Libraries & Culture, Bookplate Archive

Newberry Library

When Walter Loomis Newberry (1804-1868), a successful Chicago banker and businessman, included in his will a contingent provision that half of his estate be used to establish a free public library if neither of his two daughters left any descendant, few people ever anticipated the unlikely event that both his daughters would die young and unmarried in 1874 and 1876. Thus the Newberry Library was established when this contingent provision of Mr. Newberry's will became operative in 1885 with the death of his wife, Julia Clapp Newberry. Eliphalet Wickes Blatchford and William Henry Bradley, two conservative businessmen and civic leaders of Chicago, were appointed trustees of the Newberry Library in July 1887, and William Frederick Poole took office as the first librarian in August 1887.¹ These three immediately began the task of setting policy and the direction for the development of the library.

From the outset, there seems to have been a consensus that the Newberry Library should be a reference library for the use of earnest students and advanced scholars. At the time of the Newberry Library's founding, the Chicago Public Library had already begun its services as the circulating library for the general public. As part of a cooperative arrangement with the Newberry, the John Crerar Library, upon its establishment in 1894, agreed to limit its collection to technology and the natural sciences. Thus the Newberry Library could concentrate its collecting in the general field of humanities without unnecessary and expensive duplications. As one of the prominent pioneers in the profession of librarianship, Poole wasted no time in making sure that the collection development policy of the Library was formulated in accordance with the goals set by the trustees. Lists of complete general references and bibliographies in all subjects of the humanities were sent out to professional book dealers. Advice from subject specialists in various fields was solicited. Poole's professional interests and personal contacts with scholars and book collectors played an important role in shaping the characteristics of the Newberry Library's collection. Two early purchases—Count Pio Resse's music history and Henry Probasco's library of rare books—were made possible after a series of negotiations with the members of the two families.² These two collections became the foundation for the Library's exquisite collections of music and history.

In 1911 Edward Everett Ayer (1841-1927), a successful Chicago businessman and Newberry board member, gave his personal collection on early explorations of the Americas and early contacts between Europeans and Indians. Ayer continued to provide the Newberry with funds and guidance, under which the collection eventually grew to include manuscripts, original editions, and primary sources to document discoveries, explorations, and settlements of cities and regions on the North American continent.

John Mansir Wing (1845-1917), a proofreader, editor, and printer by profession, as well as book collector and extra-illustrator by hobby, left his books and estate to the Newberry Library with instructions that it be used to purchase works illustrating the art of printing. The income from the Wing Foundation became available for collection building in 1919. With the appointment of Pierce Butler to the custodianship of the Foundation, it quickly grew to become one of the greatest typographical collections in the country. The Wing Foundation illustrates the milestones of technological progress, with materials ranging from incunabula printed by late-fifteenth-century presses in different parts of the world to the works of contemporary masters of type design such as Eric Gill.³

Among the other notable collections in the Newberry Library are rare East Asiatic works in Chinese, Japanese, Mongolic, and Tibetan. These were gathered by Dr. Berthold Laufer on a special book-buying trip to the Orient under the joint 1907 commission of the Newberry Library and John Crerar Library.⁴ The William B. Greenlee Collection features a comprehensive coverage of Portuguese-language materials and colonial Brazil.

The genealogy collection is the one collection in the Library that is more heavily used by the general public than by academic researchers. Strongest in English and American materials but comprehensive in scope, it attracts visitors from all parts of the country.⁵

The Bookplate

Craftsmen have always depended upon commissions, especially bread-and-butter work like bookplates. In this case, however, Eric Gill (1882-1940) transcended such work to become "perhaps the most influential and important bookplate artist of the century."⁶

Gill designed and engraved more than fifty bookplates (out of a total lifetime production of 1,000 items).⁷His prolific nature meant that he needed assistance; in the 1920s Ralph John Beedham (1879-1975), a technically talented fellow, joined Gill. By undertaking the "scorping" (i.e., the removal of waste wood from the block to create the white areas on the printed surface), Beedham freed Gill for other tasks.⁸ Our cover plate is no exception.

Designed for the Newberry Library by Gill, the block was scorped by Beedham and possibly touched up by Gill. It measures 3 3/8 x 1 7/8 inches and is one of six completed during 1935. Gill's Job Sheet 1319 of 19 August describes it as an ''Eng.d device for catalogues etc.'' The sheet also reveals the associated costs: drawing and engraving, 3 pounds 3 shillings; Beedham, 10 shillings; and wood, 5 shillings. Gill was paid 5 pounds, by check, on 22 July.⁹

While his other bookplates range from the prosaic to erotic, Gill's Newberry bookplate is more symbolic. The plate is lettered "N L / Litterae Humaniores"—literally, more humane letters or the humanities as a field of study. The encircling chain suggests the circle of knowledge—what a library should ideally be.

Unfortunately, it is not clear who at the Newberry initiated its creation or why it was never used. Perhaps on the advice of Ernst Detterer, curator of the John M. Wing Foundation, the work was commissioned. In any event, the plate still stands as a symbol for one of the world's great reference libraries in the humanities.

Kuang-Pei Tu, UCLA GSLIS

John V. Richardson, Jr., Newberry Library Fellow and UCLA GSLIS

Notes

1. Detailed accounts of the founding and early organization of the Library can be found in Handbook of the Newberry Library (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1938).

2. Poole's librarianship and his career in the Newberry Library are treated in full in William L. Williamson's William Frederick Poole and the Modern Library Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

3. See Pierce Butler, "A Typographical Library: The John M. Wing Foundation of the Newberry Library," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 15 (1921) 73-87. Butler's influential role is discussed in detail in John Richardson's The Gospel of Scholarship: Pierce Butler and American Librarianship, 1884-1953 (in progress).

4. See Berthold Laufer, Descriptive Account of the Collection of Chinese, Tibetan, Mongol, and Japanese Books in the Newberry Library (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1931).

5. For more information on Newberry's collections, see Lawrence W. Towner, An Uncommon Collection of Uncommon Collections (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1970). Newberry's donors, including Ayer, Deering, DeVinne, Eames, Graff, Silver, and Wing, are covered in Donald C. Dickinson's Dictionary of American Book Collectors (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986).

6. Brian N. Lee, British Bookplates: A Pictorial History (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1979), p.126. The standard biography has been written by Robert Speaight, The Life of Eric Gill (London: Methuen, 1966), although readers interested in a more contemporary presentation of Gill's work should also consult: Malcolm Yorke, Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit (New York: Universe Books 1981).

7. John F. Physick's work Catalogue of the Engraved Work of Eric Gill (London: HMSO, 1963) contains a comprehensive listing of Gill's work (more than 1,000 engravings collected in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Victoria and Albert Museum). Subsequent work by Christopher Skelton, The Engravings of Eric Gill (Wellingborough: Skelton's Press, 1983), has identified 50 more engravings and largely supersedes the former.

8. Ralph John Beedham wrote about his work in Wood-Engraving, introduction by Eric Gill (Ditchling: S. Dominic's, 1920: rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1946).

9. Eric Gill Collection, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA.

[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 22, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 85-88.]