The Story of the Libe

The Story of the Libe

A senior assembly talk delivered in Finney Chapel, April 23, 1941

Robert S. Fletcher

Oberlin College

1941-06
1941-04-23

Educational use only.

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OBERLIN COLLEGE

OBERLIN COLLEGE
THE STORY OF THE LIBE
By Professor Robert S. Fletcher ('20)
A Senior Assembly Talk Delivered
in Finney Chapel, April l23, 1941

June, 1941 Oberlin, Ohio

The present expansion of the physical plant of the library, though
notable, is by no means unique. Since the Eighties, at least, the college
librarian has in most years viewed the incoming flood of print with an
enthusiasm tempered by fear of a more or less imminent overflow. Even
as early as 1848 the librarian presented a request to the Prudential Com-
mittee asking that an extra shelf might be put up. Always eventually by
some means more space has been provided.

At first the college books were kept in any room that happened to be
handy—from 1855 until after the Civil War this was in the old chapel on
the square. Society Hall, which was erected in 1868 just across the street
from the present site of Finney Chapel, contained space on the upper floor
for both the college and literary-society libraries. In 1884-85 the Spear
Library was built, also on the square, facing Tappan walk not far from
North Main Street. The first floor was reserved for use as a natural history
museum but the second floor was available for book alcoves and a small
reading room. At the dedication of this building on November 2, 1885,
the marble statue of the “Reading Girl” was the center of interest accord-
ing to the Review. The sculptor was John Adams Jackson, an American
artist of some repute in his day. This piece had been done in Florence in
the Sixties and rated a laudatory article in the Berliner Zeilimg in 1869. It
was given to Oberlin by an American collector particularly for the library.
“Surely,” ecstasized the Review, " [her] eager, intellectual face with its in-
tense absorption must be an inspiration to the most unappreciative mind."
But the librarian was more interested in books and shelving space
than statues, and within a. decade, despite the fact that only a few hundred
dollars was available annually for purchases, he was complaining that many
volumes had to be piled on tables and on the floor and temporary shelves
had to be put up in the tiny reading room. In 1905 the museum was re-
moved from the lower floor and the overcrowding was thus somewhat
relieved. Already, however, it had become apparent that an entire new
building was needed. The problem was solved in a most unusual, not to
say providential, manner.
Sometime in the same year, 1903, a young Cleveland matron appeared
at the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin and asked to borrow $50,000.
Cassie Chadwick is described as having had a figure of fashionable "hour-
glass lines” on which she "wore clothes like a duchess." Her face, it is said,
was that "of a slightly sad angel” and her eyes were "large, deep and sin-
cere." Cassie was, you will gather, quite fetching. As collateral for the
proposed loan she offered a personal note for half a million dollars signed
by Andrew Carnegie. She was not at liberty, she said, to explain why the
steel magnate should be so generous.
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So they gave her the fifty grand, and she came again and again until
she had borrowed $350,000. Back in Cleveland she bought pianos by the
dozen and provided all three of her maids with mink coats. Then in No-
vember, 1904, the news came to Oberlin that Cassie Chadwick was a pro-
fessional autograph manufacturer, who had already served one term for
practicing her art. The bank closed its doors. $550,000 out of Oberlin
didn't leave much. Townsmen lost their savings and students lost the money
they had put aside to pay board bills.
Of course, Carnegie wasn’t responsible, but because his name had been
used he gave $15,000 to make up the losses of college students. One day
President King, while in New York, went in to thank Carnegie for his
kindness. He came out with a promise of $125,000 to build Oberlin a new
library building.
And so the 75th anniversary of the college was celebrated in 1908 by
the dedication of Finney Chapel and the Carnegie Library. Wflliarn
Coolidge Lane, Harvard librarian, delivered the dedicatory address. Cassie
Chadwick got ten years.
In the new building there were originally only four floors of stacks
with the Olney Art Collection displayed in the space above them. Soon
the shelves were overcrowded again. The removal of the art exhibit to
the new Allen Art Building during the World War years left room for two
more levels of glass and steel stacks. These, also, were soon filled, and
thousands of items had to be sent to storage in the attics of various college
buildings. And now again ‘new dikes have been built to catch the over-
flowing tide of books.
* * *
The great college or university library is a really recent development.
The Harvard library of the time of the American Revolution could have
been placed in one of our downstairs open-shelf rooms, and any other
American college library of that date would have found room and to spare
in the reserve book alcove. Even in 1880 there was not one American
college that possessed half as many books as Oberlin does today.
Oberlin’s first books were not purchased; they were the castoff volumes
from Yankee preachers’ libraries. In 1855 the total value of all college
books was estimated at a hundred dollars. In the next year 800 volumes
were reported--on literature, history, philosophy, religion, music, slavery,
and phrenology. A good many of them were in Greek, Hebrew and Latin;
two were in French. In 1840 a gift of 2,000 books was received from phil-
anthropic English Quakers and other British reformers. The collection
grew slowly in those early years. By 1882 some 15,000 volumes had been
accumulated, and by the end of the century, 40,000. When the Carnegie
library was opened 100,000 volumes were brought over from the old build-
ing along with the “Reading Girl."
