Something of an image problem has always hounded librarians. Much of the general public sees them as meek, bookish characters interested only in the printed word, modest of manner and mild of mien. Obviously, they haven`t met Bill Towner. ”Bulldog” Bill Towner, one might be inclined to say. He`s been the head of Chicago`s Newberry Library for 23 years and when his competitors talk about him, they use words like ”aggressive,” ”unorthodox,”
”crafty,” and ”ruthless”–all in very reverential tones, of course.
What Towner has done is transform a tiny independent library into what he now describes as ”one of Chicago`s crown jewels, a world-class research library.” The Newberry Library, a pink-granite grime-encrusted Romanesque fortress at State and Walton Streets has become, in the last two decades, an international mecca for scholars and students.
How did he do it? With money, of course. By raising and spending large sums in the pursuit of great books and collections. Towner, a historian by training and a teacher by disposition, became a fund-raiser by duty. ”No one likes to raise money,” he says. ”But I like the consequences of being successful at it.”
When Towner took the helm in 1962, gifts to the Newberry totaled less than $5,000 a year; the current range is $2 million to $3 million. Even then, however, the collection was awesome: four million manuscripts and 950,000 books, among them Shakespeare`s first, second, and fourth folios; nine editions of Dante`s ”Divine Comedy”; 88 rare Bibles, including the first complete translation in English, and the first and second editions of the King James version; first editions of Milton`s ”Areopagitica” and Spenser`s ”The Faerie Queene”; and a first collected edition of ”The Federalist Papers.”
Today, it is even more awesome. The library owns roughly 1.4 million volumes–no one has ever counted them because it would be too costly. ”It`s 21 miles of books,” Towner says. ”You want to count them?” The library also has five to six million manuscripts, including a vast sheet-music library, a 70,000-page collection of letters and manuscripts of Sherwood Anderson, the private papers of Ben Hecht and Katherine Mansfield, and the early archives of the Pullman Company, the Illinois Central Railroad, and the Chicago Burlington & Quincy line. (Manuscript figures, however, can be misleading. It is common library practice to count each sheet of paper as one manuscript, so the 384-page manuscript of Anderson`s ”Winesburg, Ohio” becomes 384 manuscripts.)
Presiding over all this is Towner, 63, a bespectacled man with a penchant for bland suits and wretched jokes. ”I started out to become a professor of history at a small college some place,” he says, ”and I`ve done this job at a considerable cost to my psyche. I`ve had to wear a mask, be somebody I`m not. I`m a very private person. I know I`ve become good at being a public person, but it`s not me.”
While the job has had its stresses, Towner nonetheless has done it very well, a fact he is not reluctant to acknowledge. ”I`m damned proud of what I`ve done here,” he says. ”Look at any aspect of the library, and you`ll see it`s Bill Towner who has been goosing it to life. I took a wonderful, sleeping institution and turned it into the very model of an independent research library.”
And he did it the old-fashioned way: by outsmarting people.
A year after Towner took over, for example, Chicago hotelier Louis H. Silver died, leaving what the London Times called ”the most distinguished collection of English literary first editions formed by a private collector in our times.” Although Silver had been a Newberry trustee, he didn`t bequeath his collection to the library. So the trustees of his estate agreed verbally to sell the books to the University of Texas for $2.75 million. But university administrators dawdled over approval.
That was all Towner needed. He met with the Silver family and pointed out that the Texas deal would cost the family about $125,000 in fees to the New York broker who had arranged it. However, if they sold directly to the Newberry, there would be no middleman. The Silvers agreed to split the difference and sold the collection to the Newberry for $63,000 less than the Texas bid. The Texans were furious, of course, and so was the New York agent. But the Newberry deal held.
The Newberry Library was established in 1887 by a $2.15-million bequest from real-estate speculator Walter L. Newberry. Today, the Newberry is among the elite, one of 14 privately endowed independent research libraries in the nation. Its collection now is valued at $200 to $300 million.
Every year 8,000 students and scholars come to the Newberry from all over the world. (The Newberry is not a browsing library, but it is open to the public.) They often stay for months, becoming something like family.
The Newberry attracts scholars because Towner created four ”centers,”
or seminal collections, at the Newberry. The first is the Newberry`s Italian Renaissance collection, so formidable that scholars come from Italy to study it. Second, the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography highlights the library`s collection of historic maps. Third, the Center for the History of the American Indian, with the Newberry`s 100,000-plus titles on the subject, has made Chicago a focal point nationally for Indian studies. Finally, the Family and Community History Center is a magnet for thousands of family-history seekers.
”The centers put Newberry on the map nationally,” says the American Philosophical Society`s Edward Carter III.
What makes the library so useful is the depth of its holdings rather than its rare-book collection. A Melville scholar, for example, can examine not only the first edition of ”Moby Dick” but all 12 of Melville`s novels in every language, edition, and printing the library has been able to find, as well as books, articles, dissertations, and theses on the author and his works.
