Chicago Library : Newberry: A Literary Ft. Knox

John Koenig, a professor at Australia’s MacQuarie University, is in the heart of Chicago’s nightclub and singles bar district to learn about religious holy days in northern Italy during the Middle Ages.

Historian C. B. Clark has come from the Long Beach campus of California State University to spend the winter studying American Indian tribal legal history at “Bughouse Square,” where assorted derelicts and eccentrics once gathered.

And University of Colorado folklorist Dianne Dugaw is in the same neighborhood to learn how women soldiers and sailors were portrayed in 18th- and 19th-Century ballads, searching through fragile books just a few blocks from North Michigan Avenue’s high fashion stores.

Extraordinary Treasure

Koenig, Clark and Dugaw have gathered, along with hundreds of other scholars, at the Newberry Library, an extraordinary treasure house of rare books and manuscripts--some almost 1,000 years old.

Many believe its large specialized collections in the history and humanities of Western civilization make it the finest of the nation’s 14 private libraries, an elite club that includes the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

The Newberry, a Ft. Knox for paper and words with a collection valued at an estimated $300 million, is housed in two buildings, one fortress-like and Romanesque, its marble exterior tarnished by 90 years of undisturbed soot and grime, and the other orange-brick, modern and windowless, designed to protect books from every imaginable hazard.

Not Widely Known

Although little known outside academia, the Newberry is a member of the Windy City’s family of world-class cultural institutions, along with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. Together, they serve to counterbalance this regional capital’s reputation as a rough, tough, blue-collar city of corrupt politicians and hard-working immigrants.

The Newberry “is a gem of the library world,” says JoAn S. Segal, executive director of the Assn. of College and Research Libraries.

“Everyone agrees that it is an absolutely remarkable institution,” says Robert Middlekauff, director of Southern California’s Huntington Library.

“I put it in the high rank of the private independent libraries,” says William Matheson, the Library of Congress’ chief of rare books and special collections. “It is among the great independent research libraries.”

“We’re a Midwestern equivalent of the Library of Congress,” boasts James M. Wells, a rare book authority and a Newberry curator for more than 30 years.

But, unlike the Library of Congress, with a collection 20 times larger, the Newberry does not maintain a broad and comprehensive assortment of materials. This is not a place to go to find a copy of Newsweek, the latest microwave cookbook or a James Michener novel. Instead, the Newberry calls itself “an uncommon collection of uncommon collections,” focusing on a few highly specialized areas.

“One of the special things about our collections is their variety,” says Paul Saenger, the Newberry’s curator of rare books.

They range from the Renaissance in Italy to the archives of several Midwestern railroads, from the exploration of the Americas and the impact of European culture on Indians to the papers of Ring Lardner, George Ade and Sherwood Anderson.

Scholars consider the Newberry to be the best place in the Western Hemisphere to study the history of books and the art of printing from hand-inscribed volumes to those mechanically produced.

‘Fine Array of Manuscripts’

“They have a particularly fine array of early printed manuscripts,” says Albert R. Ascoli, a Northwestern University assistant professor who is using the library to study the relationship between literature and authority during Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

“The Newberry has an extraordinary collection in the Renaissance and in the discovery of the New World,” says John A. Marino, a historian of Renaissance Italy from UC San Diego. “There are other places that have one or the other but not both. In fact, their Italian Renaissance materials may be among the very best in the country.”

Its music collection ranges from a first edition of Jacopo Peri’s “Euridice”--the first opera to be performed--to a large collection of American psalmody before 1800 and more than 100,000 pieces of American sheet music covering the years between 1765 and 1915. And it has a musician in residence to help “translate” the music.

Chicago’s Newberry is the place in the United States to study the history of Brazil and Portugal. It is ranked among the best in the world for the study of the history and development of the American West. It is one of the nation’s three or four best centers for genealogical research.

In fact, its genealogy section is one of the most popular and the one used most by the public.

“A month ago, I didn’t know anything about my family and now I’ve traced them back six generations,” says baritone William Stone, who passes his days at the Newberry and spends his evenings singing at Chicago’s Lyric Opera.

“The most unusual requests come from genealogy,” says Michael Kaplan, 42, the library’s head page. “When I first started, there was someone who was a pretender to the English throne trying to substantiate his claim.”

The Newberry’s 21 miles of books bridge more than 10 centuries of writing and knowledge, from the High Middle Ages to modern times.

