USA > Maine > Kennebec County > Waterville > The history of Colby College > Part 63
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Meanwhile other departmental libraries had come into being, notably those in the departments of Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Geology. They were not joined by other departments because only the sciences and history had any space allotted even for faculty offices, to say nothing of libraries. It eventually became fixed policy to encourage departmental collections, but to have them catalogued at the central library and regarded as on permanent loan to the departments.
When Edward W. Hall retired in 1910, the College chose a worthy successor. Hard as it was to follow a man as distinguished as Hall, young Charles P. Chip- man of the Class of 1906 was the man to do it. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, Chipman had been editor of the Echo, had put out a class news- paper throughout his four undergraduate years, had served as part-time secretary to President White while still a student, had followed President White to New York when the latter became Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Board, and was already recognized as a popular writer of boys' books. Already self-educated in the science of bibliography, Chipman spent a period of several months at the Brown University Library under the tutelage of its distinguished librarian, Harry Lyman Koopman, Colby 1880. Chipman came to his position in the Colby library with a comprehensive knowledge of its holdings, gained in his undergraduate years, with a sincere love of books, and with some training in cataloging and other library techniques.
Chipman saw at once that the Library was hopelessly overcrowded, but it was 1916 before he was able to convince the Trustees to do something to relieve the congestion. He then appeared personally before the Board and presented convincing facts about the growth of the Library and its steadily increasing use by students. He submitted plans for connecting the gallery in the library wing in Memorial Hall with the so-called Alumni Hall on the second floor of the main building, and for turning Alumni Hall into a reading room with provision for stacks to accommodate 10,000 volumes in most frequent use. The estimated cost was $2240. Through the generosity of Charles Seaverns, 1901, the remodeled room was beautifully furnished and renamed the Seaverns Reading Room.
When the United States entered the war in the spring of 1917, Chipman re- signed to take up YMCA service with the troops. Associate Professor Robert W. Crowell was appointed part-time librarian and continued in the office until Chip- man returned in 1919.
In 1923 Chipman resigned to enter the insurance business in Hartford, Con- necticut. He was succeeded by Ernest C. Marriner, Colby, 1913, who was to be the last Colby librarian not to hold a professional degree from a library school. As it had been Chipman's task to secure added space and increase the funds, it became his successor's to popularize the Library and make students willing and eager to use it. The increased use demanded more assistance, although until 1926 the librarian remained the only full-time employee. Even when Miss Doris Tozier,
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1925, was employed as full-time assistant, the librarian made an explanation that would be rightly condemned by modern followers of the profession.
By taking one of our own girls, a graduate in last year's class, and train- ing her in our library to meet our own particular needs, we shall be as- sured service quite as satisfactory as would be the work of the graduate of a library school, who would cost us twice as much.
From 1916 to 1926 the office of the Colby librarian was in the tiny room that served as a thoroughfare between the Seaverns Reading Room and the gallery of the Old Library in the east wing. In 1926 that room was converted into space for the shelving and issuance of reserved books, and the alcove at the head of the main staircase in Memorial Hall was converted into an office. This was accom- plished through the ardent support of the trustee chairman of Buildings and Grounds, Judge Norman Bassett, who was always responsive to library needs.
Pointing out the pressing need for additional stacks, Marriner conceived the plan of utilizing space beneath the floor of the Old Library. Only partly excavated and without cemented foundation, that space was useless. The burning of Coburn Hall in 1927 prevented a start on the new stacks in that year, but it was begun in 1928 and completed just in time to greet the new librarian in 1929, when Mar- riner became Dean of Men. Before that date, however, Harold Clark, 1925, had been appointed assistant librarian, and he rendered invaluable aid to a succession of librarians during the following ten years.
In 1929, for the first time, the Colby Library was placed on a professional basis, when Robert B. Downs, a graduate of the Columbia Library School, was appointed librarian. Although he remained at Colby only two years, his profes- sional training and his sound judgment enabled him to effect many improvements, including special attention to the Library's long neglected holdings of rare items, and the cataloging of many government documents. In 1931 Downs left Colby to become, within a few years, one of the nation's best known university librarians, as Director of Libraries at the University of Illinois.
