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Trove of Treasures: The Newberry Library 1887 to the Present

By Chris Watkins, Illinois Library Association

Originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of The ILA Reporter, a publication of the Illinois Library Association.  

Chicago’s landmark water tower, pictured on the right in a 1951 illustration by Elmer Jacobs, dates from 1869, one year after the death of Chicago businessman Walter Loomis Newberry. Part of the magic of library collections is that they preserve, collect, and connect the people whose lives never quite intersect but are part of a common fabric.

Newberry wanted Chicago to have a public library and left more than two million dollars — half of his estate — to create one. The city decided to create a library of its own at about the same time, so Newberry’s library was free to become what the trustees dubbed a “library for scholars
and people desiring to make careful researches.” Since 1887 the Newberry Library has been just that, open to anyone over the age of sixteen conducting research on one of the library’s subject areas, which are concentrated in history and the humanities.

Elmer Jacobs was a freelance illustrator and designer from the 1920’s through the 1970s who worked for the Chicago Tribune, Rand McNally, and others. His lithograph of the water tower dates from 1951, and was donated to the Newberry Library along with his personal papers and other pieces of his work.

The Newberry’s collections comprise 1.5 million books, five million manuscript pages, more than 500,000 maps, and extensive holdings of prints, drawings, ephemera, music, and other printed items. When one thinks of library “treasures,” rare books come to mind, such as a copy of Shakespeare’s works or the Bible, a first edition by a famous author, or maybe a manuscript in an author’s own hand. In fact, the richest library holdings include many nonbook items — the common element has been works on paper, but binding has always been optional.

While future treasures may be digital in origin, past and present ones are becoming increasingly available in digital formats. A compelling example is what once would have been a scholarly book by one of the Newberry’s curators, recently published as a fully-illustrated blog. Paul F. Gehl, custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing at the Newberry, recently launched Humanism for Sale: Making and Marketing Schoolbooks in Italy, 1450-1650 as an online publication at www.humanismforsale.org/text.

Far from a hands-off collection, the blog presents facsimiles from the Newberry’s extensive collections of fifteenth and sixteenth century books and manuscripts to a far wider audience than might otherwise have access. The format also allows comments from readers, creating a forum for discussion, revision, and further research. For example, discussion of a comic-strip style illustration in a 1526 volume (pictured at left) touches on rearranging the panels in different formats to fit different page sizes, much as designers over time have reformatted from broadsides to tabloids to computer screens.

Some recent acquisitions featured on the Newberry’s Web site, www.newberry.org, display not only images but also commentary from librarians to introduce the items to the public and place them in context. Two examples include an unusual version of a 1540 classic map and a drawing to honor Franco-American relations in 1918. Chicagoans Roger Baskes, who donated the Ptolemy map, and Frances Shaw and Susan Moon, who donated the Velisle drawing, join the ranks of Newberry, Jacobs, and the many other players in the stories that are collected in the Newberry’s holdings.

• The Newberry already owned two copies of the 1540 Sebastian Münster edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, but in the way of books in the handprinted era, there were slight differences between them. This third “copy” differs markedly from the other two. For one thing, it contains just the maps and not the Ptolemaic tables and text. Then, the maps were bound “broadside,” whereas typical copies of this book have folded maps. Furthermore, it has a distinguished provenance that includes Baron Anselm Salomon von Rothschild (1803–1874). And finally, the maps were splendidly colored by hand and highlighted in gold in the sixteenth century. The total effect is worthy of a volume once held in the library of the founder of the Vienna branch of one of the great banking dynasties of the nineteenth century.
  
• Nine-year-old Françoise de Velisle presented her drawing to American Expeditionary Force officer Clay Judson at July 4th celebrations in a nearby French town. Judson enclosed it in a letter about the festivities to his mother, Alice Clay Judson of Chicago, noting: “Yesterday we had one of the most touching celebrations I’ve ever witnessed. France literally opened her arms to America — and this was shown not only by official actions but by the individuals.” The letter and drawing are part of a major addition to the library’s Clay Judson Papers. They contain Judson’s World War I correspondence, firsthand reports on the Russian Revolution by his diplomat father William Voorhees Judson, an album of Clay Judson’s Panama Canal construction photographs, and a childhood scrapbook containing an 1839 letter from his ancestor Henry Clay.

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