Treasures Include Audubon Sketches : St. Louis Library Keeps Low Profile

They joke that it’s one of the best-kept secrets in St. Louis, a library founded by a group of merchants almost 140 years ago to lure the “young chaps” out of the city’s seedier joints.

Publisher Joseph Pulitzer said he got his education there.

Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde entertained there.

Civil War General William T. Sherman was a regular.

Artist George Caleb Bingham was such a devotee that he donated 112 of his sketches.

Quite a historical place, the Mercantile Library. Quite obscure too.

“We’ve been here 140 years,” said Elizabeth Kirchner, who is retiring after three decades as head librarian. “And it’s one of the best-kept secrets in the city.”

Created in 1846

The Mercantile, the oldest circulating library west of the Mississippi River, was created in 1846 by a group of seven St. Louis merchants who believed the city was in need of a place for young men to gather and read.

“We were founded when the fur trappers were still trading on the banks of the river,” Kirchner said. “The founders were concerned about the young men coming into the city. There were some rather seedy places and they felt these young men were in need of more culture.”

Pulitzer, who went on to found the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, spent much of his boyhood engrossed in the literary treasures of the venerable oak-paneled library, located downtown just a few blocks from where it was established.

“Between jobs he haunted its rooms, reading omnivorously,” wrote Don C. Seitz in his 1924 biography of Pulitzer. “The boy would be waiting on the steps in the morning for the doors to open and had to be driven out at evening. He would not leave his book for lunch, but always brought two apples in his coat pocket to serve for refreshment at noon.”

2,000-Seat Auditorium

In 1854, the library was moved to its present site, where a new building was constructed with a 2,000-seat Grand Hall.

During the next three decades, St. Louisians packed the auditorium to enjoy Twain’s lecture on the delights of cannibalism, exotic dancer Lola Montez’s lecture on women’s rights and the piano playing of black virtuoso Blind Tom.

A new building went up on the site in 1889 without the Grand Hall.

“Prior to 1889, there were no other large auditoriums in the city. The Mercantile was the cultural institution in St. Louis,” Kirchner said. “The board of directors felt it would be better to have more rental income by excluding the hall.”

‘Quiet Dignity’

The Mercantile has fewer than 2,000 members. Though it could use the money more members would bring in, Kirchner said, the staff has always “had a protective feeling about the quiet dignity of the place.”

“We don’t publicize--there’s no big membership drives,” she said. “People have to discover us, but we’re always here.”

Today the Mercantile is one of a handful of subscription libraries left in the United States. Others are in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Cincinnati.

Some city residents falsely assume that the library is a private club. Its name--Mercantile--leads others to believe erroneously that it is a business library or is affiliated with the Mercantile Bank.

Can Come In Anytime

“People can come in off the street anytime and use the library for the day,” Kirchner said. “The only restriction is that you need a membership to check out books.”

Through the years, Kirchner said, the library has been given a number of paintings, sculptures and other art works. Many of them are on display, including Thomas Gould’s sculpture, “The West Wind,” and a bronze cast of “Venus de Medici” that was donated to the Mercantile by a former tenant, an art dealer, in lieu of rent.

One of the library’s prized possessions is a complete copy of “The Birds of America,” 340 plates of John James Audubon’s drawings. All of the drawings were signed by the artist.

Death Mask of Napoleon

Above the fireplace in the reading room there’s a death mask of Napoleon. Made two days after Napoleon died, it is one of 10 known to be in existence, library officials said.

The Mercantile is best known in academic circles for its collection of 60,000 to 65,000 books on Western Americana--one of the most extensive on the subject in the world.

But the library does not cater to the scholar only.

Among its 250,000 volumes one can find the latest best sellers and murder mysteries. Visitors can relax in the quaint Victorian reading room while they peruse more than a dozen out-of-town newspapers and 240 magazines.

Rare Books on Exhibit

One also can spend hours scanning the titles of rare books on exhibit in locked oak bookcases that surround the reading room.

For example, Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” can be found in the same bookcase as “Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts” by Emerson. On the other side of the room, there’s “Fashion Is Spinach” by Elizabeth Hawes, and its apparent sequel, “It’s Still Spinach.”

‘Liberal Arts Library’

“We’ve always been a liberal arts library,” Kirchner said. “We try to keep abreast with current materials and we also try to round out the gaps in our collection.”

Three years ago, the family of railroad executive John W. Barriger III donated his private collection of 10,000 volumes, 250,000 photographs and other memorabilia to the Mercantile.

“We have a healthy division of materials for serious, scholarly research and for people who love the railroads for their romance and nostalgia,” said Mark Cedeck, curator of the railroad library.

Also in 1983, the Mercantile opened the National Waterways Library, a collection of 2,000 books, reports and other papers on the inland waterways transportation lock and dam systems dating back to the Civil War. The collection was donated by the Waterways Journal.

$1.8 Million Sale

The Mercantile stirred a controversy 10 years ago when it sold the 112 Bingham sketches to the state for $1.8 million.

Kirchner said the library sold the sketches because it needed money to purchase an air-conditioning system. Besides, the cost of insuring the sketches was “exorbitant,” she added.

“There was a lot of soul-searching before we agreed to sell the Binghams,” she said. “After all, they were a gift from him. But here we sat without air conditioning for all these books.