Readers at work in a reading room dedicated to the study of history, circa 1900.
curator, Martha Briggs, Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts at the Newberry. “This exhibition foregrounds the people who guided Newberry policy throughout its 125-year history as much as policy itself,” says Briggs. “The Newberry was founded on a basic, if noble, premise, and it has been up to a long line of staff and trustees to determine how to build and maintain a ‘free, public library.’” The exhibition, to achieve narrative coherence and to ref lect the main thrusts of Newberry raison, illuminates four key library activities: acquiring special collections research materials; sustaining the highest standards of collection preservation; encouraging life-long learning and civic engagement; and fostering research, teaching, and publication. Within each of these sections a story is told, a trajectory traced; and one of the surprises the exhibition reveals is just how early in the library’s history the seeds for what would come to define the “Newberry idea” were planted. “It’s interesting to look at documents from the Newberry’s earliest years and discover that what the library is today really began germinating in the very beginning,” explains Briggs.
In 1909, caretaker Ingve Soderstrom poses with a tabby and its litter, who hunted mice among the stacks.
Examples abound: the purchase of Henry Probasco’s private collection, which would become the model for bloc acquisitions of bibliophilic “treasures” (the exhibition features a letter from Probasco to the Newberry trustees expressing regret for the price of the sale but also satisfaction “that so many treasures are secure”); the 1896 agreement among the Newberry, the John Crerar Library, and the Chicago Public Library to divide up collecting responsibilities in the city, which resulted in the Newberry’s specialization in the humanities; and even the early twentieth-century residency of a cat that fed on mice arriving by book crate from France, which could be construed as an early incarnation of the Newberry’s Conservation Department (the exhibition displays a November 1907 Chicago Daily News article about this cat, which is thoroughly tongue-in-cheek but does promote the cat’s vigilance as an effective measure for book preservation). Early seeding, germinating, and other gardening-related metaphors that make one think of the importance of beginnings notwithstanding, subsequent generations of Newberry staff, presidents, and trustees have been crucial in not only charting the library’s continued path as Chicago’s research library in the humanities, but also in ensuring its relevance to a larger public. As “Realizing the Newberry Idea, 1887-2012” demonstrates even in its title (in the progressive form of its verb, “realizing”), the complex interweaving of purposes that defines the Newberry today is the result of process, progression, and the lapse of time, and is perhaps in a perpetual state of realization.
Martha Briggs, curator of “Realizing the Newberry Idea,” discusses the exhibition with visitors.
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