A Library The Boston Letter from Athenceum No. 121 FEBRUARY 2000 A Report from the Trenches OME of our members have already experienced first hand the effects of the demolition phase of our renovation. Those in the satellite Athena:um at 12 Beacon Street had a rough go of it for several weeks while thundering jack-" hammers and shrieking saws produced excruciating chaos and great quantities of lu­ nar dust. When the noise abated and the dust settled, what appeared was a more peaceful, but hollow and echoing interior; strange new chasms had appeared (the new elevator shaft, for one), new openings for doors had magically opened, and stacks that were once packed with shelves of books now expanded majestically to­ ward distant ceilings. Meanwhile, down by the harbor, planning for the move back into Beacon Street is well underway. The Athena:um Space/Phasing committee, working with several consultants, the architects, and a number of concerned Trustees, is considering the placement of art and collections in the new building, working out the logistics for how events will function and how books will be retrieved, and attempting to foresee every possible bump in the road that leads us back into 10V2 . The project is a chal­ lenge, but it is developing into one of the most exciting undertakings any of us has worked on. We already have our eyes set on the glimmer at the end of the tunnel. Ringing Down the Curtain on Tea It is with great regret that we must announce that weekly Teas at least for the late winter and spring months will no longer be offered. Enthusiasm for a venue other than the second floor of 10V2 Beacon Street seems to be gradually waning among our Tea-going members, and we are finding ourselves with plates full of scones and sandwiches and no mouths to consume them. So it's adieu to Tea for the present. Members who would like a refund for any unused Tea tickets should return their tickets to Monica Higgins at the Athena:um, 101/ 2 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-3777· 2 / A / A happy quartet prepares for "groundbreaking" ceremonies at 10¥2 Beacon Street, December 2, 1999. Left to right: Arthur Lauretano, Barr & Barr Contractors; Athenreum Director Richard Wendorf; Athenceum Board President John G. L. Cabot; and Bob Miklos, Schwartz/Silver Architects. Photo © Harry Stuart Cahill, 1999 3 While We're Away . .. Barbara Hebard of the Conservation Department has been musing about how staff and readers might more happily survive our isolation fron1 the Beacon Street Ath ene:eu1n. We all look forward to our return to the restored and improved Athene:eum build­ ing, but while we're away we're also reminiscing about it. We especially think of the joys of browsing for books in the nooks and crannies at 101/ 2 Beacon and wish we were there. During this construction period, however, one can still vicariously visit the building by reading Growing Up In Boston's Gilded Age, Alice Stone Blackwell's delightful journal, which covers the years 1872-1874. Alice, the daughter of women's suffrage activists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, presents a lively account of ' Boston life in the nineteenth century. Notable Bostonians such as William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, Mary Livermore, and Louisa May Alcott are all brought to life in this fascinating journal. Alice was blessed to have parents who encouraged ed­ ucation for women, and she became an avid reader, regularly selecting material from the Athene:eum and the Boston Public Library. Her accounts of visits to the Athenreum to check out books and view the art exhibitions present vivid verbal pic­ tures of life at 10V2. Marlene Deahl Merrill, the editor of Alice's journal, conducted her research on Blackwell at the Athenreum, and treats us to some fascinating Athene:eum history in her commentary. In addition, she has compiled a list of books and periodicals Alice checked out, a perfect browsing guide from the nineteenth cen­ tury for those of us who are in exile from our sorely missed stacks. A selection of books from Alice Stone Blackwell's list: Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood, by George MacDonald. London, 1866. From the Earth to the Moon: Passage Direct in Ninety-seven Hours and Twenty Minutes, by Jules Verne. Newark, 1869. The Gates Ajar, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Boston, 1868. The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston, 1867. Insects at Home: Their Structures, Habits and Transformations, by John George Wood. New York, 1872. fane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. London, 1847. Mosses from an Old Manse, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York, 1846. Nature and Life; Sermons, by Robert Collyer. Boston, 1867. Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson. London, 1883. The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea, by James Fenimore Cooper. New York, 1819. Story of a Bad Boy, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston, 1869. Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray. London, 1848. Athena auf Deutschland This past fall the German government invited our Director and Librarian, Richard Wendorf, and his counterpart at the Boston Public Library, President Bernard Margolis, to visit a number of research libraries and museums in the new 4 c0 German Republic. Their expedition was made possible through an invitation from the German Consul General in Boston, Dr. P. Christian Hauswedell, who is a close friend of both cultural institutions. Here is Richard Wendorf's report. Bernie Margolis and I were faced with an embarrassment of choices and then an embarrassment of riches. Although we could have traveled as the German govern­ ment's guests for as much as two weeks, we were able to carve out only one week, in early December, in what is always a busy season for both of us. The choices we had to make were therefore particularly difficult. This turned out, rather to my surprise, to be my second trip to Germany in thir­ teen months. As I noted at some length in the recently published Annual Report for fiscal year 1999, our Boston Athenreum trip to Dresden and Berlin in November 1998 had concentrated on eighteenth-century Saxony and Brandenburg, the powerful electorates created by Augustus the Strong and Frederick the Great. Because our focus on that trip was primarily on museums, palaces, and churches rather than libraries, we visited only the Fine Arts Library in Berlin, which began life as a sub­ scription library in the nineteenth century. This time 'round I was therefore eager to visit as many libraries as possible, and I particularly hoped to visit two legendary institutions I had heard about for years, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbiittel and the Bavarian State Library in Munich. By the end of our journey, I had also been able to meet with fellow directors at the Goethe House and the Deutsches Bibliothek in Frankfurt, the newly combined Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin, as well as nine major mu­ seums. It was an intense, sometimes taxing trip, starting first thing each morning and stretching until ten or eleven each night. It was, at the same time, a marvelous op­ portunity to take the pulse of cultural institutions in relatively stable cities such as Frankfurt and Munich as well as in the vibrant and ever-changing metropolis of Berlin. Germany does not have a national library in the sense that Washington, London, and Paris do, but German librarians are eager to point out that a ''virtual national library" does exist. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a distributed library network in which six institutions across the country share responsibility for collecting books published in German as well as books published in other languages within Germany's often-changing geopolitical borders. This collaborative system is set up along chronological grounds. Early books incunabula and sixteenth-century publications are collected by the Bavarian State Library, which holds a record 18,ooo incunables (books printed between roughly 1455 and 1501). Seventeenth-century books are housed at the State and University Library in Gottingen. Books printed between 1801 and 1870 are col­ lected by a similar institution (part public, part university library) in Frankfurt (which Bernie Margolis visited while I was at Goethe House). The State Library in Berlin combining collections in two buildings in the eastern and western sectors of the city has responsibility for collecting books published between 1871 and 1912. The Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt (and Leipzig) takes responsibility for every­ thing published since 1913. This is a complicated consortium, to say the least, but it seems to be working well, even given the inherent competition among research libraries to collect representa­ tive specimens of the national cultural heritage. This movement toward collabora­ tion rather than competition is greatly enhanced, moreover, by the fact that all of these libraries no matter what their precise titles may be are ((state, libraries, funded by state and federal governmental sources. There is also a federal institute that allocates revenue for research at libraries and universities across the German Re­ public, and it is housed in a wonderfully classical house looking directly out onto the modernist severity of the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin! One of the most important discoveries I made concerned this fundamental in­ version of the way in which research libraries are, for the most part, financed in the United States. With the exception of our Library of Congress, we are largely a diverse collection of independent and university research centers, whereas the German model looks continually to the state (usually the individual, local state, as in Bavaria or Brandenburg) for its financial sustenance.