VO L. I. NO.7 THE CLEMENTS LIBRARY ASSOCIATES APRIL 1997 THE C LEMENTS LIBRARY CELEBRATES 75TH ANNIVERSARY The Clements Library will cele brate its history, and designing teac hing material s ing a one year post-graduate intern ship 75th Anniversary and the Associates based on the Library's collec tions for use in library scie nce, archi ves or other 50th Anniversary in 1997-1 998. To in public schools. fields in the hum anities related to the mark the occasions, a campaign to raise The final category sets fort h long ­ Library's holdings; developing continu­ $1.500,000 is being launch ed. The term goal s for the coming decade: ing education and cultural programs. Associates Board of Governors is building endowment funds so we can Lastly, we need to begin active planning planning a variety of activities ­ for an addition to our building, programs, publ ications, a although actual construction celebration banquet - for the will be the object of a future coming year. We will be making fund-raising effort. regular announcements, and It has now been over ten hope that all the Library's friend s years since the Clements will enjoy participating in the mounted a fund-rai sing festivities. The Associates Board campaign. Our goals are of Go vern ors has set specific modest by the standards of goals and priorities for the 75th peer institutions but substantial Anniversary fund-raising by our own.I can only speak campaign, identifying them in for myself, bu t I believe the three categories. most gratifying donations are The first category centers on those made to meet worthy, our immediate goals, proj ects specifi c needs. The generous which we hope to accomplish response of our Associates to within the next year and a half. the November dues letter was OUf top priorities include the trul y exciting. As we plan our purcha se of several major items; 75th Anniversary Celebration, retros pec tive conversion ofour we welcome your sugges tions boo k car d catalog into a national and appreciate your continued bibliographi c database, the supp ort. Research Libraries Info rmation This issue of the Quarto Network; im provement of our may appear a very odd way to exhibit space: restoration of "kick off' a fund-raising priceless maps; repl acement of The Clements Library Associates Board ofGovernors campaign. The subjects worn building furni shings; commissioned a portrait ofDirector John C. Dann by tou ched upon ~ the literature creation of new library promo­ Boston artist Gary Hoffman as part ofthe forthcoming 75th of the somewhat disreputable tional material ~ brochures, Ann iversary Celebration. Donn 's portrait now hangs in the sport of boxing, colonial guides, a video; and funding Rare Book Room with those of founder William L. Clements Maryland bookplates, tran s­ a varie ty of events celebrating and the Library :" first two Directors, Randolph G. Adams porting a rhinoceros from India the Library' s 75th Anniversary. and Howard H. Peckham, a reminder ofthe administrative to America for exhibition The second category aim s continuity enjoyed by the Libraryfor three-quarters of purposes, perpetuating a to ex pand the Clements Library's a century. geographical error on eigh­ academi c mission . Our goals teenth-century map s, and a include establi shing a new publicati on develop specific subject areas such as classic tale of seduction - are certainly fund , increasing support for our Price American Judaica, Asian-Am erican an odd mixture and seemingly a bit Visiting Research Fellowships , creating history, Frontier history, American superficial for a library which prides a premier lectureship in early Am erican business or journalism history; establi sh- itself on the Columbus Letter, the - - (iJ- - handwritten orders which started the pamphlets on the settlement of Virginia, are able to serve them well. American Revolutionary War, an the earliest known portrait engravings A library such as this is only as original copy of the Treaty of Ghent, or of Franklin and Jefferson, volume one good as its collections. The Clements Grant's letters to Shennan announcing complete of Isaiah Thomas' first Library, thanks in large part to the the capture of Richmond. where is the newspaper, and the earlie st atlas of sea visionary terms of Mr. Clements' gift, traditional military and political history charts published in America. A year the genero sity of its Associates, and a for which the Clements Library collec­ does not go by that we do not add a few supportive University. has done an tions are famous? items of this sort. exceptional job of keeping its focus on That happens to be the very point A truly great research library, its primary purpose - building the I wish to make. On its twenty-fifth however. is known not only for its collections so that year by year, it can birthday (1948), the typical Clements exciting high points, but for the breadth serve a