PAUL RUXIN
That famous Santayana warning about the past tells only half the story; sometimes repeating the past offers not doom, but promise. Although the lessons of the past are as useful a tool for special collections libraries and librarians as they are for other institutions and people, the collections themselves are the past, not merely remnants or memories, but survivors. What follows are merely three examples of how the special collections libraries of the future can benefit, and benefit their future clients, from paying attention to what has gone before.
On April 4, 2001, two divisions of the Library of Congress, the Center for the Book, and Rare Book and Special Collections, sponsored a Rare Book Forum at the Library. Moderated by Mark Dimunation, it presented three speakers, Alice Schreyer of the University of Chicago, special collections and rare book librarian; Bill Reese, of William Reese Company, dealer; and Robert Jackson, of Cleveland, collector and philanthropist. Their presentations are available and very much worth seeking out.1 All three papers are thoughtful and carry messages perhaps even more important now than when originally delivered.
Among the several points they addressed that current special collections libraries must confront today, one stands out: special collections libraries were seldom “collected” through patient acquisitions over many years by the libraries and their librarians. Building a collection requires a dedicated collector, a budget, and time. Great collections have most often been assembled by great collectors—Folger, Morgan, Huntington, Hyde-Eccles—and have by gift become part of institutional special collection libraries, which have continued to enhance the original gift. Some libraries, like the Newberry, are rightfully proud of being a “collection of collections,” representing many significant gifts, and purchases of collections built by others (e.g., the Harmsworth collection at Folger, or the Silver collection at Newberry. In general though, great collections have been built by collectors, not by librarians).
While there are still great private collections and collectors, the golden age of collecting is in the past. Moreover, many collectors, now as always, are torn between two altruistic impulses—the first, to preserve their collection intact for the use of future scholars, the second, to have their collection dispersed for the pleasure of future collectors. While both paths offer opportunities for special collection libraries, it is also true, as Bill Reese pointed out in 2001, that over time the supply of “rare” books—the heart of what makes a collection special—is shrinking, as they disappear into institutions, never again to be available for acquisition. Fewer collectors, fewer collections, fewer books—surely these are among the challenges libraries must meet in attending to the “we must build it so they will come” part of their mission. These circumstances make building relationships with collectors more important than ever, as acquisition budgets and potential donors both reflect diminishing numbers. The three speakers at the Library of Congress in 2001, had much good advice on this subject (as does Jon Lindseth, whose remarks are included in chapter 3 of this volume).
Let me offer some suggestions for meeting these challenges. First, special collections are not and ought not become museums. The books and manuscripts they contain are there to be used, not to be worshipped as relics. “Building” special collections must thus be broadly understood. In this context “building” is not limited to acquiring, displaying, and preserving the books and manuscripts themselves, but must also include encouraging collectors as well as cultivating, building bridges, and opening conversations among the libraries, and the collectors, dealers, and scholars whose collaboration will produce special collections that can achieve their optimal use when ultimately housed in a special collection library. Special collections librarians must regard establishing personal relationships with collectors, as well as with dealers, as a significant responsibility within their job descriptions. Major gifts, after all, seldom come from strangers. “Building” collections must also include expanding access to an expanded audience of potential users. Cataloging previously unfindable material and digitizing previously untouchable, fragile paper or parchment are the equivalents of acquiring something new. If the point of special collections is to preserve their holdings for use, rather than simply for viewing in exhibition cases, libraries, collectors, dealers, scholars, conservators, and technology experts must see themselves as part of the same enterprise, and must come to know each other, to respect each other, to encourage each other, and to work together.
In August 2014 Florida Polytechnic University (FPU) opened a library in a building designed by Santiago Calatrava. It contains a “digital” library (reportedly of 135,000 volumes), but it houses no physical books. The Director of Libraries at FPU called it “a boldly relevant decision to go forward without books.”2 Relevant to what, the press release did not say. Surprisingly a “policy analyst” for the American Library Association said that “Digital is in some ways better. People can find things easier [sic],3 and more important, observing with dismay that, ‘in the past, you could buy a . . . book and it could sit on your shelf for 120 years’.” Yes it could. And it could be filled with unexpected treasures of history, or evidences of ownership or usage, until discovered by a reader or user never imagined by the acquiring librarian over a century earlier. That future discoverer, however unexpected or tardy, will be engaged, delighted, and informed by the unexpected gift of finding it, holding it, and examining it closely for the evidence that proves that books—physical books, the essence of special collections—are timeless. The lesson of FPU and its admirers is for us to understand how wrong they are, how important it is that a book may be “found” even if, or perhaps only if, after 120 years. That possibility is, of course, a raison d’etre of special collections libraries.
On February 25, 1987, David Vander Meulen gave the Engelhard lecture at the Library of Congress, entitled Where Angels Fear to Tread: Descriptive Bibliography and Alexander Pope. The special collections library will continue to be important long into the future, for many reasons, but Vander Meulen helps us understand several of these. First, despite their digitization, original materials will continue to be indispensable primary source material. As anyone who has used EEBO, ECCO, Hathi Trust, or Google Books images will know, digitization is far from perfect—whole pages are often missing, or illegible. Second, many of these digital databases are prohibitively expensive. Special collections libraries and their parent institutions, and smaller colleges and universities often lack the money necessary to purchase the costly access by subscription necessary to make them available to their own users. Thus, physical books will remain important for a long time, until questions of both access and accuracy have been addressed.
