Buried Treasure

While the smoke of musketry wreathed Bunker Hill,* a young man sat working in a library a few miles away. Two days later, he confessed to his diary that "amid all the terrors of battle, I was so busily engaged in Harvard Library that I never even heard of the engagement . . . until it was completed." Last week summer students, hunched over tables in the isolated quiet of Harvard's Widener reading room, were equally oblivious to the roar outside the windows. The roar came from bulldozers, hollowing out the foundation for a new and surprisingly modernistic annex (see cut) given by Harvardman Thomas W. Lament, '92. Despite its 4,900,000 books, its 125 miles of stacks and its accommodations for 4,500 readers, the Harvard University Library was feeling cramped.

Unearthed: an Undershirt. While the bulldozers outside delved into the future, Harvard librarians inside had been digging up their past. In a series of Harvard Library Bulletins (the third issue is now in the works), its staff has begun to tell the story of the second largest* library in the U.S. They unearthed such unsuspected Harvardiana as Henry Adams' course notes and one of ex-President Henry Dunster's undershirts.

The library that today costs $1,250,000 a year to run began in 1638 with 400 books that young John Harvard brought with him from England. In spite of one testy librarian's belief that "students take books to their chambers and teare out pictures ... to adorne their walls," John Harvard's library grew into the finest in the Colonies. Then, on a stormy night in 1764, it burned to the ground. From John Harvard's collection, only one book -- -John Downham's Christian Warfare Against the Deuill World and Flesh--was saved.

From all over the Colonies and from England came gifts of books from scholars, preachers, writers. The library doubled in size every 20 years. Today, as "trustee for the learned world" (as it likes to call itself), Harvard's library spends more money a year on the upkeep of valuable but out-of-the-way bequests than it does on books that its undergraduates use. For the searching scholar it houses shelves full of irreplaceable documents on the Italian Risorgimento, Congo dialects, cooking and the privately printed pornographies of Mark Twain. Some of its treasures haven't been consulted by any one for half a century. Some others come in handy: during World War II, members of Harvard's 600-man library staff could predict coming invasions by the books Washington asked for.

Fielding Forbidden. In the old days, undergraduates were met at the library door by awesome lists of Prohibited Books (sample: "All novels in the new library . . . Fielding's works, Heine's works, Voltaire's works . . . Books of prints"). They were also forced to leave their caps and cloaks at the door, lest they smuggle out the books (Harvard still loses 1,000 volumes a year, once found that one student had made off with 3,000 books).

In the new Lament Library, to be finished in the fall of '48, the undergraduate will be able to browse freely through the stacks for the first time, pick and choose his books at will. He will still have to stand inspection as he leaves, to prove that he is not making off with any of Harvard's bound treasures.

*Then known as Breed's Hill, a smaller neighboring slope to Bunker Hill. Today both humps are lumped as Bunker.

*Biggest: the Library of Congress.

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