Ralph Waldo Emerson and Libraries

Ralph Waldo Emerson and LibrariesAuthor(s): Haynes McMullenSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Apr., 1955), pp. 152-162Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4304401 .

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RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND LIBRARIES

HAYNES MCMULLEN

R ALPH WALDO EMERSON used libraries frequently and wrote about libraries on several occasions.

What he wrote on the subject has been used by librarians and book-collectors in ways that have affected American libraries both directly and indirectly. The purpose of the present study is to examine his relationships with libraries, to review his statements about libraries, and to attempt to estimate the effect of these statements on the course of American librarianship.

Emerson grew up in an atmosphere of library use. Born in Boston in 1803, his childhood and youth were spent in a place and at a time in which books and affairs of the mind were respected. But his connection with libraries was closer than that. His father, the Reverend Wil- liam Emerson, had for a while main- tained a social library in his home when he had lived in the little town of Har- vard, Massachusetts.'

A few years before Ralph's birth, the family moved to Boston, where his father's ministerial and bibliothecal ac- tivities expanded. William Emerson was an active member of the small group of men who founded the Boston Athenae- um, and he served two terrns as a trustee of the Boston Library Society. The Athenaeum was to become the most use- ful general library in the city during the first half of the nineteenth century; and the collection of the Boston Library Society, known as the Boston Library, was perhaps the second most important

of Boston's general libraries during the same period.

Emerson's father died in 1811, a few weeks before the boy's eighth birthday, and seems to have had little direct influence on his son's intellectual development. However, after the father's death, the family continued to hold a share in the Boston Library. During the years just before Emerson attended Harvard, the Boston Library contained about five thousand books, described in the North American Review in 1817 as "principally in modern history, belles lettres, voyages and travels, novels, etc." The periodical commented that "it is not common to find so large a proportion of any library made up of the best standard works."2

The Emerson family availed itself of the opportunity to withdraw books on the two days of the week when the Bos- ton Library was open for that purpose. Ralph may have read all or none of these books; or, what is more likely, he may have read a large number of them.3 His famous journals, in which he recorded his bookish likes and dislikes, were not begun until his junior year at Harvard.

THE HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

During his college years (1817-21) Emerson was not noted for outstanding scholarship, but he gained a reputation for his fund of general knowledge, much of it gathered from the Harvard College Library. This library contained about eighteen thousand volumes, so had much

I R. L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949), pp. 3-4.

2 "Libraries," North American Review, V (Sep- tember, 1817), 432.

1 Cf. Rusk, op. ct., p. 60.

152



RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND LIBRARIES 153

more to offer than had the Boston Li- brary. The college officials had, some seventy-five years earlier, arranged the collection in a manner that sounds quite modern: books particularly suited for use by undergraduates were in a separate collection. The reason for the establish- ment of this undergraduate library was perhaps not so modern: the separation was made with the purpose of making access to a portion of the collection difficult for undergraduates and not with the idea of making the other books more ac- cessible. The student had to obtain special permission to use any book which was not in the collection deemed most suitable for his use.4

In the Harvard College Library of those days, as in other libraries of the time, circulation records were kept in bound volumes which showed who took which book on what day. The volumes for Emerson's sophomore, junior, and senior years are among those which have been lost, but the record of his withdraw- als during his freshman year have been published, as have some later volumes which record his occasional use of the library after graduation. While he was a freshman, he withdrew fourteen volumes, all historical or literary except for three volumes of an encyclopedia.5

Harvard, like other colleges then and later, abounded in a variety of literary and social clubs. When Emerson was there, these clubs owned, in all, some- where between two thousand and three thousand volumes.6 Emerson belonged to one of the lesser book clubs which sub-

scribed to current periodicals such as the North American Review and which pur- chased such current books as Scott's novels.

After graduation, Emerson taught school for a few years and then returned to the university, enrolling in the Divini- ty School in 1826. His attendance at class was quite irregular, but the record of his borrowings from the library of that school (known as the Andover-Harvard Theological Library) includes some twenty-seven items taken during the years 1827 through 1829. Most are, quite prop- erly, of a strictly religious nature, but there are included the poetical works of Wordsworth and the Commentaries of Blackstone.'

THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM

About 1830, Emerson began his close friendship with the best library in Bos- ton, that of the Athenaeum. His father had made the motion for the establish- ment of a library of periodicals at a meeting of the Anthology Society-or Anthology Club as it was sometimes called-in the autumn of 1805. This library grew to become the library of the Boston Athenaeum, but William Emer- son seems to have had less to do with its later development than had several of the other club members. He did not become a "Proprietor" of the Athenaeum (cost, $300), but he became a member of the next lower group, the "Life Sub- scribers" (most of whom paid $100).8

The Emerson family apparently did not continue to use the Athenaeum in the years just after William's death, but his son Ralph may have begun to use it in the 1820's. Visiting it in the summer of

4 Harvard University, "College Book No. 7" (MS), pp. 145-50, quoted in Louis Shores, Origins of the American College Library, 1638-1800 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1935), p. 215.

1K. W. Cameron, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Read- ing (Raleigh, N.C.: Thistle Press, 1941), pp. 44-49.

6 "Libraries," op. cit., p. 431.

I Cameron, op. cit., p. 50. 8 Josiah Quincy, The History of the Boston

Athenaeum (Cambridge, Mass.: Metcalf & Co., (1851), pp. 4-46.



154 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

1822, just after it had been moved to a new home in Pearl Street, he was deeply impressed with the beauty of some re- cently acquired casts of ancient statues.9 If he used the Library regularly during these years, he probably did so by paying an annual fee. The Athenaeum's lists of visitors from other cities include the names of four men whom he "intro- duced" to the Library between 1823 and 1829.10 The Library's records of circulation extend back no farther than 1830, so nothing is known of books taken out of the building before that date." In any event, he would have had to do his reading on the premises before 1826, because it was in that year that members were first permitted to take books from the building.'2

The 1830's were eventful years for Emerson in his outward and inward life. During this decade his first wife, Ellen, died; he gave up the ministry as a profession; he took his first trip abroad; he married his second wife, Lidian; he re- moved from Boston to Concord; and he .began his career as a lecturer and essay- ist. As might be supposed, some of these events interrupted him in his use of libraries, while others stimulated his reading. His journals contain many references to books during these years, and it has been estimated that at least 40 per cent of the books mentioned there were bor- rowed from the Athenaeum.'3

During the 1840's Emerson used the Athenaeum much less than he had in the 1830's. His personal library was growing,

and he was depending less and less on the ideas of others, as his own store of ideas grew and took a more definite pattern. There were several years during this decade when he took no books from the Athenaeum at all, and the books withdrawn by him constitute only about one- fourth of those mentioned in the journals.'4

Students of Emerson's writing have little interest in the reading which he did after about 1850, because his basic philosophy was well fonned before that year, and his reading was becoming less purposive, more casual. However, his use of books from the Athenaeum did not de- crease. From 1851 through 1872 he withdrew books every year, an average of about twenty-eight books per year. Dur- ing the decade of the 1860's he withdrew a few more books than he had withdrawn in the 1830's.'$

Emerson's use of the Athenaeum was by no means confined to the withdrawal of books. Living most of his adult life at Concord, twenty miles from Boston, he often made the Library his headquarters while in the city. He read there, wrote letters there, and sometimes visited with friends there. After he became famous, he was considered one of the chief orna- ments of the place.'6 There is little evidence to indicate that he shared the pop- ular enthusiasm for the exhibitions of paintings in the Athenaeum Gallery, but there are occasional references in his journals and letters to sculpture, some of which was in the library proper rather than the gallery.

9 R. W. Emerson, Letters, ed. R. L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), I, 119-20.

10 Cameron, op. cit., p. 141.

11 Wilford Oakland Cross, "Ralph Waldo Emer- son's Reading in the Boston Athenaeum" (un- published M.A. thesis, Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University, 1930), p. 18.

12 Quincy, op. cit., p. 107.

Is Cross, op. cit., p. 17. 14 Ibid.

"J These figures are based on the lists compiled by Cameron, op. cit., pp. 17-43. The changes in subject matter of most of this reading are analyzed in some detail in Cross, op. cit.

6 Boston Athenaeum, Tite Influence and History of the Boston Athenaeum from 1807 to 1907 (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1907), p. 48.




