Libraries & Culture, Bookplate Archive

Friends of the Library,

The University of Arizona

In 1885, four years after the Earp Brothers and Doc Holliday put Tombstone on the map with the infamous shootout at the O.K. Corral and while the Wild West was still wild, the "Thieving Thirteenth" Arizona Territorial Legislature appropriated funds to establish The University of Arizona. At that time the locations of the state capital and the insane asylum were considered political plums: Prescott retained the capital and Phoenix-Maricopa County received $100,000 for the insane asylum. Tucson got the consolation prize, $25,000 to establish a state university, contingent on the community's gift of suitable property. With time running out before the appropriation lapsed, Tucson merchant Jacob S. Mansfield successfully solicited two local gamblers and a saloon keeper to donate the land. The deed, filed on 27 November 1886, saved the university for Tucson, though there were no students, teachers, or buildings. Mansfield then became one of the first members of the board of regents. His family's support of the university continues. His granddaughter Anne-Eve Mansfield Johnson was the founding president of the Friends of the Library; her daughter Janna-Neen Cunningham and granddaughter Ann-Eve Cunningham are active Friends members today.

The University enrolled its first students in October 1891. The university library began as a collection of agriculture, mining, and engineering books housed in the office of Frank A. Gulley, dean of the school of agriculture. Most of the first one hundred accessions, including volumes of The American Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge (N.Y.: D. Appleton, 1883) still survive. By 1893 the library had grown to seven hundred volumes and had its first librarian, English professor Howard J. Hall. It moved to its own room in 1896 and relocated to its first freestanding building, constructed "to last for all time," in 1904. Growing collections precipitated the move to a larger building in 1925 and that building expanded in 1963. A separate science engineering library was constructed in 1963 and then enlarged by the addition of two floors in 1971. The main library was relocated to its present structure in 1977, where it continues to build its collections to meet the needs of faculty and students. Today the University of Arizona Library holds no more than 4 million volumes and stands twenty-first in the Association of Research Libraries' rankings for collection size.

The earliest university library property mark, a circular blind stamp "The University of Arizona Library" embossed on the title page recto, was replaced by a less obtrusive oval rubber stamp "Library, University of Arizona" in sans-serif font on the top and bottom edges marks accessions from the 1950s to date.

Arizona's library has a history of artistic specialty bookplates. The Kathryne and Loring Campbell Collection of Western Americana is distinguished by a large chestnut stallion centered on beige paper with full border text. A short shelf of books in orange outline highlights the Sarah K. Schmier Memorial gift plate. Text for the Thomas Wood Stevens Memorial bookplate is contained in the bole of a tree that spreads leafy branches skyward. The fine arts collection of T. E. Hanley has been honored by two distinct bookplates, the earliest (1936) a flowing, freehand pen-and-ink sketch incorporating symbols for art, drama, music, and dance, subjects of Mr. Hanley's personal interest and frequent gifts. The later bookplate, designed about 1950, features the donor's name in Eric Gill's Perpetua typeface superimposed on a blue and white background.

Thomas Edward Hanley has been the single greatest private book donor in The University of Arizona's history. In 1936, Hanley's brief visit to the campus revealed a young institution's pressing need for books. Within weeks, volumes selected by the donor from his own collection or purchased from bookshops throughout the country began to pour into the university library. Over the next twenty-eight years, almost forty thousand volumes were added to library collections through Mr. Hanley's gifts. Lee Sorensen's Determined Donor: T. Edward Hanley and His Gift of Books to the University of Arizona Library, 1936-1964(Tucson: Friends of the University of Arizona Library, 1989) provides an entertaining look at the rewards and tribulations of donor-institution relations. The biography includes Lawrence Clark Powell's remembrance of Hanley's early book-buying expeditions in Los Angeles.

In 1986, Lawrence Clark Powell, professor in residence at The University of Arizona, commissioned his childhood friend, noted California book designer Ward Ritchie, to create a bookplate for the Friends of the Library's Ann-Eve Mansfield Johnson Memorial Fund. Printed on buff paper, the 2.5-inch square features a delicate floral device printed in blue with text in black.

Although large donations often had distinctive gift bookplates, the university library had a long tradition of nondescript generic typographic bookplates to honor its many smaller donations and their donors. A more distinctive bookplate for use in gift books was needed, and Lawrence Clark Powell was approached to inquire if Ward Ritchie might devise a new university library bookplate. Powell both persuaded Ritchie to design the bookplate and bore the expense for its creation for the library.

The new University of Arizona Library bookplate features the university seal in black ink superimposed on a blue-grey square, set over the institution's name, followed by a printer's device, a printed statement of provenance (produced in two versions, "Gift from" and "In Memory of"), and space for three lines of text. The bookplate measures 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches and is printed in Goudy Thirty typeface on cream-colored Monadnock Caress seventy pound alkaline, calcium carbonate buffered stock. "Thirty," was released by Lanston Monotype after Goudy's death. Goudy had described it as "my last word in type design, a type in which I would give my imagination full rein, and a type by which as a designer I would be willing to stand or fall, even though not here in the flesh to defend its possible vagaries or idiosyncrasies." Ritchie's affinity for the font is expressed in his sentimental, exuberantly designed tribute to Jane Grabhorn, Jane Grabhorn: The Roguish Printer of the Jumbo Press (Laguna Beach: Laguna Verde Imprenta, 1985).

Since 1990 the Ward Ritchie bookplate has graced all university library gift accessions, to the delight of donors, who perceive it as a tangible, lasting form of recognition, and of readers, who may be motivated by example to become donors themselves. It appears in the gift books of a new generation of book donors, including Margaret Maxwell, professor of library science emeritus, whose lifetime accumulation of historic children's books augments special collections; Charles Tatum, dean of humanities, whose professional collection of Mexican and Chicano literary studies adds depth in a key collecting area; and Helen Ingram, director of the Udall Center, who gives hundreds of new political science books every year. Library staff members who are donors include Louis Hieb, who donated a collection of books by Captain Charles King, Arizona's first novelist; Louis Freauf, who spends evenings and weekends combing Tucson's bookshops for bibliographic treasures; and Carla Stoffle, dean of libraries.

A preliminary version of the University of Arizona Library's bookplate appears as the last entry in The Typographic Bookplates of Ward Ritchie (Santa Monica, Cal.: Kenneth Karmiole, 1990), an illustrated catalogue of Ward Ritchie's bookplate designs. The final version, incorporating the initial article, appears on this month's cover.

Robert Thomson Hershoff, Gifts and Exchanges

The University of Arizona Library, Tucson

[Originally published in Libraries & Culture, vol. 29, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 451-454.]