Special-Collection Libraries Are Best-Kept Secrets on Campuses

Tucked away upstairs at Cal State Fullerton’s library, in a salmon pink sanctuary largely overlooked by students, is a collection of books, maps and artifacts so rare that researchers wear white gloves to touch them.

The treasures are part of the university’s special collections section, a “library within a library” that draws researchers from as far away as Singapore while eliciting scarcely a shrug of interest from most of the 22,000 students on campus.

UC Irvine has also assembled an impressive array of largely overlooked historical treasures in its Department of Special Collections, including the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays, appraised at $250,000.

But if students venture into the departments at either campus, librarians say it is often accidental. And they don’t tend to linger.

“A lot of them open the door and they don’t know where they are,” says Sylvester Klinicke, assistant department head at UCI. “They don’t even know this room exists until they come in. They should, at least one time in their life, come in here.”

The sequestered treasures at the two campuses--most of which are behind locked doors, or even in vaults--include tens of thousands of rare and unusual books, maps, manuscripts and magazines.

The Cal State Fullerton University Archives and Special Collections Section includes one of the nation’s five largest holdings on freshwater angling, one of the state’s most impressive stockpiles of science fiction manuscripts and a Babylonian clay tablet at least 3,600 years old.

While students are not beating a path to this rarefied airspace, the collections are nothing to yawn over, say those who know.

“You and I might not get all atwitter about freshwater angling, but if you’re into that, this is the place,” says Sharon Perry, Cal State Fullerton’s university archivist and special collections librarian. “We’ve had researchers . . . working on advanced degrees come from other countries. If you have that focus or that knowledge, you get very excited.”

If any title in the collection seems likely to snag a student’s attention, it might be the “Obscenity and the Law” collection, rows of books confiscated by the Orange County District Attorney’s office while prosecuting obscenity cases during the 1950s and 1960s, now on deposit at the Fullerton campus.

But here, it seems, even pornography can be overlooked.

During the past 10 years, only one man has asked to see those books, Perry says. To view this collection, which librarians say is dated and irrelevant, an applicant would have to be at least 21 and have a “serious research purpose,” says Perry, who labels it “the most boring collection we have.”

Those who do use the schools’ special collections libraries say they are invaluable and boost a university’s prestige.

For example, students who rely on UCI’s expansive assemblage of dance memorabilia, including rare books, photographs and even slippers from famous ballerinas, call it “a gold mine for dance scholars.”

“It’s my romantic notion of being a student doing research, where you go into this almost hallowed room and you have someone find something you’ve been looking for, and there it is,” says Valerie Branch, 23. “I feel like if I was at Harvard and Yale I’d have access to this, but I didn’t think I’d have access to this at UCI. It’s a real luxury.”

*

But, alas, not many of the departments’ holdings--which are burdened with titles such as “Local History Including Emphases on Citrus and Water,” “The Emma D. Menninger Collection in Horticulture” and “The Roy V. Boswell Collection for the History of Cartography”--seem destined to lure young readers.

On a recent afternoon at UCI, the special collections library reading area is silent, save the sound of rustling paper and the steady hum of the air conditioner.

Klinicke and a librarian are eagerly awaiting the arrival of a guest from out of town.

Are we expecting the researcher from San Diego today? he inquires. She’s supposed to be here at 3 o’clock, she responds.

Any minute, it seems, someone will rise to put on the kettle.

The enclave is decorated with rows of leather-bound beauties perched rather stuffily behind a glass wall in a custom case.

On one shelf, “The Vicar of Wakefield” rubs up against “Memoirs of Libraries.” On another “Byron’s Works” is pressed between “Mrs. Perkins’s Ball” and “Lives of the Founders of the British Museum.” Below rests the towering tome “Costume of the Russian Empire.”

Yesterday, Klinicke says brightly, this place was a madhouse--nine visitors!