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This number included the college library and the library of the liter-
ary societies, the latter donated to the main library at that time. Extra-
curricular student life in all American colleges formerly centered around
the literary societies, and one of the leading activities of such societies was
the collection of books. Before the Civil War Oberlin’s two men's socie-
ties had over a thousand volumes and the ladies’ societies had begun a
library by sending a delegation down to Mr. Fitch's bookstore to purchase
Motley’s Dutch Republic, Tennyson's Workt, and Irving’s Warbingtan.
After the war all the societies joined together in forming the Union Library
Association. This organization sponsored a series of lectures each year by
such luminaries as Russell H. Conwell, Mark Twain and Elbert Hubbard,
and used the profits to buy books for the combined literary societies’
library. Though the U.L.A. library was smaller, as late as the Nineties at
least it was probably more valuable than the college library. The U.L.A.
collection was the most important single acquisition in the library’s history,
an appropriate gift from earlier student generations to later ones.
The rate of growth accelerated after 1908. In 1920 the accessioning
of the 200,000th volume was celebrated by a staff banquet at the Park
Hotel. The 300,000 mark was passed before the end of the decade. Yes-
terday when a book called The Social Relation: of Science by ]. G. Crowther
was accessioned it became the 410,579th bound volume.
Oberlin has had but five librarians. The first two were librarians only
incidentally. Dear old Dr. Dascomb also taught all the science and Henry
Whipple was principal of the Preparatory Department. Henry Matson,
a former stenographer and Congregational minister, served at Society Hall
for fifteen years—the first full-time librarian.
Azariah Root was librarian for forty years, from 1887 to 1927. He
was one of Oberlin’s chief builders. His responsibilities and contributions
were so numerous that I shall catalog only a few of them. He was an active
worker in Oberlin community affairs, a founder of the Anti-Saloon League,
vice-chairman of the faculty, a lecturer before many library schools, Presi-
dent of the American Library Association and of the Bibliographical So-
ciety of America. In his later years he was everywhere recognized as the
dean of college librarians. More important to us, as one of his most dis-
tinguished fellow-librarians (William Warner Bishop) said of him after
his death, "by prodigious industry and unremitting toil,” he developed a
very ordinary college library into "a real institution." He made, I may
add, an institution which could attract Julian Fowler in 1928 from the
fine new library at the University of Cincinnati to be his successor.
Librarians of the early years were looked upon more as guardians than
as guides. Guardians of the books against the students and of the students
against the books. The first library bookplate states that students must
report all damage to a book when returning it. There still seems to be
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need for vigilance to repress the impulses of the annotator and the marginal
artist. At an early date the librarian was given authority to withhold from
circulation any book he considered unfit for student use. Only twenty years
ago certain franker writings and translations of the classics that might be
used as "ponies" were kept locked up on the top floor of the stacks. The
effort to protect the student from the books seems to have been given up
as hopeless.
In the Nineteenth Century American colleges did not expect their
students to make much use of the library in connection with regular cours-
es. As late as 1884 the Oberlin librarian reported that the library was
chiefly used by students in preparing orations, essays and briefs for literary
society meetings, "exhibitions" and Commencement. Those were the days
before “outside reading."
For many years no reading room was provided. In the Eighties the
U.L.A. reading room was open afternoons "from one o'clock until prayers"
and the college library reading room only four hours a day: two hours for
"ladies" and two for "gentlemen." In the Nineties Spear Library was open
to all without discrimination as to sex from 7: I5 in the morning until five
in the afternoon, with time out for lunch. When in I902 gas light gave
way to electricity the library was opened in the evenings and a new era
began in the intellectual and social history of the college. The large read-
ing room in the Carnegie building was often overcrowded even before the
first World War. The spacious new reserve-book reading room on the first
floor with its nearly 200 chairs should relieve this situation.
In number of bound volumes the Oberlin library stands twenty-fifth
among all the university and college libraries in the United States. In Ohio
the only such library to surpass or even remotely compare in size to ours at
Oberlin is that of Ohio State. For a while at least this great collection will
have plenty of room on the more than thirteen miles of shelves in the ex-
panded building. But the present librarian is less interested in size than
in quality and use. He is particularly proud of the fact that nearly all col-
lege and theological students draw out some unreserved books every year.
An indication of the quality of the collection may be found in the fact that
last year 61 other libraries in 21 states and Canada borrowed books from
Oberlin through the interlibrary loan system.
A century and a quarter ago George Ticknor, studying at Gottingen
in Germany, made the discovery that "the Library is not only the first con-
venience of the University, but that it is the very first necessity,——that it is
the life and the spirit, . . . ." The library, wrote Oberlin’s Librarian Henry
Matson, is "the intellectual treasury of the college.” It has been one of our
chief privileges in Oberlin to work in this great and growing library, so
effectively staffed and liberally administered, and now conveniently housed.
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