When Walter Loomis Newberry, a Chicago businessman who died at sea in 1868, provided in his will for the establishment of a library, he couldn't have known that his bequest would produce one of the leading intellectual resources in the world. Newberry had made fortunes in banking, railroads and real estate, and he had been a founder of the Young Men's Library Association (a forerunner of the Chicago Public Library, established in 1876) and president of the Chicago Historical Society. Newberry's civic impulses — and, apparently, the urgings of his personal attorney — had resulted in the bequest for a "free public library" under certain specific — and, at the time, unlikely — conditions. The will called for half of Newberry's estate to be used for such a purpose if his attractive young daughters, Mary and Julia, died childless. When the girls died unexpectedly (Mary in 1874 and Julia in 1876) and when Mrs. Newberry passed away in 1885, Newberry's trustees found themselves with $2,150,000 to establish a library.

By 1887, Eliphalet W. Blatchford and William Henry Bradlee, the trustees, had established the Newberry Library and appointed its first librarian, William Frederick Poole. Poole was the compiler of the famous Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, one of the founders of the American Library Association and the American Historical Association, and founding librarian of both the Cincinnati and Chicago Public libraries. His efforts in the first seven years of the Newberry's life established the foundation on which the library's subsequent development and distinction were based. Before his death in 1894, for example, Poole helped determine the Newberry's direction by entering into an agreement with the Chicago Public Library and the John Crerar Library, which was established in 1893. The Chicago Public Library was to provide the city's general circulating library services and also to develop research strength in business, law, patents and fine arts. The Crerar was to be a research library in law, medicine, science, technology and the hard social sciences. And the Newberry, then as now, was to focus on the humanities. Poole also established the roots of the library's collection, which today includes 1.4 million volumes, five million manuscript pages and 60,000 historic maps, all valued at over $300 million.

Photo courtesy The Newberry Library

Poole began to assemble a general research collection from the start, but two specific early acquisitions gave the Newberry immediate stature in the fields of music history and rare books from the Renaissance. In 1889 Count Pio Resse, a Florentine collector, offered his library of 751 titles, mostly in early Italian music history and theory, to the Newberry; and Henry Probasco, a Cincinnati collector, sold his collection of 2,500 titles — including rare Shakespeare folios, first and second editions of the King James Bible, and numerous editions of Homer, Dante and Horace — for the bargain price of $52,924. By the time Poole died in 1894, two years after the Newberry Library had moved into its permanent home at Clark and Walton, the collection included 120,000 books and 44,000 pamphlets, which formed the base for the library's development into one of the great independent research libraries in the United States.

While Poole's early acquisitions gave the Newberry momentum in certain directions, later donations broadened and deepened the library's holdings. In 1911, for example. Edward E. Ayer, a member of the first board of trustees at the Newberry, donated 17,000 pieces primarily on the subject of early contacts between American Indians and white explorers and settlers. Ayer added to the collection during his lifetime (he died in 1927), and endowed the collection so it could continue to grow to its current total of over 95,000 volumes. Ayer's contributions apparently influenced William B. Greenlee, who, in 1937, transferred his extensive collection of titles on Brazilian and Portuguese art, history and literature to the Newberry. The Everett D. Graff Collection, focusing on the American West, was also the result of a bequest and subsequent endowment, and it enabled the Newberry to emerge as one of the two or three outstanding libraries on that subject. And the John Mansir Wing Collection, which came to the Newberry at Wing's death in 1917, has grown into a major research collection on the history of printing and the aesthetics and technology of book design.

These designated special collections suggest some of the Newberry's concentrations, but the library also has an international reputation in the literature and history of the Midwest (especially the Chicago Renaissance), in the history and theory of music, in the history of cartography and in special areas like genealogy, railroad history, calligraphy and early philology. The Newberry is, in truth, "An Uncommon Collection of Uncommon Collections," as its president emeritus, Lawrence W. Towner, called it in a 1979 monograph.

If the Newberry were nothing but this collection, it would remain an important institution for the study of Western Civilization. Each year, some nine or ten thousand readers from all over the world put in over 30,000 reader days at the Newberry, examining rare books and using the library's general collection to extend fields of knowledge in all of the humanities. And those scholars are themselves a resource at the Newberry, where interactions among specialists lead to new insights, new ways of looking at problems, new methodologies. The research and education division has become a central part of the Newberry's life, stimulating and supporting the work of hundreds of scholars and students who use the Newberry's uncommon collections for various projects and purposes.

