Open House

When Historian Louis Booker Wright took over as director of Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library in July 1948, he found the entrance to the reading room barred by a red silken rope and two guards. He promptly ordered the rope sent to the attic, cut the guard force by a third, put the remaining guards to work as janitors. Said Wright: "I came here to make an institution come alive, not to preside over a mausoleum."

Before Wright, Folger was sometimes known as a literary Fort Knox, with its invaluable treasures buried in regulations. Built and endowed (with $11.5 million) in 1930 by Oil Tycoon Henry Clay Folger to house his vast, scattered hoard of Shakespeariana, the library was run almost like an exclusive club. Only scholars known to its staffers could gain access to its books and manuscripts--after writing in advance. Even the favored few were stopped by the silken rope, had to sit on a bench until a staff member came to escort them to the books. As a result, days went by without a single visitor gracing the reading room. Virtually untouched were its great prizes: 79 Shakespeare First Folios (no other library has more than four), the Rev.

John Ward's diaries ("Shakespear, Drayton and Ben Jhonson had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted"), and the world's second largest&* collection of early English (1475-1640) books.

New Roofs, Old Books. Today, thanks to 56-year-old Louis Wright, the Folger reading room is well known as one of the world's great research centers, wide open to all serious scholars. (Casual visitors are tactfully shunted across the street to the Library of Congress, or to the Folger's own exhibition hall and theater.) Working 18 hours a .day, Wright has improved the library's physical plant (with air conditioning, better lighting), reorganized the 300,000-item collection. He also publishes a lighthearted Report which has delighted jaded librarians round the world.

Sample Wright whimsy: "During the latest [D.A.R.] gathering, a [visiting] Daughter . . . was overheard to say to her fellow travelers: 'I always feel so safe here. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get people to read Shakespeare instead of all those Red modern writers!' The lady little knows that the Folger Library also harbors the works of John Milton, who counselled rebellion, commended the cutting off of the King's head, and had other dangerous thoughts."

Much of Wright's time is devoted to augmenting the Folger's entire collection, not just its Shakespeariana. Under a special "Ten-Year Plan," he is directing the collection of every significant book written, published and read in Britain during the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts (1500-1700): "We have the rarities; now we're after the books the average man read." To dig up the oldtime bestsellers, Wright annually spends six weeks sleuthing abroad, moves like a human divining rod through Europe's dusty attics, cold cellars and decaying churches. Frequently, he uses a "new roof" method to encourage the hard-up British gentry to part with their libraries: in exchange for hitherto neglected books, Wright pays for a new roof on the manor house. Such persistence gets results: last year some 12,000 rare titles were added to the Folger's collection, 300 of them published before 1640.

Pickles & Revolution. To boost academic interest in the Folger, Wright has sent a traveling exhibit to about 25 U.S. colleges and universities, offers 15 to 20 research fellowships a year, annually answers hundreds of scholarly queries. As a result of Wright's barnstorming, scholars have become aware of the Folger's rich non-Shakespearian sources; today only 15% of the 350 academics who annually visit the library are studying Shakespeare. Among their latest completed works: Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution; The Cryptologist Looks at Shakespeare; Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth. Works in progress: a study of the varieties of English pickles used in early times, a history of 17th century printing, the administration of justice in Norfolk, England during the 1590s.

Breathing new life into the Folger Library is merely the climax of a lively career for South Carolinian Wright, who took his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina. His thesis on Vaudeville Elements in Elizabethan Drama drew a dead-serious rebuke from a dead-serious professor: "Humor has no place in a doctor's dissertation."

As Elizabethan scholars celebrated the 391st anniversary of Shakespeare's birthday, Director Wright took time out to explain further his library's new trend: "We're trying to show that we're not a little bit of England in America, but a place for Americans to gain a better perspective on their own history. All the fundamental concepts which make us the kind of people we are today had their modern conception in the Tudor and Stuart periods. For us, that's the milk in the coconut."

* The largest is in the British Museum.

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