Checking Out Libraries’ Treasures

At some point in most everyone’s childhood, someone--your mother, your third-grade teacher--revealed the secrets of the library. Maybe, to instill a sense of wonder, she said libraries hold books full of great ideas, magical stories and far-off places. The code to finding them: the card catalog, the Dewey Decimal System.

Here’s what no one told you was in libraries: glass eyeballs, handwritten diaries, the first stop-motion pictures and select volumes worth more than the average house in Los Angeles. And those are just in the major institutions. Dig into smaller ones, and you can come up with thoroughbred stud records, Guatemalan political posters, Olympic torches, lace and zippers.

Libraries are one of the public institutions that tell us a lot about ourselves. They tell us what we know, what we need, what we value. They show how different we are, and how much the same. In Los Angeles County, not surprisingly, the number of library collections flung far and wide reflects how diverse and sprawling the region is.

So sprawling, and so diverse, it turns out, that not even the librarians knew what was out there.

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It took a Canadian to reveal to Angelenos the treasures filed away in Los Angeles and surrounding cities. The results of his exploration are on display at the UCLA Hammer Museum in the exhibition “The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Los Angeles Libraries.”

That Canadian, Bruce Whiteman, the head librarian at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, came to Los Angeles six years ago. A rare-book specialist, Whiteman wanted to know what was already around before deciding what to add to his own library, which specializes in 17th and 18th century history and literature. “To me it makes sense to collect things collaboratively,” he said. “There’s no point in my building a collection of X, Y or Z if X, Y or Z is well represented at USC. And you can only do that, in a practical sense, by finding out what other people have.”

He started in April 1997 with a letter to six people and a more modest idea: a book highlighting the best of the city’s collections. Six people became an organizing committee of 10. A few institutions became more than 30. The book became a 450-page catalog for a major museum exhibition of nearly 400 objects.

Objects-not just books. Whiteman and the others who composed the curatorial committee sought out photos, maps, drawings, prints, manuscripts. The selection had to represent vast and varied holdings and go beyond such library exhibit standbys as Shakespeare’s first folio, the first edition of Newton’s “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”

“There’s a range of books that everybody recognizes as the ‘great books.’ Some of them are rare. They’re all expensive as hell. And they’re all very influential.... And somebody here in L.A.’s got them. But they’re also everywhere else too,” Whiteman said. He and the other curators felt the show needed to highlight items unique to Los Angeles’ libraries, and be visual enough to hold its own at the Hammer, an art museum. “We had a lot of very interesting-never rancorous, but often heated-arguments about certain books that someone (usually me, because I was the book person on the curatorial committee) wanted and felt should be there. And the other people would say, ‘People are going to fall asleep on their feet looking at this.”’

Many great books are represented in “The World From Here,” including all those mentioned above. Also: Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” as printed by William Caxton in 1476, and Thomas More’s 1516 novel “Utopia” (both owned by the Huntington). There are books that are works of art, such as Edward Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” (loaned by the Getty Research Institute Library) and 1844’s “The Pencil of Nature,” the first book to contain photography (from the Seaver Center for Western History Research at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County).

Other items represent Los Angeles and California history, such as Edward Weston photographs of early California, the first books printed in the state (both from Seaver Center), and original movie posters for “King Kong” and “Citizen Kane” (from the library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).

Even with nearly 400 items in the show, there are ones that got away. They couldn’t reach a lending agreement with Caltech for some astronomy and science books. The Ralph W. Miller Golf Library, which declined to loan its copy of the rare 1743 Scottish book “The Goff,” has now lost its home in the city of Industry. At the One Institute, a gay and lesbian archive, the curators just couldn’t find the right material for their exhibition.

“I know there will be people who will say, ‘How could you even think about putting the Caxton Chaucer and the original poster for ‘King Kong’ in the same room?”’ Whiteman said. “But the fact is that you could do five shows like this with completely different contents, and they’d all be great.”

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The Getty and the Huntington represent L.A.’s titans of rare book collecting, institutions familiar to even non-bibliophiles. Along with UCLA, they provided the largest number of items for “The World From Here.”

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It’s the next two tiers of libraries that most stand to benefit from the increased exposure the exhibition may offer. College and university libraries-the Claremont Colleges, Loyola Marymount, Occidental, CalArts-have individual strengths and special collections. USC, for instance, owns the Hancock Collection, about 78,000 science titles dating to 1525, purchased from the Boston Society of Natural History by G. Allan Hancock in 1944.

Whiteman’s own institution, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, is another hidden Los Angeles gem. William Andrews Clark Jr. built the library-named for his father, a U.S. senator-beside his house in the West Adams district between 1924 and 1926, and deeded the entire estate to UCLA on his death in 1934.

The French-Italian-style building is hidden from passing traffic on Adams Boulevard near Arlington Avenue by a vine-covered brick wall.

Inside are rooms with marble floors, English oak paneling and hand-painted ceilings. Clark’s collection of 18,000 books-primarily English literature and history from the 17th and 18th centuries-has grown into a collection of some 90,000 books. The library holds the world’s most comprehensive collection of materials by and about Oscar Wilde, the basis for another show at the Hammer Museum in late 1999. (The Hammer is the venue of choice because Clark’s deed of gift to UCLA stipulates that his books may never leave the property, which has been interpreted to include the UCLA campus. The Hammer Museum, since it merged with UCLA in 1994, is an extension of the campus.) A Wilde manuscript, book and portrait are among the Clark Library’s 39 items in “The World From Here.”