Before Towner retires in 1986, he wants to establish at least two more centers: one for the history of music and one for Latin-American colonial history. (Actually, some of the credit for the success of the centers goes to James M. Wells, who retired last February as the library`s rare-book expert. Getting the money was Towner`s job, but identifying collections worth lusting after was Wells` specialty.)
Lawrence W. ”Bill” Towner was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1921. His father, a disbursement accountant for Northwestern Bell Telephone, had a grade-school education. After a stint as an Army Air Corps pilot in World War II, Towner earned his master`s and Ph.D in history from Northwestern University in 1955. He then taught history at Chicago`s Latin School, M.I.T., and College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He was on a research fellowship at Harvard University when he was tapped in 1962 to become the sixth man to head the library, succeeding Stanley Pargellis. Towner loaded up his 1957 Chevy convertible with wife, Rachel, then pregnant with twins; four other children; and assorted belongings and returned to Chicago.
It was shortly thereafter that he outfoxed the University of Texas for the Silver collection. But there was one problem. He couldn`t pay for it. At that time the Newberry was already in a financial bind because of a renovation of the original building from 1959 to 1962 that cost $1.25 million. Where was he going to find the $2,687,000 for the Silver collection?
Thus began the transformation of Bill Towner, scholar, into Bill Towner, consummate fund-raiser. Towner held the library`s first capital-drive in 1965 and came away with $2.5 million. (In those days, the independent libraries were on their own, having been excluded by Congress in 1956 from the Library Services and Construction Act, a financial-aid program. Nine years later, Congress overlooked the independents again in the Higher Education Act, and kept overlooking them until 1977.)
At Towner`s urging, the trustees also created a friends-of-the-library group that would make annual contributions. Towner also spearheaded the expansion of the library`s board from 13 to 25 members–the more the monier, he figured. The list of donors grew to the current 4,000 individuals and 40 corporations, one of the largest for a private research library in the country.
Towner also won many grants for the Newberry, including one to set up an office at the library to seek grants from foundations. He has assiduously courted the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and has won more than 40 NEH grants in the last 15 years. In December of 1983, the Newberry was one of 13 independent research libraries to win challenge grants. That means it must raise $2.25 million by July of 1985 in order to receive $750,000 from the NEH. (The library has already raised roughly two-thirds of it.)
Not surprisingly, Towner`s competitors view him with some respect. ”He`s a very special character,” says Robert Rosenthal, curator of special collections at the University of Chicago Library. ”A great tonic for the Newberry. He has carried the board of trustees with him, taken risks, made mistakes, but at least he has moved, and he has instilled the Newberry with vitality and direction.” (MORE)
”He is a magician,” says Edward C. Carter II, head of Philadelphia`s independent research library, the American Philosophical Society.
”A very, very successful and excellent librarian–in some ways the best in the country,” says Terry Belanger, assistant dean of Columbia University`s School of Library Service and one of the nation`s leading experts on rare books. ”He has put Newberry on a firm financial footing, initiated solid scholarly programs, and gathered about him one of the best boards of trustees in the United States today.”
”Bill is crafty and ruthless,” says O.B. Hardison Jr., former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington,
D.C. ”But not in a pejorative sense. He just never takes `no` from anybody when he wants something. He`ll charm the socks off people in the foundation world to get the grants he wants. If he appears orthodox on the surface, the surface hides a brilliantly inventive spirit.”
he Newberry`s annual operating budget is about $3 million. Currently, the library is spending a third of that to encourage and expand use of its collections. The goal may be admirable, but it also carries with it the threat of self-destruction. Except for fire and flood, nothing is harder on books and manuscripts than human handling. All books and manuscripts are inevitably doomed. Ultimately, those wondrous holographs by Mozart and Chopin, the illuminated Bibles, the journals of George Washington and of Lewis and Clark
–all will decompose and disintegrate. Handling accelerates the aging process. So do humidity, air pollution, insects, and microorganisms. A temperature of 72 degrees is pleasant for people but hard on a book. People enjoy the change of seasons, but books suffer grievously from temperature swings, even those of as little as 20 degrees. (Damp basements and unheated attics and garages are equally disastrous.)
For a book or manuscript to survive indefinitely, it should be frozen solid, sealed in a moisture-proof container with an inert atmosphere such as nitrogen rather exposed to the outside air, never thawed, and never handled.
(There have been serious proposals to store one copy of every new book and the best existing copy of all older ones in a government-run, blastproof, underground freezer.)
At a working library the easiest and most important way to protect the collection is to air-condition the stacks, a fact well-known today but not 22 years ago, when the Newberry, in the Pargellis-era renovation, was air-conditioned throughout for the right reason–to safeguard the books, not to provide comfort for people. (In the beginning the misguided maintenance staff kept turning off the system after hours to save money.)