Richard H. Brown, the vice president for academic affairs at the Newberry, has served the institution for over 20 years. "It used to be that a library had two, maybe three jobs." says Brown, who holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale. "It was supposed to collect materials, take care of those materials, and open the front door so people could use them. If anyone came in, that was fine; if no one came in, that was okay, too, and some old-time librarians almost preferred it when no one came. But times have changed, and we've accepted another major mission — the obligation to promote effective use of our collection. That mission led to the development of programs that became the research and education division."

Brown offers an idea of the "scale of change" in programming which has occurred at the Newberry during the past quarter century. "In 1962, when Bill Towner started the research and education operation, we had about $20,000 available for fellowships. This year, it's up around $350,000 to $400,000, which makes this the largest library-based fellowship program in the country."

"It's a bit like a four- or five-ring circus here," Brown explains, "but the rings are interconnected. We support individual research through our fellowship programs; we encourage collaborative research through our centers; we sponsor and host a number of educational programs; we organize conferences colloquia; and we offer programs for the public." In a typical year, 60 to 70 scholars will study at the Newberry with funding from one of the library's numerous fellowship programs. They may spend from a month to a year, using the collection and engaging in the formal and informal discussions which are part of the Newberry's life. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provides substantial funding for fellowships, and foundations and universities from throughout the country also contribute. Rima Schultz, Susan Hirsch and Raymond Birn are among the current fellows, and their interests and pursuits suggest the nature and range of the intellectual community at the library.

"Actually, I first learned about the Newberry in Paris," says Birn, a professor of history at the University of Oregon. "A book dealer there saw I was serious about rare books, and, with a typical Frenchman's sense of American geography, he told me I should 'spend my weekends in Chicago at the Newberry.' " When Birn realized the extent and nature of the Newberry's resources, he applied for an NEH fellowship to study the book culture of Paris in the 18th century. When he received the fellowship, he moved into one of the apartments the Newberry maintains in its neighborhood.

"I'm interested in the book as a paradigm of the Enlightenment." says Birn. "I'm studying the book as a physical object, but also looking at censorship, the economics of book publishing and other angles of the book culture."

Rima Schultz, a Ph.D. in history from Boston University, is a Newberry fellow, studying the business culture in Chicago in the 19th century. She is using the library's collection in family and community history to trace the development of certain business families and their influence on the city. "My dissertation adviser at Boston had studied here at the Newberry, and he encouraged me to 'join up with those people' after I finished my dissertation. Right now, I'm working on the social history of an important Episcopal parish in the city, where the Ogdens, the Palmers, even the Newberrys were prominent. With the Newberry's map collection, I can even take 'walks' in my families' neighborhoods, imagining how it must have looked back then."

Susan Hirsch, another NEH fellow, is working with the Newberry's Pullman Archive, also a part of the family and community history collection. Hirsch's specific interests lie in labor and social history, and her research is focused on racial and sexual segregation in the Pullman company in the first half of this century. "I'm trying to put the Pullman situation in a national context," says Hirsch, who formerly worked in the women's studies program at Northwestern University. "This is the central place in the Chicago area for studying labor history, because of the collection, but also because of the seminars and other chances to get together with people with similar interests. Very few people in labor history have regular faculty positions, so the Newberry is the only place where interested people can try out ideas on each other."

But the fellows' individual projects are only part of their Newberry experiences. They also participate in informal weekly colloquia at which fellows talk about what they're discovering as they're using the collection. The long-term scholars also attend twice-monthly seminars, with each fellow responsible for one session, making a formal presentation and leading a discussion.

"This place gets about as close to being a true community of scholars as I can imagine." says Birn. "Back at my university, we might have an occasional serious meeting on a scholarly topic, but in a half hour or so, we're griping about salaries or parking. Here, an art historian might be challenged by a social historian who raises new questions or mentions some seminal writer whose influence goes beyond a single discipline."

"Fellows work in other ways, too," says Hirsch, "by making presentations to other groups and seminars here, or helping to judge the entries in the Metro History Fair, which is co-sponsored by the Newberry. It's a chance to put our work into a larger context and to help others see their work from a different angle."

"When people think of making bequests to libraries, they think of donations of books or getting rooms named after them," says Schultz. "But libraries also need support just to provide a certain kind of climate where people can talk and deal in ideas. We need places like this to support scholars, to bring them together to provide the infrastructure for the kind of intellectual life that any culture needs."

