In 1964, under Towner, the library hired its first conservation officer, Paul N. Banks, a young New York hand-bookbinder. Banks` mission: Preserve the collection but don`t interfere with its use.
Banks began by instructing employees on the finer points of handling books: Don`t pull books off shelves by their head caps (the top of the cover`s spine); don`t bend the leaves or strain the spine while photocopying; never carry books by the armful but use a book truck instead because the top volumes on an armful of books may fall off. The slide-and-tape program he developed for new employees was so effective that other libraries, including Harvard`s and Yale`s, copied it.
Banks ran the bindery that the library had operated since the 19th Century–most other libraries shut theirs long ago–not only to bind current periodicals and replace paper-covered books with hard covers but to repair deteriorating books. In 1970 he established a separate conservation laboratory as well. He and his small staff became expert at repairing and conserving the library`s rarest holdings, and soon they were working on some 300 items a year, from books to illuminated manuscripts to ancient maps to works of art. Each item had to be carefully handled because every component in a book reacts differently to solvents, and the different components of a book react differently to one another. Thus, a book with a leather cover, vellum leaves, and oak boards, bound with linen thread and rice-starch paste, would require different treatment than a more recent book with acidic-paper leaves, compressed-paper boards, and cloth cover, held together by synthetic adhesives.
Banks and his staff preached the conservator`s cardinal rule: Do nothing that cannot be undone. That rule was not always so cardinal at the library. Before Banks, the Newberry had each page of the manuscript of Sherwood Anderson`s second novel, ”Marching Men,” laminated between two sticky sheets of clear cellulose acetate. Library officials shudder at what hidden chemical changes may be happening or will happen. Now they seal manuscripts in transparent, inert Mylar envelopes with their edges closed by tape.
By the early 1970s the Newberry board members realized their library had become overcrowded and outmoded. The first question was: Should the Newberry continue to exist as a separate library? Over the decades, Northwestern University and the University of Chicago several times had shown an interest in acquiring the library, and in the early 1970s the question of merging with another institution was raised again. The trustees considered various mergers, such as with the University of Chicago or the Chicago Public Library. Once again, however, they chose independence.
Soon afterward, plans were drawn for a new adjunct to the Newberry, a $6.5-million ”stack building” that would house only the books. ”The starting point for that building was conservation of the collection and that in itself is pretty darned rare,” says Banks. ”And to carry it through with darned few compromises is most unusual.”
The ideas were innovative and uncompromising: double-wall construction, no windows, no vertical penetration between floors. To travel from one floor to another, a library staff member must go via a ”link” building connecting the old building to the new stack building.
The new building also features a special air-filtering system and a heat- and humidity-control system that constantly maintains a temperature of 60 degrees, plus or minus five degrees, and a relative humidity of 50 percent, give or take three percent. It has a huge fireproof vault for the rarest works, no rooftop cooling unit that might spring a leak and damage library materials stored below, and a strict computer-controlled security system that includes electronically operated locks that allow staffers to enter only those areas they`re assigned to and only during their shifts. A TV-surveillance system combined with a motion-detection system is turned on after working hours.
The 10-story building is 79 feet, 9 inches tall, four inches short of the height at which the city`s high-rise code requires elaborate life-safety and fire-protection systems, probably including a sprinkler system that, if activated, could ruin the collection. Instead, the library depends on early fire detection; hand extinguishers; walls, floors, and ceilings designed to withstand fires for four hours; and–in the vault only–a costly halon-gas automatic extinguisher system.
On June 5, 1982, library staffers and movers completed the shuttling of thousands of volumes 20 feet from their Victorian past into their climate-controlled future. American Libraries magazine marveled at the futuristic building–”a storage facility without parallel among the great book warehouses of the world.”
The design of the stack building and Banks` programs made the Newberry second only to the Library of Congress in conservation. Banks and his assistant, Gary L. Frost, resigned in 1981 to establish at Columbia University in New York the nation`s first graduate program in conservation of library and archival materials.
Today Towner, ever alert to money-making schemes, is considering offering conservation services to other libraries. Some say the pioneering work in conservation will be the greatest achievement of Towner`s administration and perhaps its greatest contribution to scholars of future generations. That leadership in conservation is just beginning to attract imitators. The University of Chicago Library has recently hired a full-time preservation officer.
If the pursuit of conservation is Towner`s pride, the rising need for security is his greatest sorrow. When he joined the library, readers and staff came and went through an unguarded back door. Today, thieves and vandals have made security the fastest-growing problem for libraries with valuable collections. The most successful and dangerous thieves for a rare-book library are its own employees, and over the years, although no Newberry employee has been caught in the act, several have been fired as suspected thieves.
In one of the worst lapses of library security in American history, a thief at the John Crerar Library (now at the University of Chicago) befriended an employee in 1977 and over the next several years stole about 370 rare books worth $500,000. (The FBI has recovered all but about 100 of them.)
Academics also make good thieves, because library staffs tend to regard them as kindred spirits and incapable of such a heinous crime. In 1977, however, a professor from Tulane University stole several maps from the Newberry and Yale libraries; they since have been recovered, and the professor has been sentenced to jail. And many years ago a top official of another Chicago library stole a rare book from the Newberry. He tore off its cover to conceal the Newberry`s ownership but was caught when he tried to peddle it to the same rare-book dealer who had sold it earlier to the Newberry.
Sometimes a library finds itself holding stolen material, as the Newberry did when a Chicago collector gave it his collection of Napoleon manuscript letters. Experts discovered that 19 of them had been stolen from a French national museum. The Newberry, embarrassed, returned them to the museum.
All in all, the Newberry has been lucky, apparently suffering few losses and none of great consequence. To keep it that way, Towner in 1981 hired the library`s first full-time security officer, Richard L. West, who manages a computerized security system and a small staff with a vigor that irritates some employees.
Towner mourns the need for computers, night patrols, walkie-talkies, and the recently established national network of libraries and rare-book dealers that, led by federal agents, alerts members to stolen items and the movements of suspected thieves. Closed-circuit TV is coming to the reading rooms, he laments, as is specially colored notepaper provided by the library so guards can tell at a glance what a departing reader is carrying from the building.
But security is just one aspect of the job, and Towner is never at a loss for things to do. The job has absorbed much of his life, and he now is beginning to look forward to retirement in 1986, when he promises he will turn off the doorbell at his Gold-Coast apartment, unplug the phone, and read all the John D. MacDonald novels he can find. Towner also wants to spend more time with his wife, Rachel, more time in the cockpit of their Rhodes 19-foot day-sloop, and much more time being what he set out to be as a young scholar–a historian.
”Before I croak,” he says, ”my ambition is to do an index of the first significant continuous newspaper in America, the Boston News-Letter. I could get a staff and do it in three or four years, or do it alone in 10.” Knowing Towner, you get the feeling he`ll be doing it alone.