OTHER LIBRARIES

There is no indication that Emerson was particularly moved by the campaign which culminated in the opening of the Boston Public Library in 1854. Because he had the privilege of using the Athe- naeum only by paying an annual fee and was not a shareholder, he was not in- volved in the unsuccessful negotiations aimed at making the Athenaeum collection the basis for the new library. In a gossipy letter to his friend George Par- tridge Bradford, who was abroad, he wrote in the summer of 1854: "The Pub- lic Library in Boston begins to grow. George Ticknor has interested himself very actively in organizing it. There will be one more chair for us to sit down in, in Boston."'7 A few years later he was wanting more than a chair to sit down in, because he was asking Edward Everett, president of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library, to grant an interview to a committee which included Emerson and which was made up of some nonresidents of the city who wished "to en- joy the benefit of the City Library."'8 Apparently, nothing ever came of the interview, for there is no record of his hav- ing taken books from the Public Li- brary.

Back home in Concord, Emerson was quietly taking part in library affairs. Soon after he had made his home in that town in the 1830's, he had joined the Concord Social Library and had become a member of its governing committee. A few years later he was off the committee, but again became a member just before the town took over the Social Library in 1851. When a leading citizen presented the town with a new library building in 1873, Emerson made the principal address at its dedication. He was serving as a mem-

ber of the committee of the Concord Free Public Library when he died."9 His duties as a committeeman seem not to have been onerous, but they included the writing of letters of thanks. Several of Emerson's notes to donors are in exist- ence, thoughtful in content and graceful in style.

Emerson had dealings with scores of library associations but had scant contact with their libraries. Many of his lectures were given under the auspices of city library associations, young men's mercantile library associations, and kin- dred groups. The profits from the sale of tickets presumably were used for the pur- chase of books in many instances, but there seem to be no references in his journals or extant letters to the libraries oper- ated by these organizations. When, as a young man, he took a trip southward for his health, he enjoyed the use of the collection owned by the Charleston Library Society; and in 1871, on a trip to Califor- nia, he was favorably impressed by a visit to the San Francisco Mercantile Library. But neither of these trips con- stituted a lecture tour.

SOME NATIONAL LIBRARIES

Almost the only libraries outside of Concord and Boston to receive notice in Emerson's letters and journals were the larger ones, those which could show him books not to be found in eastern Massa- chusetts. On a visit to Washington in January, 1862, he was shown the Library of Congress by Ainsworth Rand Spof- ford, who was then the first assistant to the librarian. Emerson had known Spof- ford for ten or twelve years. Before he came to Washington, the latter had been an enterprising young bookseller in Cin- cinnati and had helped to organize lectures by Emerson in that western out-

17 Emerson, op. cit., IV, 461. 18 Ibid., V, 278. "O Rusk, op. cit., pp. 229 and 431.




post of culture on more than one occasion.

When Emerson visited Washington in 1862, Spofford had been on the staff of the Congressional Library for only a few months, but he did not hesitate to impart to his friend some shocking details about the condition of the Library. Ac- cording to Emerson's journal, Spofford said that for several years "it had been under Southern domination, and as under dead men. Thus the Medical Depart- ment was very large, and the Theological very large, whilst of modern literature very imperfect."20 Both Emerson and Spofford were active opponents of slav- ery and were therefore well fitted to take notice of mistakes made by southerners. Emerson was not greatly impressed by the collections of the Library of Con- gress, but he records at some length the sights he saw in the Archives of the State Department. His friend, Charles Sum- ner, who was then chairman of the Sen- ate Committee on Foreign Relations, took him through the archives and showed him treaties and letters signed by Napoleon, Talleyrand, Lafayette, and Washington.2"

On Emerson's trips to Europe he made it a point to visit famous libraries, just as he made it a point to call on famous literary figures. On his first trip abroad, in 1833, he visited the British Museum, taking with him an introduction to Hen- ry Francis Cary, assistant keeper of printed books. He wrote his brother Wil- liam: "As to the Museum it does not ap- pear so rich as one would expect from its fame. Its library is great."`2 On his sec-

ond visit to England in 1848-49, he wrote home about the Museum, men- tioning the marbles several times and writing somewhat less about the books. On this trip he met Sir Anthony Panizzi, then keeper of printed books, and Coven- try Patmore, who was earning his living as an assistant keeper while he wrote poetry. Emerson also inspected the Bodleian at Oxford and the Bibliotheque du Roi (the Bibliotheque Nationale) in Paris. In these libraries he remarked the great size of the collections and the great age of volumes shown him.