The Newberry's four research centers, built around strengths in the collection, generate most of the library's collaborative scholarship, and all of them have made important contributions to scholarship in their respective Fields. The D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian is built around the "strongest collection in the country on the American Indian," according to Brown, who says that it is creating "a whole new knowledge base" for the study of Indian culture. The center has generated at least 25 books, among them the 1987 Atlas of Great Lakes Indians, published for the Newberry by the University of Oklahoma Press. The Family and Community History Center includes most of the library's genealogical materials. And, over the course of a 10-year period beginning in the early seventies, the center helped to alter the face of scholarship in social history. Over that period, over 600 scholars came to the Newberry for month-long seminars in which they learned the new quantitative methodologies which historians now routinely use to study the character of cities and communities. "We primed the pump," says Brown. "There were very few people in the country able to teach this kind of methodology before we started. Now, people all over the country teach and use the quantitative methods they learned here, and we've more or less gotten out of the business."

The Center for Renaissance Studies is the newest center, established in 1979 to encourage greater use of the library's holdings in Renaissance literature and history. The center's current director, Mary Beth Rose, first came to the Newberry in the fall of 1981 as a Monticello College Foundation Fellow. The Monticello program provides six-month fellowships for work at the Newberry for women scholars "at an early stage in their professional careers whose work gives clear promise of scholarly productivity."

"Actually, the center was formed out of the economic depression in the humanities in the seventies," says Rose. "The Newberry and NEH worked to provide a focus for Renaissance studies at that time, when there weren't many university jobs for Ph.D.s in history." What began in adversity has developed into a unique combination of programs which attracts scholars and students from all over the world.

"The real base for our operation is in the consortium of universities which contribute to the center," says Rose. That consortium of 25 institutions — including Chicago-area schools like the University of Chicago, Loyola, Northwestern and De Paul as well as schools as far away as Vanderbilt, the University of Minnesota and the University of Kentucky — collaborates to provide opportunities for study and research to its graduate students and faculties. "On any single campus, there might be, at most, a handful of scholars interested in the Renaissance," says Rose. "The consortium provides these people with a first-rate library, but also with a chance to communicate with colleagues from other universities who have similar interests. It's an attempt to encourage interdisciplinary study and research, and to answer the real needs of academics who might otherwise be isolated."

Each member school pays a yearly fee for membership in the consortium, and these dues plus grants from the NEH and other sources enable the center to offer fellowships, summer institutes, seminars, lectures and conferences. In October, for example, the center cosponsored a conference on the Romance of the Rose, a 13th century poem considered the most significant work of the Old French literary tradition.

"We're constantly looking for new ways to help qualified people make use of our collection," says Rose. "We've got a musician-in-residence, Mary Springfels, and she has developed a concert series called 'Early Music from the Newberry,' which gives exposure to our collection of early sheet music. This is a field that few Renaissance scholars know about, because musicologists tend to be isolated at most universities. Here, we can bring people from all disciplines together and expose them to the music of the period. Our structure and resources give us a chance to break down the barriers that tend to build up in universities. That keeps us from becoming complacent and static."

The Newberry's many courses, colloquia, conferences and concerts comprise its most visible educational efforts, offering, as Lawrence Towner put it in his monograph, a "program... for adults in a variety of subject areas, from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, and from map collecting and bookbinding to calligraphy." But the oldest seminar program is the "Newberry Library Program in the Humanities," which it sponsors in collaboration with the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) and the Great Lakes College Association (GLCA). Each year since 1965, around 20 undergraduates from the small, private liberal arts colleges which make up the two associations are selected for a fall seminar on a topic which requires them to take advantage of the Newberry's resources. This year the students are enrolled in a seminar entitled "The Ruling Taste: Government Influence on European and American Culture," which focuses on how cultural activity reflects communal belief. The seminar director this year is Debra Mancoff, an art history professor at Beloit College; her assistant director is Lyman Leathers, a specialist in 19th century American history and American studies at Ohio Wesleyan.

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Mancoff, who earned her Ph.D. in art history at Northwestern, used the Newberry's resources when she worked on her dissertation. "I'm interested in cultural objects, like paintings and buildings," says Mancoff, "and Lyman is interested in texts. We wanted to get our students to look at how various works embody communal belief and how governmental influence can affect those works and beliefs. We tried to pick self-motivated students who could formulate a topic, do research with primary sources and complete an individual project." This fall's students came from various disciplines and from 11 college, and they examined many subjects for their research. One student used the Newberry's unequalled collection of American sheet music to study Civil War music that came from the Confederate side. Another studied the idea of the "True Woman" in 19th century American literature. "We want them to look at how these works reflect and influence the cultures they came from," says Mancoff. "How the popular images of women the 19th century — the 'True Woman' ideal, for example — may actually have kept women from gaining the right to vote."

