library. Then she found a room on the third floor where a person could get lost for days, maybe weeks. "I love libraries," she told me earlier this week by phone from New York. "And we went up and this man was very kind and we asked if we could look around. He was so welcoming. He showed us all over."

Smith was in Providence to visit her twin sons, Raber and Taylor Umphenour, and Raber's fiancie, Jenni Katajamaki. And when Piper and Raber and Jenni met Phil Weimerskirch on the third floor of the library they brought together more than just an incredible mix of surname syllables. They brought together a shared fascination with timeless works on paper.

In Special Collections at the public library, you can pick up a first edition of Charles Dickens' Little Dorritt in serialized format complete with advertisements. There is the history of printing collection and the Irish literature and folklore collection. There are more than 10,000 items on the Civil War and the history of slavery. There are shelves and shelves of whaling logs that tell in very personal and immediate ways of the often brutal life aboard whaling ships on their years-long voyages. In the children's collection, there is a German book with a xylophone inside.

"Row upon row of mind-bending rarity," says Richard Ring of the things that surround him. Ring is director of Special Collections. Weimerskirch is director emeritus and works part-time and is due to be laid off as part of the brutal cuts at the library. Together, they represent one of those wonderful corners of learning that allows us to feel and smell and settle in with the work of centuries.

Ring handed me a small volume titled Traits De Jeu de Dames A La Polonois. It's about the international game of checkers. There are drawings. It was once owned by Marie Antoinette. She held it, and I held it. I'm going back. I want to sit down with a whaling log. But if not for Piper Smith I would have been just another of those people passing by without a clue as to the rich possibilities close by.

Actually, it was her daughter-in-law-to-be that pointed her toward the library. Katajamaki is a graduate in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. She studies buildings. She considers the public library at Washington and Empire streets one of the most beautiful and well preserved buildings in the city. And she considers Special Collections and all its enriching books special and fantastic. "There was a medieval manuscript," she said. "There are only three in the world. Usually, things like that are under glass. You can't touch them."

Smith contacted The Journal after her visit to the library. She thinks people should be more aware of what's really there. She finds it sad that more people don't use it. She also finds it sad that the library staff, including Phil Weimerskirch, is being so drastically reduced. "He was so kind and generous with his time," she said. While she was there, she looked at a first edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter.

By the nature of its priceless inventory, Special Collections is not a place for school field trips. It's not a drop-in part of the library, although Ring says if he's there and you ask, he'll be happy to show you around. But due to all the staff cuts, he has been given additional duties at the library. An appointment is a good idea. If you go, you will meet a man passionate about the treasure over which he presides. He speaks of the "materiality of books."

It is a small world he works in, says Ring. But it is a very interesting world and one where the gentleman's handshake still means something. There was a Dutchman who had a book that Ring says was worth two times his annual salary at least. And the Dutchman told him to take the book and check it out "It's based on trust," he said.

So, too, is the use of the material in Special Collections. People are trusted to treat the books with respect and clean hands. Ring is never far away. This is his domain. He does everything -- from writing grants to putting books on the shelves. He came to the public library from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University in November 2007. "I knew we had good stuff here, really excellent stuff."

It is that, all right. This part of the library is a place to stop and slide out a book and think about where it's been as well as what it teaches. There is a feeling of reverence. As we moved among the stacks, Ring took a book from a shelf. It's the memo book of the chief surgeon in the Confederate hospital at Richmond. It tells of the war in a way historians cannot. And it is just one small piece of this quiet, thoughtful place that so enriches its city.

I want to thank Piper Smith for telling me that it's there.

The Press in the United States, Part III

The following is a transcription (Part III of III) of an article by Lawrence Wroth in his "Notes for Bibliophiles" column in the New York Herald Tribune, which ran 70 years ago.

The Press in the United States: A Perfect Tercentenary Exhibition, Part III (Conclusion)
[September 10, 1939]

In this department for Aug. 13 and 27 we indulged ourselves with the idea of setting up, with books borrowed from many libraries in this country and England, an exhibition of the first and unusual issues of the Colonial American press to celebrate the tercentenary of its establishment at Cambridge, Mass., in 1639. In those two articles we discussed the early presses of Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina. We continue with the story of the other colonies in which the printing press was found before the conclusion of the Revolution.

The press in New Jersey was established in 1754. Its earliest issue was "The Votes and Proceedings of the Assembly of New Jersey" of April, 1754, issued in the year named by James Parker, who had just moved his establishment to Woodbridge, in that colony. Again the Public Record Office in London would have to be drawn upon for a copy of this first New Jersey imprint for display in our exhibition. We have already spoken of Parker in connection with printing in New York, as one of the most skillful and enterprising printers of the colonies.

The press in New Hampshire was begun by Daniel Fowle, a printer of Boston, who, in 1754, issued a pamphlet entitled "The Monster of Monsters," by Thomas Thumb, which was held to reflect upon the Massachusetts Assembly. After his pamphlet had been condemned and burned by the hangman and Fowle had been reprimanded, jailed, and ordered to pay costs, he turned his back upon Boston and settled with his press in Portsmouth, N. H. The earliest issue of his press in that place was the prospectus of a newspaper. No copy of that prospectus is now known, so that the first number of the newspaper itself, dated Oct. 7, 1756, must be regarded as the earliest known production of the New Hampshire press.

