Lessons from 4,800 Pages of History

Dana Goldstein, "Lessons from 4,800 Pages of History," New York Times, January 13, 2020, p. A2.

     About midway through my reporting process, I spent an afternoon at the New York Public Library.  There I reviewed American history textbooks from the 1950s and 1960s.  Their racism in depicting African-Americans, Chinese immigrants and Mexican-Americans  was overt, a reminder of the vastly different history educations received by today's adults-- all of whom, from Generation Z to the Greatest Generation, will be eligible to vote in November 2020.
     It was a reminder that the historical stories we tell have a profound impact on the world. 

COMMENT

    This article describes the research process for a newspaper article about differences in history textbooks used in Texas and California.  
     At the library the author consults  out-of-date textbooks, a kind of material that many librarians would weed without a second thought, particularly since they promote a kind of overt racism that would be entirely inappropriate in the contemporary classroom.  However, the books are valuable precisely because they demonstrate pedagogical history and changing attitudes.   The writer believes that knowledge of history informs voting and civic engagement,  with the implication that the racism taught in the classrooms of the past may have created a cohort of racist voters.   If we threw those outdated books away it would be hard to remember how kids learned history so many decades ago.


   

Bypassing Legislature

Norman Anderson III, "Bypassing Legislature," Salt Lake Tribune [Opinion, LTE], January 11, 2020, p. A10.

      There was a line of people at the Millcreek library for several days last week.  Just ordinary people waiting to sign the latest referendum petition, a referendum on the tax plan recently passed with little discussion by the Utah Legislature.  It is almost a certainty that there were lines at other petition signing locations, as well.

COMMENT

    The public library offers a place for citizens to sign a petition against an unpopular new law that raises taxes on food and services and seems likely to cut tax revenues for education. If enough signatures are gathered citizens will get a chance to vote on the law.  This letter to the editor says that people were lining up at the library to add their signature.  It's yet another way libraries can promote civic engagement, and maybe a few of those voters also went home with something to read.

The Love Song of T.S. Eliot

Maria Cramer, "The Love Song of T.S. Eliot," New York Times, January 6, 2020, p. C3.

   As planned, his estate released the statement on Thursday, coinciding with Princeton University Library's announcement the more than 1,100 letters the poet had written to Hale were finally available for public viewing.

     Hale gave the letters to Princeton in 1956 with the instructions that they be opened 50 years after both she and Eliot had died. ([Emily] Hale died in 1969, four years after Eliot).
     The relationship between the two has long been a source of speculation among literary scholars, who have known for decades of the letters' existence.  the letters were freed in October from wooden boxes bound with copper straps and ties before a small group of Princeton professors at the university's Firestone Library.
...
     The letters in the collection, which also includes photographs, ephemera and a brief narrative in which Hale describes her relationship with Eliot, are available for viewing only at the Firestone Library and will not be published online until at least 2035 when they are no longer under copyright.

COMMENT

     These days it's astonishing to think of someone writing 1,100 letters on paper and mailing them to someone.  Hale knew the letters had value since Eliot was famous in his own time.  Scholars have been waiting for 50 years to open those boxes and start the search for hidden treasure. 

    The library made a small ceremony of the opening, and also made the New York Times.  Having famous, mysterious materials is good publicity for a library.  Nonetheless, copyright prevents digitization.  If you want to read them, you'll have to go to Princeton. 

Robert Caro's Papers Find a Home

Jennifer Schuessler, “Robert Caro’s Papers Find a Home,” New York Times, January 9, 2020, p. C1. 

     The books are already monumental.  And now Mr. Caro is getting monumental treatment himself.
     The New-York Historical Society has acquired Mr. Caro’s papers  — some 200 linear feet of material that will be open to researchers in its library.  And just a as important to the 84-year-old Mr. Caro, it will create a permanent installation int its museum galleries dedicated to showing how he got the job done.

...

     The archive will be among the largest of an individual in the historical society's collection.  It includes research notes, drafts, annotated news clippings, correspondence, and other documents, from once-classified memos excavated at the L.B.J. Presidential Library to at least one artifact literally coaxed out of a secret trunk. 

COMMENT

     The article describes an archival collection acquired by a special library.  The collection originates from a research strategy that includes library research as well as other kinds of documentation.