HARVARD AGAIN

In his later years Emerson had an opportunity to render a service to the library of his alma mater. In the winter of 1869-70 he was surprised to receive a letter from his fiery old friend, Thomas Car- lyle, saying that Carlyle desired to be- queath the books he had used in writing his Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell and his History of Frederick the Great to some institution in New England as a slight token of his esteem for the people of that region. The people of New England might have felt the need of some such token because some of Carlyle's remarks about the American Civil War had tend- ed to lessen his popularity in the North. The idea of the bequest was Carlyle's, but he asked both Emerson and another New England friend, Charles Eliot Nor- ton, to advise him as to what library should receive the gift. Each of the two, without knowledge of the other's opin- ion, suggested the Harvard College Li- brary, although Emerson had also considered the Boston Public Library as a possible recipient.23

Emerson had the pleasure of notifying the university about the proposed gift in the spring of 1870, although the books

20 R. W. Emerson, Journals, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, Vol. IX (1856-63) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909-14), p. 395.

21 Ibid., pp. 378-79. 22 R. W. Emerson, Letters, ed. R. L. Rusk (New

York:-Columbia University Press, 1939), I, 393. 23 Ibid., VI, 98.




did not arrive until the summer of 1881, less than a year before his death. Accord- ing to the list prepared by the Harvard College Library, there were approximately three hundred items in all.24

EMERSON S USE OF WHAT HE READ

VVe have seen that Emerson had a nod- ding acquaintanceship with a goodly number of libraries, that he made fairly heavy use of a few of them, and that he knew some librarians personally. What, then, did he write and say publicly about libraries and librarians? And is there evidence that his views as expressed from the platform or in books had any noticeable effect on anyone else?

Before we examine what Emerson said about libraries, we should consider the way in which he used the books which he took from them. As we have seen, he read widely as a youth and as an adult. As he grew older, his reading became less methodical, more, as he said, "for the lustres." This change in reading habit was partly due to inclination, but his new way of reading was well suited to his vo- cational needs. The reasons for his choice of lecturing as a vocation may be in- volved and obscure, but it is likely that two of the important reasons were these: he was trained as a minister to speak in public and he was forced to earn a living for his family by some means other than the ministry.

It is not surprising that many of Emer- son's lectures (later printed as essays) were, in effect, lay sermons which were successful mainly because of the combi- nation of spiritual insight, common-sense

philosophy, and melodious language. This type of lecture seldom required any systematic digging through source mate- rial. In reading "for the lustres," he glimpsed ideas which he later cut and polished until they were his own. He used books as a source of inspiration, seldom as a source of facts.

OPINIONS ON THE VALUE OF

LIBRARIES

Emerson made some pointed remarks about books in the first of his lectures to gain any widespread attention. In "The American Scholar," an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge in the summer of 1837, he pled eloquently for a new type of thinker, one whose intellect was formed by nature, by books, and by action. He warned that books should be used with discretion and that libraries were not in themselves good things. "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to ac- cept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forget- ful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books."25 Thomas Went- worth Higginson, the writer and reform- er, has been quoted as saying of this passage, "I suppose that all the accumulated sentences ever spoken before in America had not done so much to induce young students to think for themselves as that one sentence. To me I know the whole college library became my servant, not my master, from that moment."26

It is difficult to assign any chronologi- cal order to Emerson's later writings in

24 W. C. Lane (comp.), The Carlyle Collection: A Catalogue of Books on Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great Bequeathed by Thomas Carlyle to Harvard College Library ("Harvard University Library, Bibliographical Contributions," No. 26, ed. Justin Winsor [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Library, 18881).

21 R. W. Emerson, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903), p. 88.

21 J. M. Fletcher, Emerson's Educational Phi- losophy ("Investigations of the Departments of Psychology and Education of the University of Colorado," Vol. II, No. 2 [Boulder, Colo.: University of Colorado, 1905]), p. 32.




which libraries are mentioned. It is almost impossible to ascertain the date on which any idea was first presented to the public, because his lectures were often re- worked between readings; and, after they had been delivered so often that they had lost their value on the platforn, they were edited for publication in a magazine or a book. Sometimes, much to his an- noyance, a lecture was reported almost verbatim in the newspapers, an action which of course reduced the number of potential listeners or readers for that lecture.