In 1928-29, the last report of Librarian Marriner showed that the number of books had reached 70,456, augmented by an unknown number of pamphlets estimated at 20,000. Accessions for the year had been 2459 bound volumes, 1287 unbound government documents, and 729 other pamphlets. Circulation for outside use was 18,136, and 34,833 volumes were circulated from the reserved book room for use in the reading room. By 1928 the staff consisted of three full- time persons, but none with professional training. In addition to their salaries, the appropriation for books, periodicals, binding, supplies, student service, and all other operating expenses was $3500.
When Downs left, in 1931, the staff included a second person with library school degree, Miss Mary Whitcomb, and Mr. Clark had taken professional train- ing in the summer. In 1932 Clark was on leave, to complete work for the B.L.S. degree at Columbia, and his place was taken by Miss Miriam Thomas, a Colby graduate of 1929, who also held the B.L.S. degree.
From 1931 to 1935 the librarian was Joseph S. Ibbotson, who was succeeded for one year by J. Periam Danton. Then, in 1936 came N. Orwin Rush, who rendered distinguished service during the difficult years from 1936-46, when plans were being developed for removal to the Miller Library on the new campus. Rush was a skilled bibliographer, who published several carefully annotated
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bibliographies, including those of Rufus Jones and Carl J. Weber. Under his leadership the Library made significant advancement.
During the year 1936-37 total expense of operating the Library, including salaries, was $19,039. Regular salaries were $5650 for three persons; student help amounted to $1417; books and periodicals cost $4821; $1000 was spent for bind- ing; sundry expenses amounted to $6151. By this time the number of volumes had increased to 89,174.
In the fall of 1937, Mary Herrick, a graduate of the Simmons College School of Library Science, became cataloguer, and a third full-time worker was added in the person of a clerical assistant. Throughout the 1930's the library work was facilitated by the use of students paid by the National Youth Administration. Rush's 1938 report said: "Seventeen NYA students have worked regularly in the library. Eight have worked in the catalogue department helping with the re- cataloging and reclassification. One has been engaged in repairing books and several have assisted at the circulation desk."
Before 1930 it had become necessary to store many books in the attic of Chemical Hall. When the new stacks were installed in the basement of the old library in Memorial Hall, five thousand volumes in the Chemical Hall attic were transferred to the new stacks, but this could not be done until the steel stacks were completely installed, six years after construction of the basement had been finished.
The year of the nation's entry into World War II was significant for the Colby Library, because it was in that year that the total collection of catalogued items, not including several thousand pamphlets, first exceeded a hundred thousand. At the end of the college year 1941-42 the total was 104,560, and new accessions were nearly triple those of a decade earlier, having risen from less than 2500 to more than 6800. Purchases alone accounted for 2100 volumes.
In 1940 the Library began the microfilming of certain periodicals and installed a reading machine. Since that time the process has been expanded to include regular filming of the New York Times, the Waterville Sentinel, and other publica- tions, as well as emergency filming of numerous pages of books and pamphlets.
When Orwin Rush resigned in 1946, it was under an interim librarian, Gil- more Warner, that Colby's hundred thousand books, more than twenty thousand pamphlets, and hundreds of pieces of equipment were moved to the new library on Mayflower Hill. The tremendous task was accomplished smoothly by the construction of wooden trays, each accommodating one shelf of books. The posi- tion of each shelf-full thus transported was clearly marked, and they went into place without re-sorting.
What a change it was from the cramped quarters in Memorial to the spacious rooms of the Miller Library! The beautiful new reading room in the south end of Miller provided more floor space than the entire amount available in the old library. Space in the new preparation and cataloging department was larger than the old Seaverns Reading Room, and five tiers of stacks (one of the six tiers was left open as a passageway between the building's two wings) seemed likely to provide room for expanding the collection for many years to come. To be sure, much of the building had to be used at first for classrooms and administrative offices, but by 1960 the erection of the Lovejoy Building had removed all class- rooms from the Library, and the start made on construction of the Administrative Building assured that soon all of the large space in Miller could be used entirely for library and seminar purposes. Then would be fulfilled the obligation to pro- vide several separate rooms for prominent collections donated in recent years.