They hold a 10th-Century book of homilies and sermons recorded by six monks in a monastery in southern France and the notes and personal papers of contemporary poet, translator, editor and critic Malcolm Cowley. There is a first edition of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and Ben Hecht’s screenplay for the original “Scarface.” A first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is there, along with first printed editions of Homer, Dante and the Federalist Papers.

Among the roughly 1.4 million volumes, 5 million manuscript pages and 60,000 maps and thousands of photos and Native American paintings--nobody has ever counted just what the library has--are 88 rare Bibles, the most complete collection of Herman Melville materials in the world and tens of thousands of maps, some predating the discovery of the New World and one that shows California as an island off the western coast of North America.

Unlike most private libraries, the Newberry did not start out as a collection of books. “This place started out as a collection of money,” says Lawrence W. Towner, 64, who has headed the library for almost a quarter-century, adding that Walter Loomis Newberry’s own collection of books was destroyed in the 1871 Chicago fire.

Newberry, who came from two pioneer Detroit families, moved to the primitive village of Chicago in 1833, when roughly 4,000 people lived in shacks along its muddy streets. He was a pioneer and speculator who bought property, eventually headed a banking firm, was president of a railroad and served as both acting mayor and president of the school board. He helped found the association that became the Chicago Public Library and maintained friendships with James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving.

‘Buried in a Barrel’

Newberry died at sea in 1868. His body was placed in a keg of rum and returned to Chicago. “Buried in a Barrel. How millionaire Newberry . . . who died at sea, was interred . . . “ read a caption in The Police Gazette.

His will provided that a library should be established but only after the deaths of his two daughters and his widow, a chain of events that was completed in 1885, leaving $2.1 million to establish an endowment.

In its first years, trustees decided that the Newberry would be a non-circulating reference library. They set out buying specialized collections and rare books, establishing the Newberry as a great vault of literary and historical significance.

That is a tradition that still governs the library’s purchases. “The most distinguished collection of English literary first editions formed by a private collector in our times” is what the London Times said of the library of Louis H. Silver, a Chicago businessman, which the Newberry acquired in 1964 for about $2.5 million.

The Newberry is still a non-circulating library. Its books never leave the building, ever. In fact, there are no shelves to browse through, only card catalogues. Books are stored in the new 10-story building, where the humidity is kept at 50%, the temperature at 60 degrees and the air is specially filtered to keep down dust. The floors and ceilings are designed both to contain fire for four hours and to prevent fire from moving from one floor to another. It is equipped with an array of fire- and theft-protection devices.

“A storage facility without parallel among great book warehouses of the world” is what American Libraries magazine said about the building, completed in 1982.

On days when the temperature and humidity are not just right in reading rooms, books may not be removed from the storage building.

“Sometimes, they put their books ahead of their scholars,” says Northwestern University’s Ascoli, who, like most of the 8,000 scholars who work there each year, appreciates the care.

The library is also a center for book conservation, one of just 10 in the United States. In a modern laboratory, workers preserve paper, rebuild bindings, often rebuild entire books, disassembling and reassembling them, using skills that have virtually vanished from commercial book production.

Nothing escapes attention in the conservation laboratory. On a recent day, Mary Lampert was carefully weaving silk threads into the embroidered velvet cover of a 16th-Century German text while, nearby, Demetrious Enoch was using a small hammer to “round” the backing of a reconstructed book.

While hanging onto the past, the Newberry has played a major role in more modern times. Using a grant from the library, Nelson Algren wrote “The Man With the Golden Arm,” and Ben Hecht, along with several other one-time Chicago journalists, picked the Newberry as the guardian of some of the nation’s most colorful newspaper history. The Hecht collection includes the first Oscar Hollywood ever gave for a screenplay. He won it for the script of “Underworld.” Hecht had used it as a doorstop.

‘Bughouse Square’

In the 1920s and 1930s, the grassy square in front of the Newberry was Chicago’s Hyde Park, a place where speakers on soapboxes exercised the First Amendment. Because some of those speakers expressed unconventional ideas, the park became known as “Bughouse Square.”

“Crazy arguments would erupt,” recalls Studs Terkel, author and historian who frequented the square. “Wobblies would argue with anarchists and evangelists would argue with atheists and, to settle these fights, they’d run into the Newberry and look things up to resolve the arguments.”

The Newberry was also special to rare book dealer Ben Abramson, so special that he arranged to have his cremated ashes spread on the lawn outside the Newberry’s rare book collection after his death in the 1940s.

They were spread on the area that has recently been turned into a modern facility for preserving books. If he knew, he’d probably approve.