Emerson expressed some further reser- vations about the way in which people used libraries in the essay "Quotation and Originality," which appeared in the North American Review in 1868 and as part of the volume, Letters and Social Aims, published in 1875.27 The lecturer was not averse to startling his hearers at the beginning of his talk, and the lecture begins:

Whoever looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life. If we go into a library or news- room, we see the same function on a higher plane, performed with like ardor, with equal impatience of interruption, indicating the sweetness of the act.28

This reference to libraries is used only as a point of departure, from which he goes on to develop the idea that there is little true originality-that almost all of what is written and said has been written and said before. The essay has perhaps not been so influential as have some of the others.

LIBRARIES AND THE CULTURE

OF THE PAST

In 1856 Emerson published English Traits, generally considered at that time to be one of the best books on England written by a foreigner. It was based mainly on observations made during his European trip of the winter of 1847-48. While in England, he spent several days at Oxford, made a number of friends there, and had an opportunity to form opinions about life and thought at that university.

A chapter of English Traits is devoted to universities, and in it he comments on the libraries at Oxford-how no fire is ever lit in the Bodleian and how its catalog is the standard one for the other libraries of the university. He notes that there is a copy of the printed catalog of the Bodleian in each college library and that, in each copy, the titles owned by that college are underlined in red ink, "the theory being that the Bodleian has all books."

But Emerson saw the whole university as a library. After saying that universities are hostile to geniuses, he said:

The University must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity. Oxford is a library, and the professors must be librarians. And I should as soon think of quarrelling with the janitor for not magnifying his office by hostile sallies into the street, like the Governor of Kertch or Kinburn, as of quarrelling with the professors for not admiring the young neologists who pluck the beards of Euclid and Aristotle, or for not attempting themselves to fill their vacant shelves as original writers.29

27 The first edition was published in December, 1875, but the date on the title-page was 1876. Cf. G. W. Cooke (comp.), A Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1908), pp. 129-30.

*8 R. W. Emerson, Letters and Social Aims (Bos- ton: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904), p. 169.

"' R. W. Emerson, English Traits (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903), pp. 212-13. Kertch and Kinburn were Russian posts taken by the allies in the Crimean War, but neither the editor of the "Centenary Edition" of Emerson's works nor the present writer knows exactly what their governors did.




Emerson did not quarrel with the Ox- ford dons over their attitude toward cre- ative scholarship, so we should not quarrel with him for using a library and librarians as symbols for cautious conserv- atism. His experience in libraries probably justified this association of a collection of books with the traditions of the past.

Emerson's association of books with tradition or inherited learning appears frequently in his writing. Whether he spoke with approval or disapproval, books were symbols for the accumulated cultural heritage. In his poems, for ex- ample, most of the references to books are of this nature. There are about twenty-five references to books in the poems, and approximately half of these compare books unfavorably with some other source of ideas. In six or seven he seems to praise books, and in six or seven he mentions them without noticeable emo- tional bias. The poems contain no references to libraries as organized collections of books.30

SHAKESPEARE, EDUCATION, AND THE

ELECTIVE SYSTEM

If there is little notice of libraries in Emerson's poems, there is even less attention given to libraries in the one essay which has had the most direct effect on them. In the spring of 1879 a student at Amherst College heard Emerson lecture on "Superlative or Mental Temper- ance." Shortly thereafter, this student read the address on Shakespeare which Emerson had written for delivery before the Saturday Club, a Boston literary and social organization. The young men, who already was deeply interested in litera-

ture, became so enamored of Shakespeare that he began to collect everything he could which was related to that author. The young man entered the business world, where, because of unusual ability and energy, he rose high in the councils of the Standard Oil Company. Before he died in 1930, Henry Clay Folger had amassed the finest Shakespeare collection in the world and had begun construction of the beautiful building in Washington where the materials were to be made available to all scholars.31

Emerson's influence on the origin of the Folger Shakespeare Library is easy to see, but he may have influenced libraries in other ways that are less easy to establish. One of these ways was through his writings on the subject of education. At least a dozen writers have analyzed his educational theories, searching diligently for some connection between his ideas and educational practices. Emerson's theories about education foreshadowed many of the ideas which are basic to the progressive education movement, but a close connection between him and the movement is difficult to prove.