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In 1947 there came to Colby as librarian the man who made the Colby Library on Mayflower Hill the remarkably efficient service organization that it became. James Humphry, a graduate of Harvard and of the Columbia Library School, possessed the happy combination of thorough professional training, sound scholarship, warm personality, and brilliant administrative ability. He found a library of 115,000 volumes; he left it in 1957 with 178,000 volumes. The full- time staff in 1947 consisted of five persons; in 1957 it numbered twelve. Appro- priation for all purposes, including salaries had increased from $21,000 to $66,000. Humphry's successor was John R. McKenna, who became Colby librarian in the summer of 1957.
For fifteen years prior to the writing of this history, an important contribution to the library's permanent service had been rendered by the Associate Librarian, Elizabeth Libbey. A native of Augusta, Miss Libbey had graduated from Colby in 1929, had taken her degree in library science at Columbia, and had served in several public and institutional libraries before returning to her alma mater in 1945 as Reference and Circulation Librarian. When she was promoted to Asso- ciate Librarian, Miss Libbey was given faculty status and soon rose to the rank of associate professor. During the absence of Librarian Humphry on military service, at the time of the Korean War, Miss Libbey managed the Library as Acting Li- brarian. By 1960 she had served cooperatively and efficiently with three different Colby librarians, and she could look forward to many more years of service to her college.
A glance at the annually published reports of the College Treasurer, during the sixth decade of this century, will show that the Library has been the beneficiary of many special funds through the long years of its history. In 1959 those funds were 19 in number and amounted to $64,000. Those which proved most valuable in the lean years of the 1920's were the Albion Woodbury Small Fund of $5000 and the Lorimer Fund of $3750. Income from the latter provided books in eco- nomics, while from the former came books in sociology.
Every college library in America got its start and continued its growth largely through gifts. Although this chapter has already shown that, even in the early days, purchases for the Colby Library played a significant part, for more than a hundred years the major portion of each year's accessions came from gifts. The first president, Jeremiah Chaplin, bequeathed to the College his personal library of more than two thousand volumes. His Civil War successor, James Champlin, gave his valuable collections on the classics. From the estate of Charles Hamlin, that shy scholar in natural history, came nearly 1500 valuable items. One of the last acts of Librarian Hall, before his death in 1910, was to secure a gift of more than 600 volumes of Greek and Roman classics in beautiful, uniform bind- ings. In 1928, from the estate of James King, 1889, came a thousand handsomely bound, deluxe editions of English and French literature. Those major gifts were augmented by a constant flow of smaller donations from alumni and friends. All of this was before the magnificent contributions which came subsequent to 1930, through the work of the Colby Library Associates and the rapid expansion of the collection of rare books and manuscripts.
Although many persons had shown generous interest in the Colby Library, there was no organization apart from the librarian and his staff who made its wel- fare their special concern until the Colby Library Associates took form in 1935. It was the ingenious conception of Frederick A. Pottle, 1917, Professor of English at Yale, who recruited its membership personally. His method was the kind that
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President Arthur Roberts once described as the best plan of evangelism, "hook and line rather than net." Although a general invitation was sometimes placed in the pages of the Alumnus, it was personal solicitation by Pottle that brought in the members. His first charter members, besides the founder himself, were Professor Weber and Dean Marriner, and his entire charter list in 1935 numbered only 26. By 1945 it had grown to 126 adult and 65 undergraduate members. Every alumni or faculty member paid an annual fee of five dollars, and a smaller fee came from each undergraduate member. The avowed purpose of the Asso- ciates was to use all the fees to purchase for the Library valuable items not afforded by the general budget, with special attention to works which would enlarge the opportunity for scholarship on the part of faculty and students.
