history of the library

SLIDE 24: On the left you see one of the new reading rooms, while on the right, one of our loyal readers is demonstrating the rolling shelves.

SLIDE 25: For those of you who remember the old “metropolitana” in the cryptoporticus, here it is today, transformed.

SLIDE 26: None of these changes would matter, were it not for the books and their readers. Over the years, many of our books have been gifts, and a whole history of our institution could be told from what’s just inside the cover.

Moreover, a whole lecture could be devoted to the development of the collections and how this development parallels the mission of the American Academy in Rome. As the Academy added new fields—such as landscape architecture and music in the years between the two world wars—the Library struggled to adapt, without slighting its core collections in classics and art history. The collections also reflect the overall financial health of the Academy: the annual reports of the Library reveal that there were years in which no purchases could be made, or very few, and other periods in which there were more funds for books. Some of this money came from foundations and grants, such as the Carnegie Corporation in the 1930s, the Kress Foundation in the 1970s, and the Department of Education in the early 2000s.

SLIDE 27: Readers have always played a central part in the development of the collections. I’ll show you a few of them—a personal selection…. How many can you recognize?

L to R: Arthur Frothingham, Howard Crosby Butler, Elihu Vedder, Charles Rufus Morey, Esther Van Deman, Herbert De Cou (who was a cataloger in the Library before his tragic death in Libya), Frank P. Fairbanks. Note that these are all Americans. We know that Italian scholars were invited to give lectures at the old School of Classical Studies—among them were the archaeologist Giacomo Boni and the art historian Adolfo Venturi—but we don’t know whether they actually used the Library, which was still relatively small.