Other libraries have even more tightly focused collections. The Center for the Study of Political Graphics was started by Carol Wells as a private collection of political posters about Central America. The nonprofit center, the only one of its kind, now has 45,000 posters protesting political situations all over the world. “It’s an incredible responsibility,” Wells said. “We’re holding the record of their dreams. There’s one poster that says, ‘Until the lions have their historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.’ The posters we have are the record of the lions in their own words.”

The Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is devoted exclusively to movies and contains more than 7 million photographs, 22,000 posters, 65,000 screenplays and hundreds of thousands of clipping files on films. It has the personal papers of dozens of filmmakers, such as George Cukor and John Huston.

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Herrick Library Director Linda Mehr said it takes an exhibition like “The World From Here” to show off the rich holdings of L.A.’s libraries, which are spread hither and yon. A number of years ago, she said, there was an effort to create a performing arts library in Los Angeles, much like one in New York. “Well, there is a performing arts library. It’s just not in one location. If you take the L.A. Public Library and Hollywood, the university libraries, there are amazing resources on performing arts and other subjects, but people don’t realize it because of the nature of L.A. being 28 suburbs in search of a city. It’s just not one institution that calls attention to itself.”

The Western States Black Research and Educational Center certainly flies under the radar. Septuagenarian Mayme Agnew Clayton, a former librarian, founded her collection 25 years ago after noticing that black students on the campuses where she worked-USC and UCLA-couldn’t find books about African American history. Then, while helping build a collection at UCLA for the Afro-American Student Center, white advisors told her that “black students didn’t need any retrospect.”

“I took that seriously. That [attitude] could’ve been going around, and librarians might think that was the thing to do. And then blacks would never have anything left,” Clayton said, sitting at the dining room table of her home in West Adams, only a few blocks from the Clark Library, where she has never been.

Out the back door and down a short path is her center, a modest, converted two-car garage that belies its contents. Crammed onto floor-to-ceiling shelves, she has a vast collection of books by early African American writers, biographies, songbooks, magazines, letters and documents relating to the sale of slaves. There are 20,000 photographs and 540 all-black films. Tables covered with books and boxes fill the middle of the two small rooms; the space is so full that two people couldn’t pass anywhere.

Clayton knew immediately what would interest the curators of “The World From Here”: her signed copy of “Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral,” by Phyllis Wheatley. Published in 1773, it was the first substantial book of poetry by any African American writer, a detail made more profound by the fact that, at age 8 in 1761, she was kidnapped and brought to America as a slave.

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The transition from such private collections to public institutions started in Renaissance Italy, said Roberta Shaffer, executive director of the Special Libraries Assn. in Washington. The Medici family, for instance, began to establish institutions to house its books, manuscripts and artifacts, the forebears of the modern library and museum. “It became a very democratic philosophy ... that there was social value in sharing,” Shaffer said.

In the United States, as the railroads stretched across the continent in the 1800s, books came to California from East Coast cities and from Europe. In the case of the Huntington Library, the railroad connection is quite direct: Henry Edwards Huntington bought his books with a fortune made in railroads, then opened his library-which now contains some 5 million volumes-to the public in 1928.

Smaller private collections often found their way to universities and public libraries, places where scholars would have access to them, and donors would be sure that they would be cared for. A directory in her office lists 23,000 special library collections, Shaffer said, and that’s probably only half of the ones out there. In the U.S., there are also 9,691 special libraries that serve only a specific interest. Those range from law, business or medical libraries to the California Thoroughbred Breeders Assn., the One Institute, or the Paul Ziffren Sports Center Library.

Such facilities are increasingly valued, Shaffer said, as Americans have become more interested in their history over the last 20 years. Papers in special collections have given historians, such as John Adams biographer David McCullough, insight into the personalities of world leaders. They’ve likewise documented the experiences of women and blacks and other groups overlooked by history. Such collections, especially of primary materials, leave a legacy to future generations, she added. “Rather than the forest, they’re kind of the trees.”

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The bibliothecal forest that has grown up around Los Angeles has swiftly matured. As Whiteman writes in his opening essay to “The World From Here” catalog, very few books published before 1900 were ever read in Los Angeles when they were new. And yet thousands of books and artifacts that predate the city itself have found their way into its libraries.

Los Angeles is still closing a 150-year gap in collecting, compared to cities in the Eastern U.S., and is centuries behind Europe. The continued strength of such institutions as the Getty Research Institute Library, however, indicate that the city’s collective holdings will more than keep pace.

But what’s most remarkable about “The World From Here” is not the age, or oddity, or even value of the items on display. It’s that each of them is available in a library that is open to the public.

In that respect, “The World From Here” is a love letter to all libraries.

Katharine Donahue, head of history and special collections at the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA, said the organizing committee decided not to borrow from private collections, or even from collections that charge for use. The show didn’t suffer for that limitation. She was astonished by objects and books discovered in her own library, where she’s worked for 14 years, which are among the most visually riveting in the show. A Japanese autopsy scroll. Original Rorschach test cards. That box of glass eyes.

“Even if they aren’t scholars, if they want to look at something in our collection, they can do that. We might give you a reference card so we know who you are, but there’s nothing that anybody can’t look at in our collection,” Donahue said. “They just have to find us.”

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“The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Los Angeles Libraries,” through Jan. 13 at the UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday, 11 am. to 5 p.m. $4.50; $3, seniors; free for students, and UCLA faculty and staff. Admission free for everyone Thursdays. (310) 443-7000 or https://www.hammer.ucla.edu.