However, a fairly direct line between Emerson's educational theories and the practices of schoolmen can be seen in the case of the elective system as practiced at Harvard University. Charles W. Eliot, who was president of the university during its most pronounced swing toward election, gave Emerson full credit for the educational ideas which underlay the system: "Emerson laid down in plain terms the fundamental doctrines on which this elective system rests."32 There is some evidence to indicate that Emer-

30 Figures are based on an examination of the poems containing such words as "books" and "libraries" as indicated by G. S. Hubbel, A Con- cordance to the Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1932).

3' The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washkington (Washington, D.C.: Published for the Trustees of Amherst College, 1933), pp. 13-14.

81 C. W. Eliot, "Emerson as Seer," Atlantic Monthly, XCI (June, 1903), 846.




son's influence was not so powerful as this statement might imply, but his part in the matter was noteworthy, just the same. 33

If we grant Emerson's influence on the elective system, we still need to establish a relationship between the elective system and the growth of college and university libraries. Perhaps we do not yet know enough about the dynamics of college and university growth to say with any authority whether a broader curriculum and greater freedom in the choice of courses caused libraries to grow more rapidly or to develop in ways which were different from those they otherwise might have followed. Emerson saw no connection between curricular trends and library growth. At a time when he was active as an overseer at Harvard, he wrote in his journal:

In the perplexity in which the literary public now stands with regard to university education, whether studies shall be compulsory or elective; whether by lectures of professors, or whether by private tutors; whether the stress shall be on Latin and Greek, or on modern sciences,- the one safe investment which all can agree to increase is the library.34

DEDICATION OF A LIBRARY

The address which Emerson gave at the dedication of the Concord Free Pub- lic Library seems to be the only address which he prepared for an occasion directly connected with a library. At that time he was losing his memory and need- ing the help of collaborators in the prep- aration of his speeches. However, he was personally much interested in the occasion, seems to have prepared the manu- script with little help, and succeeded in

delivering an appropriate message with a return to his old-time platform chann.35

In his dedicatory address he spoke about literary figures of Concord and praised books in general. But he had not lost his views on the proper use of books; and, in words that were reminiscent of those in his Phi Beta Kappa address made thirty-six years earlier, he warned his fellow-townsmen:

In saying these things for books, I do not for a moment forget that they are secondary, mere means, and only used in the off-hours, only in the pause, and, as it were, the sleep, or passive state of the mind. The intellect reserves all its rights. Instantly, when the mind itself wakes, all books, all past acts are forgotten, huddled aside as impertinent in the august presence of the creator.3"

PROFESSORS OF BOOKS

In Emerson's address at the dedication of the Concord Free Public Library he said nothing about the administration of libraries, but in an earlier lecture he had made some statements about personal aid in the use of books in colleges. As early as the 1840's he was advocating that colleges add "professors of books" to their faculties who should guide the general reading of students. A lecture containing this recommendation was reported almost verbatim in at least one English newspaper, the Nottingham Reg- ister, in 1847, and appeared in American periodicals under different titles at least three times before it was published as "Books" in his volume of essays, Society and Solitude, in 1870. In it he wrote: "College education is the reading of cer- tain books which the common sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already accumulated." After an argu-

33 Cf. H. C. Carpenter, "Emerson, Eliot, and the Elective System," New England Quarterly, XXIV (March, 1951),13-34.

34 Journals, Vol. X (1864-76), p. 263.

ai Rusk, op. cit., p. 487.

'e R. W. Emerson, Miscellanies (Boston: Hough- ton, Mifflin & Co., 1904), pp. 507-8.




ment for the value of this accumulated knowledge comes the passage which has most often been quoted: "Meantime the colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries, furnish no professor of books; and I think no chair is so much want- ed."37 The rest of the essay is concerned with the large number of books available to the individual reader, the difficulty of choosing the best ones, and the need for guidance from people who have read many books; he does not again mention colleges.

Emerson's phrase, "professor of books," or similar phrases apparently derived from it, "professor of books and reading" and "professor of bibliography," have been quoted by librarians and nonlibrarians in support of several worthy library causes. American and English librarians began quoting it as early as 1876, the first year included in Canons' Bibliography of Library Econo- my, and the phrase in its original form has been used as the title of a chapter in a book about public libraries published as late as 1954.38 It has been used as the official title of the librarian in at least three institutions of higher education in the United States.39

Some writers about libraries have taken Emerson's words literally and have developed the concept of a professorship of books, discussing in detail the quali- ties needed by the holder of such a posi- tion and outlining the subject matter to be included in courses which he would teach. Other writers have taken the

phrase as a point of departure to discuss the need for the training of librarians or to expound in a general way some newer and more liberal ideas about college library service.