Because several faculty members most interested in the Associates were also interested in the collection of rare books, the Associates were soon accused of favoring the purchase of rare collector's items. The charge was unfounded. Al- though the Associates' committee on selection did indeed make an occasional pur- chase for the Treasure Room, by far the larger part of their annual donations went for significant items to supplement regular college work. Some of the items procured during the first ten years of the organization were:
Bibliotheca Americana Annals of the New York Stage Black's Law Dictionary The Kelmscott Chaucer Correspondence of William Cowper Faraday's Diary Hand-Atlas of Human Anatomy Linguistic Atlas of New England Toynbee's Study of History Introduction to Old French Phonology
For several years the Associates supported a series of monthly lectures on literary and bibliographical subjects. Recently, because of expansion of the college lecture program, the Associates' lectures have been reduced to four each year. Until 1959, when he completed twenty-five years with the organization, Dr. Pottle was himself its president. Annually the Associates award a prize to the senior who has collected the best private library during his or her undergraduate years.
What Librarian Rush said in 1945 was still true of the Colby Library Asso- ciates in 1960.
This organization is an integral part of the Colby Library and of the college itself. Some of the finest books in our collection bear the book plate of the Associates, and some of the most stimulating lecturers brought to the College have come under its auspices. Even if the organization should disband now, the Library would be permanently enriched by the accessions made possible over the last decade. But it is still an active and growing society whose next ten years should see even greater service.9
To one man alone Colby College owes the widespread fame of its Library, for without Professor Carl Weber it would have no famous collection of rare books
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and manuscripts, and without him it would not have heralded that collection abroad in the pages of what became recognized as one of the best American periodicals of its kind, the Colby Library Quarterly.
Weber had come to Colby in 1919, fresh from his experience as an Army officer in World War I, and not long removed from the academic environment of Oxford University, where he had been enrolled as a Rhodes scholar after his graduation from Johns Hopkins University. After serving at Colby for a short period as instructor in English, he taught briefly at the U. S. Naval Academy, then returned to Colby where he remained a member of the faculty until his retirement in 1959. Before President Roberts' death in 1927, Weber had already been promoted to full professor and had been made chairman of the English De- partment, which Roberts had previously refused to turn over to anyone else after he assumed the presidency in 1908. During the "interregnum" of 1927-29 Weber was a member of the Executive Committee administering the College in the absence of a president.
From his first day on the Colby campus Professor Weber took an active interest in the Library. He found it woefully deficient in the tools needed even by undergraduates in English and American literature. It was like pulling im- pacted teeth to get appropriations for the needed books, but gradually Weber, with the help of successive librarians, extracted the necessary dollars. Important gifts were also acquired, and by 1945 the Colby working collection in English and American Literature had become the envy of many another small college.
During the 1920's Weber developed an interest in the writings of Thomas Hardy. In fact Weber's special field of teaching, although he taught almost every- thing from Beowulf to Thomas Wolfe, had always been the Victorian period of English poetry and prose. In the summer of 1929 Weber conducted a literary tour of England, during which he made his first intensive inspection of the Thomas Hardy country in Dorset. On his return to Waterville, Weber talked to the Faculty Club on "A Visit to the Hardy Country." At the end of that evening President Johnson said to the speaker, "I think you have a book there." That remark was just the encouragement needed to start a chain of events which led to the publi- cation of several scholarly books and numerous articles on Hardy, all from the pen of Carl J. Weber. In fact, Weber has been the most prolific writer ever con- nected with Colby College. No other Colby teacher has ever produced such a lengthy bibliography as did Carl Weber, and no alumnus came even near to equaling his total publication, which was still progressing in 1960.
In order to continue his writing about Hardy, including the careful annota- tion of the Hardy novels, Weber was obliged patiently to collect everything he could lay hands on concerning the Wessex poet and novelist. He became acquainted with and won the confidence of Hardy's widow, and he secured access to information long withheld from other investigators. It was not long before Weber had been labeled "Colby's Hardy Perennial." It was his growing collection of material that became the basis of the Thomas Hardy Collection at Colby, and it was that collection which formed the nucleus of Colby's now famous Collection of Rare Books and Manuscripts housed in the Edwin Arlington Robinson Treasure Room of the Miller Library.