Through its courses, concerts and other public programs, the Newberry offers educational and cultural opportunities to more general audiences as well. Its Lyceum Seminars, for example, cover topics like "Cultural Philanthropists in Chicago," "Japanese Side-Sewn Bindings." "German Immigrants in the American Midwest" and "Urban Imagings: Chicago in the Novel." Through the Family and Community History Center, the Newberry also supports the Chicago Metro History Fair, a 10-year-old event which generates over 3,500 entries a year in the form of research papers, exhibits or performances, according to Adrian Capehart, the fair's program director for the past four years. "We offer a range of prizes and scholarships,'' says Capehart, "including six cash awards of $500 and some $500 scholarships, as well as books and other prizes, and we use a wide range of people as judges — Newberry fellows and interested lay people and teachers." Last year's winners ranged from essays on Chicago's image in popular films and on former vaudeville performers, to exhibits on the Illinois Central and on a suburban church, to a one-man show on the activities of comedian and activist Dick Gregory. "The best thing about the fair," says Capehart, "is that it helps students see how their local history connects to the larger world."

To enter the Newberry is to enter a larger world. To get a feel for what it does, you have to get inside it, talk to the people and feel the dedication the staff and scholars have for their work. Talk to John Aubrey, for example, who has been a reference librarian since 1969. Listen to him discuss the wondrous Melville collection or the Shakespeare quartos or the writers' papers the library holds: Sherwood Anderson's, Ben Hecht's, Floyd Dell's, Hart Crane's, Malcolm Cowley's. Aubrey's quiet pride in the Newberry's collection will give you some sense of the honest respect the place can foster.

Or listen in on one of the meetings that take place in the Newberry's meeting rooms. Attend a Thursday meeting of the Chicago Area Labor History group, which is responding to a paper on "Polish American Socialism" by Mary Cygan, a freelance writer and historian. The talk is low-keyed but honest, as Cygan elaborates on points she's made and others in the group offer suggestions, advice, criticism. Steve Rosswurm. a professor at Lake Forest College, questions some of Cygan's generalizations about the Poles' political leanings. Susan Hirsch, the NEH Fellow who is working with the Pullman Archive, suggests that Cygan might need to narrow her topic. Toni Gilpin, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale who is doing research at the Newberry, mentions that research on other immigrant groups might provide a comparative base for Cygan's studies of the Poles. There's a heated exchange about the Poles' attitudes toward the Soviet Union and their stance on McCarthy ism in the fifties. The exchanges are critical but constructive, and when the meeting ends the discussion continues informally, as group members exchange titles and arrange for future meetings.

To enter the Newberry is to
enter a larger world. To get a feel
for what it does, you have
to get inside it, talk to
the people and feel the dedication
the staff and
scholars have for
their work

Thirty or forty years ago, the group might have met in the little park outside the windows of their meeting room. Washington Park, a half-block oasis of green across Walton Street, used to be called Bughouse Square, and people would come from all over the city to watch and take part in the animated debates that made the place famous. Ideologues of every stripe would declaim for hours, and the arguments were sometimes fueled by new facts gathered from trips into the Newberry, at the southern edge of the park.

Bughouse Square is quiet now, but the Newberry has maintained the tradition of lively intellectual life at that location. Now, though, the people come from all over the world. If the talk is quieter, more disciplined and civil, it's also more sophisticated and no less rigorous and interesting. In its quiet way the labor history group embodies the values — indeed, the value — of the Newberry itself: It is not only "an uncommon collection of uncommon collections"; it is also an uncommon collection of uncommon people, keeping alive a rich tradition of scholarship and lighting their corners of the intellectual world.

Admission to the reading rooms is open to the public without charge. To obtain a library card, prospective readers fill out a brief registration form and present positive identification. The library's General Reading Room and Reference and Bibliographical Center are open Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Special Collections Reading Room is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The reading rooms are closed on Sundays and Mondays. For further information, call (312) 943-9090.0

Richard J. Shereikis teaches literature and writing courses at Sangamon State University and is a frequent contributor to Illinois Issues and the Illinois Times.

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