When researchers do appear, they must follow a standard protocol intended to maintain order and preserve the collection. In other words, this is no place to simply waltz through the door and pluck a book from a shelf.

“No one can browse the collection,” says Jackie Dooley, UCI’s department head. “There are things that are valuable and fragile. . . . It requires supervised use.”

Should a student desire something from, say, the “British Naval History Collection,” he would collect the call numbers from drawers that line one wall, present his request to the librarian and then cool his heels while it is being fetched.

Nothing is checked out, even by instructors.

One “gloriously illustrated” costume books is worth up to $25,000, Klinicke says. The department’s crown jewel, the collection of plays by Shakespeare, which was published in 1623, is secured in a vault on another floor.

*

“It would take some credentials to see it,” Klinicke says, adding that most students would be unable to appreciate its beauty or value. If a title from the collection were requested, the researcher would probably be presented with a facsimile to view, he says.

The routine is no less formal at Cal State Fullerton, where scholars must slip into white nylon gloves before being presented with some of that department’s rare maps or books. There, the books are retrieved from a chamber dubbed Never Never Land.

“We call it Never Never Land because they never go in there,” Perry says. “Order must be rigidly maintained to make it retrievable.”

Researchers jot notes with pencils, never smudge-prone pens.

Each of the 1,500 maps in Fullerton’s internationally known cartography collection is stored in its own acid-free folder in a metal drawer. Some individual maps are worth $5,000.

“They’re more secure than at any time in their history,” said Albert R. Vogeler, curator of the dazzling medley, which dates to the 15th Century. “They will be here 1,000 years from now, hopefully, if there’s no disaster.”

Then again, “special” does not necessarily mean highbrow.

The 88 headings in Fullerton’s department includes a pop culture division with comic books, movie posters and film and television scripts, including scripts from the original “Star Trek” series.

The contents of the two libraries have been gathered from a variety of sources. But with governmental funding shrinking--even disappearing--in recent years, librarians say they are increasingly reliant upon library support group purchases and gifts from collectors, professors and residents.

Dooley said UC Irvine receives less than $9,000 a year in state funding, a paltry sum to a rare-book collector.

“One could easily spend that on half of a book for the prices rare books go for,” she said. “There’s just never enough money to go around.”

But the scene is leaner still at Cal State Fullerton, where the special collections section has operated without a budget for nine years, said Perry, who admits it was she who most recently laundered the department’s protective gloves.

“Donations would be the only way we acquire materials currently,” she said.

And the donations have been generous over the years.

Dooley points with pride to the gifts UCI has received from distinguished professors, including Jacques Derrida, the father of “deconstruction” and a professor of French and Italian whose papers now form the cornerstone of that university’s burgeoning Critical Theory Manuscript Collection.

The prized Shakespearean works came from Patrick Hanratty, a UCI graduate, who gave the treasure to his alma mater in the late 1980s, Dooley said.

In 1981, businessman Dwight V. Strong gave Cal State Fullerton a collection of George Bernard Shaw’s first editions and manuscripts, Perry said.

*

About five years ago, she added, a Fullerton resident donated about 800 volumes of “Big Little Books,” mini-books linked to popular culture, such as comic strips, radio, television and film.

Still, such offerings have not seized the attention of the student body at either school.

On a recent afternoon at UCI, a young man hurries along, a few feet from the special collections department door. Has he ever dropped in?

“No, I haven’t,” he says, rushing on. “Sorry.”

Nearby, a woman reads in a courtyard, two doors removed from the department. Has she been inside?

“I haven’t,” she says, almost regretfully. “I’ll go look at it, though.”

The refrain is the same at Cal State Fullerton.

“I’ve never been up there,” admits Sienty Liu, 18, in the main library, two floors below the archive. She wonders who has. “Maybe teachers?” she asks.

A young man sitting at a nearby computer table appears equally stumped.

“Special collections?” he says. “I’ve never heard of it.”