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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector |
Harwood Foundation In the center of
the town of Taos in northern New Mexico, on narrow Ledoux Street, stands a
complex of old adobe buildings known as the Harwood. The first
installation of these buildings was built as early as 1813. It was the
home of one Smith H. Simpson, a compadre and employee of Kit Carson.
Simpson acquired the property when he married into the prominent Valdez
family. Simpson is known for receiving permission from the United States
Army to fly the U.S. flag twenty-four hours a day during the Civil War,
after he nailed it to a tall cottonwood pole and vowed to shoot any
Southern sympathizers who dared remove it. The house was
purchased by Elizabeth (Lucy Case) and Burt (E. Burrit) Harwood in 1916.
The Harwoods were artists who had lived in Paris for many years and
continued in Taos their habit of opening their home to other artists. They
opened their home for informal cultural events and created a small gallery
for exhibits. Elizabeth Harwood had a small personal library from which
she loaned books. The Harwoods added a second story onto their home, the
town's first second story on a residential building, as well as
electricity. In 1923, after the
death of her husband, Elizabeth Harwood formally established the Harwood
Foundation, which hosted lectures, plays, and musical events. Artists were
able to rent studios and apartments in the building on Ledoux Street. The
lending library continued to grow through donations. A fee was charged to
become a member of the foundation, but no one was ever denied use of the
library. Community members began to contribute local art and artifacts to
the foundation, as well as books. One very prominent benefactor of the
foundation's library was Mabel Dodge Luhan, the East Coast socialite and
art promoter who claimed northern New Mexico as her own and introduced
such influential artists as Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams to the
American Southwest. Luhan made sure that the library had both bestsellers
and classics, and her gifts make up much of today's special collections. In 1936 Elizabeth
Harwood realized that the foundation would not be able to survive for very
long on its existing funding and bequeathed it to the University of New
Mexico, with the understanding that the community would continue to
receive the same services. Taos was a tiny and isolated community, and
Harwood meant to ensure that the area would continue to benefit from the
cultural and educational programs she had initiated. The University
became owner of the buildings and the collections, and began an extensive
remodeling of the property. A space specifically for the library was added
at this point. The renovations and additions were designed by John Gaw
Meem, the prominent architect renowned for his projects and renovations in
the Spanish Pueblo revival style of adobe building design. This style
became exceedingly popular in New Mexico, as city planners and homeowners
began to desire properties which combined the architectural
characteristics of both colonial Spanish-American homes and the nearby
ancient Pueblo Indian multistory complexes. It was more than a fad,
however; earlier, the city of Santa Fe, with tourism and economic
development in mind, had encouraged restoration and building in the
Spanish Pueblo revival style with tax credits and even mandated the style
in certain older areas of town. Meem was a leading force behind the
restorations of the Franciscan mission churches, San Esteban de Acoma and
El Santuario de Chimayo as well as numerous other historical buildings
throughout New Mexico. In 1940 a grant
from the Carnegie Corporation awarded to the University of New Mexico
helped establish the Taos Community Project, an experimental program of
community-based planning, cooperative action, and education. The Harwood
served as the headquarters for the project. One of the greatest successes
to come out of the project was New Mexico's first bookmobile. The
bookmobile brought library services to communities all over Taos County.
It held about eight hundred books, rotated from the main collection at the
Harwood, and also a movie projector for showing educational films. The
bookmobile came equipped with loudspeakers and a projection screen, and
even a portable generator for film showings in those villages without
electricity. In the winters one isolated village even received its reading
material by ‘‘book-horse'' when snowfall cut off road access for
the little red wagon, as the bookmobile was called. Under the guidance of
the mobile librarian, eleven communities set up branch libraries that
continued to thrive after the closure of the project a few years later.