Equally important is the fact of the object itself. There is certainly an emotional and subjective response to the intellectual experience of reading it, which is enhanced by holding a 1623 First Folio, as compared to viewing it on a screen. But this aspect of the importance of the object is less pressing, less universal, and, frankly, less easy to justify in any objective way than another aspect of the physical book that Vander Meulen helps us appreciate. In this aspect of its mission, the special collection library of the future has an important and perhaps unique role to play in the world of scholarship and learning. It can be—it ought to be—the center for the underutilized, underappreciated, understudied, but profoundly learned, discipline of descriptive bibliography. Descriptive bibliography has been around for a relatively short time in the history of the book, even if we go back to the seminal work of Fredson Bowers and, later, Philip Gaskell and Thomas Tanselle. I believe that at one time, PhD degree candidates in English were expected to have a working knowledge of it. Such masters as Frederick Pottle and Richard Fleeman in the mid-twentieth century created magisterial works of bibliography, without which much of the subsequent research and scholarship in their chosen subjects could not have been accomplished. It is not possible, in my opinion, to be a serious collector, dealer, or special collections librarian without some mastery of the language, semiotics, and notation of formal, descriptive bibliography. This is because the physical object itself carries information that must essentially be decoded and understood to extract from the book its full intellectual value.
Vander Meulen’s talk at the Library of Congress was about his then ongoing (perhaps it still is, in the sense that a bibliographer’s work is never done) bibliography of Pope’s The Dunciad. His is a truly magnificent achievement, but at the time of his talk it was very much a work in progress. At the time he had reviewed 800 copies of 33 editions of The Dunciad. Why is that important? What was the process he followed? Why does it matter for the future relationship between special collection libraries and descriptive bibliography? Here is part of his description of what he did to distinguish among the copies. He used a micrometer to
measure paper thickness—first the total bulk of all the leaves that had passed through a press. Then I also measured the thickness of each leaf at the center of each of its three outside edges. As a result, I hoped to offer quantitative data for what Griffith [an earlier bibliographer] had pointed to only in relative terms: he had distinguished issues of Pope’s Works in 1717, for instance, as being on a “second royal” paper, on “still thicker” royal paper, and on “a very thick” royal paper.4
What Vander Meulen learned from this is as important as what he did not; in fact,
the average thickness of a large number of samples of the same paper differed from the average thickness of another variety, [but] the variation within the same paper . . . was too great for the result to serve as a trustworthy means of discriminating varieties.5
But he also measured the exact size of each leaf, which enabled him to check his tally of chain lines, which in turn enabled him “to make discoveries about these books that simply would have been impossible otherwise.”
While “smell-o-vision” may someday be an enhanced feature of digitization, we are a long way from the time when digitization will allow collectors and scholars to feel, touch, and measure with precision the objects we care so much about. Until then descriptive bibliography will be in large part dependent on having the books themselves, and scholars and librarians and collectors will be dependent on the collections that can be described only by such bibliographic efforts. Special collection libraries ought to shape their own futures by reemphasizing descriptive bibliography; reintroducing their librarians and users to the concepts and principles of descriptive bibliography; teaching how the book as information and the book as thing, the book as text and the book as object, are integrated by descriptive bibliography, thus enhancing their value for all who collect and learn from them. Special collections libraries must become not only repositories, but also teaching centers. Instruction in descriptive bibliography ought to be widely available in the very places it can best be applied and used. As a collector, my own rudimentary knowledge of descriptive bibliography has served me well. It has allowed me to identify books to a certainty well beyond what truncated and often erroneous catalog or dealer descriptions suggested, and to buy, or not buy, accordingly. Think what a real grasp of its principles could do for the librarian and scholar.
The answer to why descriptive bibliography is important to the broader community engaged with special collections is, once again, best described by Vander Meulen. Using the tools provided by descriptive bibliography results in
involvement [that] leads to the most fulfilling pleasure of all, the excitement of engaging in the historical reconstruction of these works. It is an activity that requires those much-discussed eighteenth-century qualities of reason and imagination. It is a process that brings us not only closer to the minds and actions of those who manufactured the books but also, ultimately into the presence of Alexander Pope himself.6
NOTES
1. The three talks were published as Collectors & Special Collections—Three Talks (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2002). Alice Schreyer’s talk was also published separately as Elective Affinities: Private Collectors & Special Collections in Libraries (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2001).
2. Letitia Stein, “Library without Books Debuts at Florida’s Newest College,” August 25, 2014, www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/25/us-usa-florida-library-idUSKBN0GP0W620140825.
3. Ibid.
4. David L. Vander Meulen, Where Angels Fear to Tread: Descriptive Bibliography and Alexander Pope (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988), 16.
5. Ibid., 17.
6. Ibid., 28.