     The article also describes Caro’s research process as “a kind of museum of a vanishing analog world.”  As a consequence of his careful gathering, his research materials can now be used by other historians.  This kind of idiosyncratic individual collecting stands in contrast to automated approval plans the mean every library buys the same things. There’s a photo of a typewriter, and the article says he has more than one just in case he needs spare parts. 

N. Mexico Author Delivers Books to Migrants

Angela Kochera, "N. Mexico Author Delivers Books to Migrants," Salt Lake Tribune (original to Albuquerque Journal), January 7, 2020, p. A6.

     Along with giving books to migrant children and their families, the book drive helps a small library that serves children in Mexico living in Anapra.
     Chavez, Lenander and volunteers with the Border Servant Corps make monthly visits to the Biblioteca para la Vida to participate in Saturday morning storytelling sessions.
     "The kids will come in their pajamas and just put blankets and pillows all over the floor," Lenander said.
    In December, the children each got their own book bag with a book and toy and celebrated the season with a piñata shaped like a big book.  Chavez read from "Dragones y Tacos" during he Christmas party as the kids munched on tacos. 

COMMENT

    The article describes a project called Libros para el Viaje that collects books in English, Spanish and Portuguese for migrants at the U.S./Mexico border.  Part of the project is a children's library located in Mexico that offers story time, community, food, books to keep and a small sense of normalcy for migrant children.  The books help migrants pass the time,  and provide language practice, but most importantly they are a deeply humane gift.
    The Biblioteca para la Vida provides an opportunity for volunteers to hold story time.  The books and stories become a connection between people who might otherwise never meet each other.

Fresh Litter

"Fresh Litter," (Talk of the Town), New Yorker, December 23, 2019, pp. 31-32.

The source material "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," is a collection of poems that T.S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren. "The poems were written in the nonsense tradition," Carolyn Vega, the curator for the Berg Collection, at the New York Public Library, explained recently.  Sara Beth Joren, publicist for the library chimed in: "And that's why when people hate on 'Cats' -- like "Oh there's no plot.' It's just like, 'Yeah, there wasn't supposed to be'. And anyway, there is a plot. There's a cat trying to get to the Heaviside Layer.  That's a plot.
     The two women were waiting for Francesca Hayward, one of the stars of the "Cats" movie.  Hayward, a principal dancer in the Royal Ballet, plays Victoria, a graceful white cat -- her first film role.  Vega was ready to give Hayward a quick Eliot lesson; she had brought out a first edition of "Old Possum" and some photographs of the poet. 

COMMENT

      An actor in need of information about her role consults a librarian.  Sure, there is plenty about T.S. Eliot on the Internet, but it could be quite a slog to discover how we got from Eliot the poet to the musical "Cats."  The librarian helps zero in on the nonsensical origins of what is, after all, a distinctly nonsensical musical.   Hayward reacts appropriately to the first edition, experiencing that spooky sense of history that is connected to physical artifacts.

Barbara Testa dies at 91

Katherine Q. Seelye, “Barbara Testa Dies at 91: A Discovery in Her Attic Rocked the Literary World,” (Obituaries) New York Times, January 3, 2020, p. A21.

    The story began in the 1880s with her grandfather, James Fraser Gluck, a lawyer who was also the curator of the library in Buffalo N.Y., now called the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.  He was a collector, and he aggressively solicited autographs and writings from contemporary authors, all of which he donated to the library.    Over the years, he had collected manuscripts from some of the biggest names in 19th-century letters, among hem Walt Whitman, Henry James and Louisa May Alcott.  He also had snippets from Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, Keats, Shelley and Dickens.
     Mr. Gluck established a pen-pal relationship with Samuel L. Clemens — better known as Mark Twain — and at one point asked him for the manuscript for “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a novel that had shaken the rafters of the literary world when it was published in 1884.

COMMENT

    Long story short, Clemens sent Gluck his handwritten manuscript, but half of it was lost until Testa found it in the Attic in 1990.  She was in need of money and wanted to sell it, but the library filed suit, arguing that Clemens gave the manuscript to the library.  Still, the library paid $1 million to settle. 

    This is another collection development story in which a librarian follows a personal obsession rather than following an arbitrary standard of popularity or high circulation.  I believe that libraries should do more to deliberately support this kind of personal collecting which can produce extremely valuable and unusual collections.  One possibility would be to assign each librarian a small personal collection development fund to be spent on whatever they think would be good to have in the collection.