Week 16/17: Can you tell me about your senior thesis?
no one has ever asked me this question except for Grandma Phyllis and my old boss, Heather. also: curating Jennifer Coolidge gifs
Two weeks ago, I concluded that private collectors can change the way institutions collect by building collections in niche areas and donating or selling those developed collections and establishing new areas of focus for institutions. The opposite is true as well: collecting areas in institutions are often constrained by preexisting holdings and funds tied to condition-specific donations or endowments. Such is the case of various collections at the John Hay Library, including the Harris Collection, about which I wrote my senior thesis.
That project examined the evolution of curatorial decision-making for the Harris Collection, tracking how each person in charge of the collection shifted their attention or methods to introduce new materials to the holdings. I thought there would be some rhyme or reason, because humans like patterns! Through interviewing the living curators and reading through accession books of the dead ones,1 I instead found that each established their own principles: the oldest took an old-school approach of finding “diamonds in the rough” during dedicated (and frequent) book-finding trips. His job as it once was no longer exists: there are few people who occupy roles exclusively dedicated to curating collections. So where “Curator” was once a distinct (and distinguished) title, it is now an action, practice, and responsibility that crops up in different kinds of jobs, from collection management to public services.
The next curator took the mission of the Harris collection—to collect “all” American poetry and plays—very literally, so she pursued exhaustive collecting. (For good measure, I’ll note that when this collection was established in 1861, collecting “all” American poetry and plays was a tall order, and it was impossible in the 1970s, let alone now.) That exhaustive approach resulted in a slew of long-standing subscriptions to magazines (that I spent weeks my junior year tracking down to determine if they still existed), but also a genial willingness to meet with whatever the cat dragged in and an interest in regional poetry and pamphlets that might not otherwise have ever made it into a big-time library.
This approach can be understood as the Critical Mess Theory: amassing things somewhat indiscriminately until you have a large enough pile to begin sorting out patterns. William Reese, the founder of William Reese Company, the leading Americana dealer, championed this method. He discusses it in the documentary The Booksellers, which follows various New York antiquarian book dealers in the days leading up to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in 2019.2 The Booksellers is a good introductory documentary for a breadth of opinions on the state of bookselling and book collecting, though I’ll caution that the producers chose not to put name tags on any of the speakers, so at some points you might feel lost as to who is talking to you. Fran Lebowitz also shows up a few times.
But the Harris Collection is a useful example of the Critical Mess Theory, because working with it did, at times, feel like a critical mess (how many copies of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass does one really need? A lock of Edgar Allen Poe’s dandruffy hair? Amy Lowell’s silver-wrapped cigars? Actually, no, those were super cool). Thankfully, the mission of the Harris—to collect American poetry and plays—is amenable to a generous and expansive interpretation of “American,” “poetry,” and “play.” The current curator, who was also my boss (and who reads this newsletter, hi Heather!),3 collects according to a contemporary, expansive definition of “American” that prioritizes non-white, non-male, non-Protestant, non-straight writers and artists. She also collects with an eye for the longview: what is reflective of our current moment, and what will be important, intriguing, and challenging 10, 50, 200 years down the line?
An eye for the longview is a critical skill for private collectors as well as institutional ones: it’s easier to collect things that are already popular (easier in that you can readily find copies of well-known materials, though they are usually far more expensive). It is much harder to carve out a niche collecting interest that a lot of people aren’t paying attention to yet: you have to track down the materials yourself, you often have to justify your interest in the materials, you have to piece together lacking scholarly sources and often create your own reference documents on those items (this is how we got a lot of author-specific reference sources, from really dedicated private collectors).
Librarians are stretched thin as it is; it can be difficult to convince various levels of bureacratic crumble to invest in a new area that has no clear significance without dedicating your own time to that research. This administrative hesitancy can prove costly: in the last issue, I noted that rare romance novels are an emerging area of interest. As romance collecting becomes an even more well-established area, prices will uptick considerably, before the availability and price levels out to relatively prohibitive rather than slightly wallet-stretching. Being late to the game often means shelling out more cash (or checks or bank transfers or whatever may have you).
Not only are institutions are less nimble than private collectors (I deliberately chose “nimble” because apparently administrators use it a lot to describe meeting patrons’ needs, so pour one out for the librarians who just read that and groaned), they are constrained by habit and by money, which is often tied to specific purposes. The Harris is unusual in that it is endowed but without too many content constraints. I once heard of an endowed collection limited to materials about cats and dogs. In our Rare Book Curatorship class, our lecturer advised us to take as many no-strings-attached opportunities as possible. They are precious and rare.
So why do institutions collect at all, if it’s so hard? The author of the book we read for class bemoaned the settling of materials in institutions, calling it a kind of death. I disagree. Entering institutions can bring new life to materials, provided the people who deal with them do their best to think holistically about their significance or shepherd them to someone who can. Moreover, access to heritage materials is important to society’s intellectual and cultural health, and institutions are a somewhat more egalitarian locale for that access than, say, writing each individual collector of American poetry and plays and asking them if you can hang out in their parlor for an afternoon or an entire sabbatical. Institutions coordinate collaborations; they’re centers for research, learning and exchange; they provide systematized care and specialty preservation of delicate materials.
Admittedly, some institutions dig deeper graves for materials than others: I wrote a few weeks ago about the offer of Apollo 11 materials to Brown, which would have been a cool but somewhat illogical acquisition, as the rest of the Apollo mission archives are in Texas and the Smithsonian. So institutional curation is asking not just if we will care for an item, but if it is findable. Will someone think to look here?
A bummer addendum, sorry
One benefit of institutional collecting is more systematized care, but that doesn’t guarantee material safety (nothing is forever!). Lack of funding can lead to disaster: in the last three years, we’ve seen two significant heritage institutions lose thousands of materials to fire, which could have been prevented or mitigated through more robust fire prevention infrastructure (and comprehensive climate crisis policies!). We’ve also seen the loss of books to war: one of the best-known bookshops in Gaza was bombed by Israeli missiles these last few weeks. For all the intellectual and creative potential of collecting practices, guided by private contributors and professional curators, there remains a tenuousness in putting everything of something in one place. That said, wealthy private collectors are not necessarily a better bet: a famous collector of Americana recently lost his entire collection to a tragic house fire. If I think about it too long, I get a bit nauseous.
Threats of fire and water abound, which is why I think of Word on the Water with a wry smile. It’s a London bookshop that has combined the two most book-threatening elements in a single location: a houseboat barge on Regents Canal that is heated by a wood-burning stove.
housekeeping and birdseeking
house
What I read this week: The Summer of Dead Birds by Ali Liebegott, a surprise gift from my dear friend Marlee, who, as always, picked the perfect book. It’s about grief, moms, pets, and love.
What I’m currently reading: Still on Libertie and Typical American, but my goal for June is to finish the books on my shelves that I’ve never read.
bird
My mother reported that the mourning doves returned sometime this week to check out their old nest, which she has removed in the process of clearing the dead foliage off the trellis. I am somewhat devastated. But! I saw our beautiful great blue heron stalking around the pond out back this weekend. He’s looking healthy as ever.
More later.
Accession books are basically running lists of all the things added and removed from collections with dates and notes of who you bought them from or who donated them, and so on.
Reese died too young in 2018, just months after I first became interested in rare books. The first ever book catalogue I looked at was a William Reese catalogue. My boss at the time (Heather) handed it to me and said, “They’re very good and very important.” My current boss (Heather) and I recently took a day-long book-buying trip to William Reese, which was very fun, and the dealers there were very kind and generous, which are two great things to be.
I will note again that both of my US-based bosses are named Heather. This confuses my parents to no end.