These branches were run by villagers who first received several weeks of
library training at the Harwood. The Harwood's
circulation jumped in the first year of the outreach program from 10,712
to 38,279. The film showings were immensely popular as well, and over
50,000 people attended these in the year 1941–42. The Taos County
Project workers took advantage of these well-attended showings and often
took the opportunity to address the crowds on other aspects of the
project, such as the new hospital, irrigation plans, or other farming
issues. After the project closed, the bookmobile and its services had
become so valued by the people of the county that funds required to keep
it in operation were allotted from county and village budgets. Adjacent
Rio Arriba County was so impressed that it contracted with the Harwood
Foundation for similar service (J. T. Reid, It Happened in Taos [Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1946], 44). The bookplate for
the Harwood probably originated about this time, in the early 1940s. The
bookplate measures 2 7/8 inches wide and 3 1/4 inches high. It reads,
‘‘Public Library, The Harwood Foundation.'' The words ‘‘Taos,
New Mexico'' frame a square bordered by a broken line. The large
‘‘H'' and ‘‘F'' are outlined in the same punctuated
border. The capital letters are free imitations of Lombardic lettering,
while the small letters are taken from Gothic forms. The block is a
woodcut view of what may be the outside of the Harwood, or any number of
John Gaw Meem's buildings. It is a classic Spanish Pueblo revival
scene—thick, sunbaked, adobe walls, a wooden ladder rising to somewhere
outside the border of the image. Vigas and latillas, wooden roof supports,
are visible on the second story and above the portal. The initials of the
artist, Gustave Baumann, appear in the lower corners of the block,
‘‘G'' in the lower left-hand corner and ‘‘B'' in the
right. Baumann was a German-born painter who came to New Mexico in 1918 by
way of Indiana and Chicago. Unlike many of the artists who came to the
Southwest during this period, Baumann stayed and became one of the most
prominent and distinctive of New Mexico's artists. He was an
internationally known master of woodblock printing whose works have hung
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in Washington,
D.C. Baumann's prints of Southwestern landscapes reveal a wonderful
ability to capture the colors of the desert, mountains, canyons, and
cacti. The design of the bookplate may have been conceived by one Willard
‘‘Spud'' Johnson, a writer and associate of Mabel Dodge Luhan and
yet another transplant to the Southwest. Johnson is more known for his
satirical publications than for the fact that he was director of the
Harwood from 1944 through 1947. During the nearly
fifty years of its management by the University of New Mexico, the Harwood
continued to grow, both in terms of its collections and in its role as a
community center. The buildings of the Harwood were placed on the National
Register of Historic Places in 1976 and renovated again in 1977 through a
federal historical preservation program. In 1984 the
University of New Mexico returned responsibility and control of the
library portion of the Harwood to the town of Taos. At this point it helps
to think of the Harwood in two parallel tracks—the Harwood Public
Library, a department of the town of Taos, and the Harwood Foundation, a
museum whose buildings are as historically significant as its collection.
The University retained ownership of the building and the museum holdings,
by this time an invaluable collection of Northern New Mexican arts,
containing treasures ranging from Pueblo pottery to traditional Hispanic
religious art, to paintings of the Taos Society of Artists. Some
controversy resulted from the university's reluctance to adequately
finance a museum in such a high-maintenance building which produced no
income. Numbering
approximately thirty thousand volumes, the library remained in its
original home but became fully funded by the town of Taos, which was now
required to pay rent to the University of New Mexico. Shortage of space
for the growing collection spurred the movement for the library's
relocation. In the summer of 1996, the Taos Public Library moved out of
the Harwood and into a new $2.2 million facility with twice as much space,
a real parking lot, and room to grow. The parking lot may have been the
best reason for celebration, as the narrow old street and tiny parking lot
on Ledoux Street made for inconvenient parking. The new building
echoes the architecture of its predecessor in a more subdued and
predictable fashion. The library now employs twelve people and has an
active Friends of the Library program which was instrumental in the
campaign for the library's move to a new site. Special collections
include a collection of Scottish Genealogy on permanent loan from the Clan
MacLeod. The general collection, numbering over forty thousand volumes, is
especially strong in the areas of general fiction, art, and Southwest
studies. The buildings on
Ledoux Street remain the home of the Harwood Foundation, which has
expanded into the space vacated by the library. The space has been
remodeled, and only memory indicates that a public library ever lived
there. Spacious white-walled galleries have replaced cramped rooms of
handcrafted furniture and stuffed bookshelves. The Harwood's collection
of Spanish Colonial furniture, Rio Grande tinwork, paintings from the
Santa Fe and Taos art colonies, and traditional Hispanic religious art are
renowned. The museum archives contain over seventeen thousand photographs
and more than sixty linear feet of documents pertaining to the history of
art in New Mexico. And although the library has moved down the street, it
can be said that Elizabeth Harwood's dream of providing artistic and
intellectual inspiration to her adopted home has been a complete success. Lisa
Bier and Donald G. Davis, Jr. Graduate
School of Library and Information Science, University
of Texas at Austin [Originally published in Libraries & Culture, vol. 33, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 446-450.] |
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