larger and more sophisticated Library visitor would probably have and depth of its collections. Seventy­ constituency of researchers in whatever been shown. or been pursuing research five years after its founding, the aspect of American history they care to in source materials documenting the Clements Library is not only a notable investigate. discovery of America, the Stamp Act, or resource for studying the Age of Our modest but essential fund­ the Battle of Lexington, The original Discovery and Exploration or the raising effort in celebration ofour 75th Clements collection of 1923 was rich in American Revolution, but a wonderful Anniversary is aimed at making it the "great books" on the "great events" place to investigate American sports possible for us to continue concentrating of American history. Our resources on and leisure activity, the reading and on the fairly straightforward activity of these timelessly important subjects are book-collecting habits of our ancestors, building the collections. We are now several times richer today than they were ecology and the gradual change in much more than a great book collection. then, and the Library continues to add to attitudes about the treatment of animals. We are a rich and unique repository of its collections in its traditional areas of the fine points ofcartographic history. our nation's past experience - a strength whenever it has the opportunity. or crimes and scandals which tell us national treasure. With your continued In the past few years alone we have something about the failings of our support, we will only get better, acquired the letterbooks of Anthony changing civilization. These are subjects - John C. Donn, Director Wayne' s Pallen Timbers campaign, which interest today's students, and we THE JACKSONIAN UNICORN Short-tempered, short-sighted, and Curiosities in Europe for centuries. reputation of the pachyderm as an sharp-homed. the rhinoceros was the pachyderms (rhinos, elephants, and American icon was ensured. The rhinos perfect animal for the savage world of hippos) exerted a particularly strong and elephants that occupied center stage Jacksonian politics. Until the Pliocene fascination for American s. Their size in early national museums, then. became epoch. rhinos had been among the most and power, and their exotic good looks, part of the intellectual project of building abundant perissodacty ls on the conti­ made these creatures popular fare for a nation - they signified our strength nent, but like the Federalists, they had children' s books and scientific minds. and vitality, our control over nature and become extinct by the mid-1820s. In Noting the paucity of large-bodied over the colonized nations from which October 1826, however, a lone rhino mammals in North America, French they were liberated , appeared on our teeming shores. the first natural historians in the 1790s theorized For men like Marmaduke Burrough, in over a million years. and within five that the impoveri shed climate of the rhinos also promised fun and profit. As years. he and his thick-skinned compa­ United States must have stunted the a young man enamored of natural triots could be found treading the stage growth of its fauna. Simply put. history, Burrough studied the closest ofPeale's Museum in New York. America lacked the vital spark that subject available at the time. medicine, chewing the scenery at Washington animated the Old World, To nationalists and pursued his science on the side Gardens in Boston. touring the Eastern like Thomas Jefferson. of course, this wherever and whenever he could. His seaboard with the American National was pure balderdash. With the vast. lucky break came in 1828, when he Caravan, or biding time with the Associ­ unexplored reaches of the nation before received a little slop from the bucket of ation Menagerie. Among the earliest of him, Jefferson looked to the elephantine diplomatic spoils. a consular appoint­ these immigrant sons was a three year­ bones of mastodons and mammoths ment in Calcutta. old rhino captured on the plains of the littering the countryside (having studied Exotic and virtually unknown to Brahmaputra River north of Calcutta. them himselt) , and asked Lewis and Jacksonian Americans. the Indian and sold to Marmaduke Burrough Clark to keep an eye out for any subcontinent overflowed with natural (ca,1798-1844) in March 1830, In pachydermal herds that might still be riches. Shortly after assuming his post, Burrough' s papers, recently acquired by roaming the trackless Louisiana Pur­ Burrough ambitiously set out to join in the Clements Library, lies one of the chase, Although the explorers returned the scientific bonanza, setting his cap on best-documented stories of rhinocerine empty handed, the American ardor for acquiring the most treasured resource of immigration before this century. gargantuan creatures survived; the all. a live rhinoceros.