Used in teaching and research, Lawrence's rare book collection doesn't just sit on the shelves.
By Gordon E. Brown
Lawrence Today magazine, Spring 2002
First editions of three works by Ernest Hemingway. The American first edition of Moby Dick. A New Testament from 1522 and a Bible from 1665. The complete serial edition of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit. The 1680 London edition of The Works of the Famous Nicholas Machiavel[li]. Books signed by Amelia Earhart, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, John Updike, Robert Frost, and others.
These and some 3,500 other rare books, whose titles span the entire history of printing and bookbinding, make up the collection housed in the Milwaukee-Downer Room in Lawrence's Seeley G. Mudd Library. Most came from the early library collections of Lawrence and Milwaukee-Downer Colleges; over the years, alumni and other friends of the college have enhanced those holdings with special books from their personal collections.
The shelves of the Milwaukee-Downer Room hold a host of treasures, old and rare, significant and special. There are books to delight the bibliophile and books to enhance the study of many languages, subjects, and historical periods: Latin histories; contemporary accounts of the French Revolution; European explorers' first impressions of North America, Africa, and China; zoological catalogs; first editions, some of them signed, by 19th and 20th century major writers; and many other classics and rarities.
"Because the collection is so broad and eclectic," says University Librarian Susan Richards, "it provides faculty and students with an opportunity to read books they probably have never seen or touched before. Faculty members take particular titles to their classes for group study, and students use them to enhance research projects they are pursuing -- an experience they would rarely get at a larger university."
Speaking of the rare book collection as a research tool, Bertrand Goldgar, professor of English and the John N. Bergstrom Professor of Humanities, says, "Over a long period of going away to use the British Library and other major collections of 18th-century books and pamphlets, I have learned always to check our holdings before leaving -- and I've sometimes been pleasantly surprised to find things I need already on hand."
His students also have benefited from the collection, Goldgar says.
"For example, we have one of the first editions of a vitally important work about Restoration drama, Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1698). Collier was a sort of Restoration version of Pat Robertson or some other figure from the Moral Majority, whose work helped produce a change (for the worse!) in the level and type of wit possible in plays of the period."
Rex Myers, lecturer in history, taught a course in Spring Term 2001 titled History of the American West, in which, he says, "students read journals of explorers and compared their observations with the writings of settlers. Louis Hennepin's A New Discovery of a Vast Country, the first English edition published in 1698, and John C. Fremont's 1854 Exploring the Rocky Mountains were both on the reading list.
"Holding an original edition puts a person 'in touch' with history in a way that is beyond words," Myers says. "The student who used Hennepin's work came up after class one day to tell me, almost reverently, that he had held the book in his hands -- something over 300 years old. What a memorable experience for an undergraduate."
In a different way, the term-paper assignment in Associate Professor of Art History Michael Orr's course The Illuminated Book was a memorable experience for some other undergraduates, one they may not soon forget. Working with facsimiles of manuscripts from the Vatican Library, each student was to describe, categorize, and analyze two manuscripts, treating them as if they were newly discovered and producing a term paper in four extremely detailed parts.
Orr describes the value of the rare book collection to his teaching as incalculable. "I can't imagine," he says, "trying to give undergraduates an understanding of the history and development of the decorated, handmade book without the resource of a rare book collection. I was delighted when I came to Lawrence to see what was here."
Orr also uses items from the collection in his courses on medieval and Northern Renaissance art, which also touch on the subject of illuminated manuscripts.
For those who teach and those who learn, the appeal of the old and rare is irresistible, and even librarians are not immune to the allure. Says Richards, "Today I opened a first edition of Willa Cather's O Pioneers, 1913. Ten days ago I found a two-volume set of George Catlin's North American Indians, 1926. As a scholar of western United States history, there is a particular thrill in holding a Cather first edition or leisurely examining Catlin's meticulous and colorful drawings."
Edmund Kern, associate professor of history, is a frequent user of the collection (see "Teaching with The Nuremberg Chronicle"). "Although Lawrence's collection doesn't rival those of research libraries, such as the Newberry in Chicago or the Folger in Washington," he says, "it's really quite good for a liberal arts college, and it offers ample opportunities to make use of works in courses.
"For example," he says, "to someone teaching the cultural history of early modern Europe, the first editions of Desiderius Erasmus' Annotationes on the New Testament and the Canones et Decreta of the Council of Trent are truly significant. In addition, Lawrence holds a nice selection of Renaissance editions of works by classical authors, published by the famous Venetian house of Aldo and Paulo Manuzio, and a couple of well-illustrated 17th-century books on plants and their properties, such as John Gerard's Herball, or General Historie of Plantes and Adam Lonitzer's Kreuterbuch.
"Rounding out the collection," Kern says, "are numerous works of science, politics and law, European and world history, and rhetoric and philology, all of which date from between 1500 and 1800. One of my favorites is a relatively minor political treatise published in 1652, Thomas Fuller's Holy State and the Profane State, which includes a short sketch of "The Witch" along with commentary outlining how the practice of sorcery is a threat to both religious and secular morality."
The Lawrence collection stands up well to expert scrutiny, Professor Goldgar notes. "When Anthony Grafton, the famous historian of early modern Europe, visited Lawrence last year, he held a session with our students in the Milwaukee-Downer Room, commenting on the collection, going over some parts of it book by book, and communicating some of the excitement that comes from this particular way of recapturing the past."
Ultimately, Kern says, "The real value of the collection comes from merely bringing students into contact with these very real and very fascinating traces of the past. To put the works in their hands, to have them scan a few pages and look at a few pictures, to put their historical imagination to use -- well, doing so brings the past alive for them in a way that historical scholarship alone can't accomplish."
For those who love books and libraries, the Lawrence rare book collection is a treasure to be prized and preserved, but it also is an institutional asset of which the best possible use should be made.
"As librarians," Richards says, "we take every precaution to protect the books from abuse and carelessness, but we do think of this as a teaching collection. As information and scholarship increasingly appear in digital form on computer screens, the rare book collection provides students with an opportunity to embrace the book, one of the most aesthetically pleasing and convenient objects ever invented."
University Librarian Susan Richards and appraisal expert Gerry Max, '67, also contributed to this article.