In 1937, with the cooperation of Librarian Rush, Weber put on a library exhibit of the Hardy items. In order to prepare for that exhibit, he and Rush visited the library of Wesleyan University, where a literary exhibit had just been displayed. That visit to Middletown, Connecticut, had important results far be-
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yond the proposed Hardy exhibition. At the Wesleyan function Weber's literary acquaintance, Carroll Wilson, introduced him to H. Bacon Collamore, an insur- ance executive of Hartford. Collamore was founder and head of the Edwin Arl- ington Robinson Memorial Association. Weber learned that the Association in- tended to bring together at the Robinson birthplace in Head Tide, Maine, all the books, papers, manuscripts, and memorabilia of the poet.
Weber, as he puts it, "blurted out to Collamore my consternation at the thought of collecting all this wealth and depositing it at a place inaccessible throughout the long winters, open in the summer only to tourists, and in no way equipped to meet the needs of scholars. It did not take long to convince Mr. Collamore that it would be better to deposit the materials in an institutional library, and that, fortunately, Colby was not only near the Robinson regions, Head Tide and Gardiner, but that also the College was about to erect a new library building."
Such a change of plan was not easy to accomplish. Several of the poet's close relatives were still living, none of whom had any immediate interest in Colby, and the same was true of Robinson's associates at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire. But Weber soon secured the attention and interest of the poet's sister-in-law, Mrs. Herman Robinson, of her daughter, Mrs. Nivison of Gardiner, of the poet's close friend, Mr. Burnham, and of Miss Margaret Perry of Hancock, N. H., whose mother had painted the well-known portrait of Robinson then hang- ing at Harvard.
Weber credits President Johnson's friendly, tactful approach for the success of the plan. Mrs. Nivison afterwards said she thought Johnson and Weber had called on her to ask for one Robinson manuscript. Instead they asked for nothing. Johnson merely said that Colby was planning to erect a new library, one of the finest in the state, and that if she and her associates wished to make use of it the College would be glad to provide a memorial room in the building.
In a note to this historian Weber told what eventually happened.
When Mr. Nivison was suddenly transferred by his company to Mobile, Alabama, I got a hurried call from Mrs. Nivison. I got a college truck with two drivers, and off we went to Gardiner and Head Tide and brought 'the works' back to Waterville: hundreds of books, hundreds of letters, sixteen manuscripts (some of them book length), filing cases, and numerous other items. For safe keeping against fire, these were stored in a vault at the Peoples-Ticonic Bank (now the Depositors Trust Company) until the new library should be ready to receive them.
In 1943 a temporary treasure room was opened in the Women's Union on Mayflower Hill, when that building first became available for college use. Into the temporary room were moved the Robinson and the Hardy collections.
When, in 1947, a designated room in the Miller Library was at last ready, Colby acquired the Perry portrait of Robinson, which, though displayed at Har- vard, had never been the property of the University. The room was fittingly named the Edwin Arlington Robinson Treasure Room, and on protected shelves either side of the portrait were arrayed the Robinson collection. Professor Weber was named Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts.
Even before 1947, the collection had begun to expand. Weber had been quietly gathering the juvenile "Rollo" books and other writings by an early 19th century Maine man, Jacob Abbott of Farmington. In three annual installments,
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Mr. Collamore gave his famous Henry James collection. From various sources came Wordsworth items. Colby became the first library in New England to possess all the publications of William Morris' incomparable Kelmscott Press.
As soon as the Treasure Room was opened, visitors became so impressed that many of them offered additions to the collections. Miss Perry gave the entire library collected by her father. In the fall of 1948, James A. Healy, a New York broker whose boyhood home had been Portland, but who was then quite unknown to any Colby person, visited the Treasure Room. Mr. Healy had for years been a collector of Irish literature and had become a fostering patron of the aged James B. Connolly, author of sea stories popular in the early 1900's. Mr. Healy set up at Colby a complete collection of Connolly first editions and hundreds of items about the man. He followed that gift with every first edition that had come from the famous Cuala Press, founded in Dublin by the family of William Butler Yeats. Eventually Mr. Healy decided to give to Colby his entire collection of Irish literature --- the most complete assembling of 19th and 20th century Irish writing and publication to be found anywhere in America. When erection of the Administration Building should permit withdrawal of offices from the east wing of the Miller Library, a large room of the second floor would become the per- manent home of the Healy Irish Collection.
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