A journeyman printer named James Adams, after several years of service, left the firm of Franklin & Hall, of Philadelphia, in 1761, and went to Wilmington, Del., where, soon afterward, he announced that he had published a schoolbook, a ready reckoner, the "Wilmington Almanack for 1762" and a piece called "The Advice of Evan Ellis to his Daughter when at Sea." No copies remain of the ready reckoner or the spelling book, but two at least of the known imprints of Adams's first year are represented by actual copies. Four libraries, among them the Wilmington Institute Free Library and the American Antiquarian Society, are known to possess copies of the "Almanack," and the John Carter Brown Library has a broadside entitled "The Advice of Evan Ellis to his Daughter when at Sea," printed by James Adams in Wilmington, which, in all probability, is from the edition in question. Perhaps the best known issue of the Wilmington press in the eighteenth century was the celebrated "Discovery, Settlement and present State of Kentucke," by John Filson, which James Adams printed in 1784, though the great map of Kentucky that went with it was engraved and printed in Philadelphia.

Though James Johnston went to Georgia in 1762 and received the appointment of printer to that colony, it is probable that he was not equipped with press and type at that time. At any rate, it was not until April, 1763, that he began the publication of a newspaper, and it was only in June of that year that he printed a group of acts of the Georgia Assembly, some of which had been passed four years earlier. It is generally assumed that the first of these to be mentioned in Johnston's advertisement—that is, "An Act to prevent Stealing of Horses and Meat Cattle"—is the earliest Georgia imprint other than the "Georgia Gazette." Copies of this act and of others of the group are found in the John Carter Brown and the Massachusetts Historical Society libraries.

The first press in Louisiana was set up in New Orleans at that critical moment in the history of the colony when France was in process of ceding it to Spain. The earliest piece brought out by Denis Braud, the first New Orleans printer, was a broadside of 1764 entitled "Extrait de la Lettre du Roi, a M. Dabbadie." This was a notification to the Director General of the colony that Louisiana had been ceded to Spain—tragic news for the French settlers of Louisiana. The only known copy of that broadside is described by Douglas C. McMurtrie in "Early Printing in New Orleans" as in the Louisiana collection of Edward Alexander Parsons, of New Orleans. The early history of the press in Louisiana is of unusual interest because of its participation in the political changes of a period through which the country was, in turn, French, Spanish, French and American.

If we are to pay attention to present-day boundaries, the press in Vermont began in Westminster in 1780 with a Thanksgiving proclamation for that year printed by Judah Padock Spooner and Timothy Green. The beginnings of Vermont printing, however, are more interesting than this, for the first Vermont press was actually established in New Hampshire in the town of Dresden, now called Hanover. At that time Vermont was claiming as hers both banks of the Connecticut River, and Dresden lay on the eastern bank of the river, within the debatable territory. Here in the fall of 1778 the newly established Vermont Republic brought Alden Spooner, a printer of New London, and during the next two years that printer took an active part in the struggle of the Vermont settlers against the governments of New York and New Hampshire in carrying on what was known as the New Hampshire Grants controversy. A thanksgiving proclamation dated Oct. 18, 1778, and a sermon preached by Eden Burroughs, entitled "A sincere Regard to Righteousness and Piety," are the earliest known issues of the Dresden press. A copy of the thanksgiving proclamation could be displayed only by courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library, but either the Library of the University of Vermont or the John Carter Brown Library could be called upon to lend a copy of the Eden Burroughs sermon.

A short-lived printing establishment was set up in Florida when, in 1783, William Charles and John Wells, sons of a loyalist printer and newspaper publisher of Charleston, S. C., fled before the American occupation of that city under Gen. Nathaniel Green. Together with many other South Carolina loyalists, they went to the British colony of East Florida and at St. Augustine began the publication of "The East Florida Gazette" in February, 1783. In 1784 two pamphlets are known to have come from the press. Probably the first of these was Samuel Gale's "Essay II, On the Nature and Principles of Public Credit." The other was the "Case of the Inhabitants of East Florida," which is a presentation of the claims to compensation of the loyalists, an unhappy group who had hardly settled and taken up land in East Florida when they found the country ceded by Great Britain to Spain as the result of the Treaty of Paris. It would not be impossible to make a good showing of these early Florida imprints. A few numbers of "The East Florida Gazette," the first St. Augustine newspaper, are found in the Public Record Office, London. The New York Public Library and the John Carter Brown Library have copies of the "Case of the Inhabitants of East Florida." The only known copy of Gale's "Essay II" in the St. Augustine edition, is in the possession of Mr. Thomas W. Streeter, of Morristown, N. J., who also owns a copy of the "Case of the Inhabitants."

An exhibition of printing in the colonies would be incomplete without reference to certain foreign presses which operated in different parts of the country, especially in Pennsylvania, where the German element was always strong, and where, toward the eighteenth century came great numbers of French refugees from Santo Domingo. The printing establishment of Christopher Sauer, the elder, was responsible for the publication, in 1743, of "Biblia, Das ist: Die Heilige Schrift Altes und Neues Testaments," the second Bible known with certainty to have been printed in America and the first to be published in a European language. The press of the Seventh Day Baptists Monastery, at Ephrata, Pa., began about the year 1745 a long series of books of great interest in the religious and social history of the Pennsylvania Germans. Among these was "Der Blutige Schau-Platz," printed by the Ephrata brothers for the Mennonites of Pennsylvania. Completed in 1748, this book of 1,512 pages was the largest issue of the press in colonial America.

Among the notable French presses of Philadelphia was that established by Fleury Mesplet in 1774, and used by the Continental Congress for its propaganda addressed to the French of Canada. Later in the century, after the Santo Domingan revolution, the press of Moreau de St. Mery issued a number of extremely interesting political and sociological books. In Philadelphia, and in Boston also, French newspapers were published in the eighteenth century, and many pamphlets of interest to refugees from the West Indies and from France were issued.

The exhibition we have discussed in these three articles in "Notes for Bibliophiles" would represent material of fundamental, social and literary interest in the life and history of the United States, and would celebrate the beginnings of one of the most important present-day industries of the country.