At least a dozen writers in library pub- lications used Emerson's phrase or a similar one during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Three of these, writing in the 1870's, dwelt at some length on the educational conditions which made professors of books a necessity and dis- cussed the competencies which the professor should have and the information which he should impart.0 Other writers narrowed Emerson's idea to fit a need which they felt for instruction in bibliography. They favored more instruction in college about the history and kinds of books and about lists of books rather than instruction about the great ideas to be found in books.4l

Education for librarianship was a matter of concern to many thoughtful Brit- ish and American librarians in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Two British writers considered professors of books to be appropriate instructors for

37 R. W. Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1912), p. 191.

0 Ernestine Rose, The Public Library in A meri- can Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954).

S9 Rollins College, Birmingham-Southern Col- lege, and Baylor University.

40 F. B. Perkins, "On Professorships of Books and Reading," Public Libraries in the United States of America (Special Report, Bureau of Education, Part I [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876]), pp. 230-39; William Mathews, "Pro- fessorships of Books and Reading," Public Libraries in the United Stales of America, pp. 240-51; and W. E. A. Axon, "Professorships of Bibliography," Transactions and Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Library Association of the United Kingdom, Held at Oxford, October 1, 2, 3, 1878 (London: Chiswick Press, 1879), pp. 104-7.

41 W. F. Poole, "The University Library and the University Curriculum," Library Jouwrnal, XVIII (November, 1893), 470-71; G. T. Little, "School and College Libraries," Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1892-93 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), I, 916-33; and M. D. Bisbee, "The Place of Bibliography in the Equipment of a Cultivated Man," Library Journal, XXII (September, 1897), 429-32.




future librarians.42 Other writers used the phrase as descriptive of the entire function of the librarian in a progressive college,43 and one, Melvil Dewey, in a glow- ing passage which describes advances being made by college libraries, refers to "professors of bibliography, of books and reading" without pausing to describe their duties.44

Such have been the uses to which Emerson's phrase, "professor of books," has been put. It has clearly either stimulated or supported the thought of a number of writers who have dealt with the relationship of college students to books. However, the influence of such an idea on the course of library practice cannot be measured with any precision.

SUMMARY

Ralph Waldo Emerson grew as a child and thought as a man in an atmosphere of books and reading. During several periods in his life he made heavy use of the Boston Athenaeum and some use of the Harvard College Library; he would have taken books from the Boston Public Library if nonresidents of that city had been permitted to do so. He was active in the management of the small libraries of Concord, but his journals and letters give more space to the description of several great English and Continental libraries which he made a point of visiting.

Emerson praised books and libraries on several occasions but tempered his praise wlth these two warnings: the reader should be careful to select only the best books and he should make reading a basis for action, not an end in itself. The only writing by Emerson which had a clear and direct influence on library development was an essay on Shakespeare which aroused Henry Clay Folger's interest in that writer. Nevertheless, the frequent appearance of Emerson's idea of a "professor of books" in library literature is evidence that the thinking of leaders in the library profession has been influenced or at least supported by his opinions about the need for an improved relationship between books and readers.

2Juvenis (pseud.), "The Standard of Library Service," Library Journal, III (June, 1878), 160, and H. R. Tedder, "Librarianship as a Profession," Transactions and Proceedings of the Fourth and Fifth Meetings of tlhe Library Association of the lrnited Kingdom, Held in London, September, 1881 and at Cambridge, September, 1882 (London: Chis- wick Press, 1884), pp. 163-72.

43 R. R. Bowker, "Learning To Read in College," Library Journal, II (October, 1877), 60-62; A. N. Currier, "College Letters: Iowa State University," Library Journal, II (October, 1877), 73; and C. H. Robarts, "University Libraries as National Institu- tions," Library Journal, II (November-December, 1877), 129-40.

44Melvil Dewey, "Libraries, the True Universi- ties for Scholars as Well as People," Library Notes, I (June, 1886), 49-50.



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Ralph Waldo Emerson and Libraries