When 235 people arrived at the Newberry Library last fall for a panel discussion on the exploration of the North and South Poles, even the person responsible for the library’s public programs was surprised.
“It’s exhilarating,” Mary Janzen, director of the Center for Public Programs, said of the turnout.
“I consider 50 people to be a threshold. If I get 50 people, I’m happy. We had over 100 people [for several of the lectures on polar exploration].
“It’s amazing to me the range of people’s interests. They want to go beneath the surface. People say the lecture is dead, but not here.”
Adult education is thriving
Adult education in the form of seminars, lectures, exhibits and concerts is alive and well at the library. Attendance for public programs was record-breaking two years ago and then held steady the past year.
Seminar topics in the coming year will range from the esoteric (Medieval Transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) to the more mainstream (writing workshops and Chicago genealogy).
The library has been at 60 W. Walton St. since 1893, when it opened as an independent research library concentrating on the humanities.
Although public educational programs always have been offered, the number has grown steadily since 1994, when it established the Center for Public Programs.
“The collections are rich in things that cry out for public programs,” said Mary Wyly, associate librarian.
“It’s natural to have lectures because people are doing such interesting things here.”
Vast, varied collections
The library was founded in 1887 with a bequest from Walter L. Newberry, a Chicago businessman who had been an avid book collector.
The collections span the history and culture of Europe from the Middle Ages to the mid-20th Century, and the Americas from the time of first contact between Europeans and Native Americans.
Anyone 16 and older can use the library for free after being issued a library card. (There are fees for the public programs.) Getting a card requires a photo ID and proof of current address.
The library also asks that the cardholders have a research interest that’s supported by the collections. One-day passes can be issued to people who are uncertain and just want to explore.
The building is home to 300,000 maps, 1.5 million books and 5 million manuscript pages.
Readers use card catalogs and computers–and the help of reference librarians–to find out what’s in the stacks. The materials they need are brought to them in reading rooms. The collections are non-circulating.
Wyly estimated that 80 to 100 people use the library each day.
Usage increases in the summer, in part because of the number of people doing genealogical research. More than half come to look up family histories, Wyly said.
Genealogical research is big
“We have a great number of published and self-published genealogies,” she said, “and strong holdings in local history.
“Another strong thing about our collections [for genealogy] is our holdings of census microfilm and of African-American genealogy. With a series of grants in the early 1980s, we made an effort to collect” African-American genealogy.
Reference librarian Jack Simpson’s primary responsibility is to help people do genealogical research. “A lot of people just wander in and aren’t that prepared, and others have been researching for years,” Simpson said. “We help everyone.”
Census data, birth and death indexes and newspaper obituaries are some of the records he helps people find.
“A lot of people who are coming through Chicago for some reason and know they had family here will stop and look up census records,” he said.
Constance Stewart Alty of Elk Grove Village has been researching her family’s history for about 10 years.
She spends about one day a week researching in the Newberry or other Chicago-area libraries. She also goes to Salt Lake City every other year to do research at the Mormon Church’s Family History Library.
“It’s really exciting when you find something,” said Alty, 76. “It’s like a mystery, like a giant puzzle, and you learn about history along the way.
“The reference librarians here are helpful if you have a definite question, or if you’ve reached the end of the line they can give you new suggestions.”
Genealogy research has become so popular that the library has started a Friends of Genealogy group, which shares tips on gathering family-history information and plans speeches and seminars.
Latest exhibit focuses on maps
The library mounts exhibits in its lobby three times a year. The current exhibit, “Cartographic Treasures of the Newberry Library,” began Oct. 10 and runs through Jan. 19. Library cards aren’t required for viewing the exhibits.
The exhibit includes 77 maps spanning six centuries.
The earliest is a 1425 Italian manuscript called “La Spera,” or The Sphere, which contains a description of the heavens and earth with small drawings in the margins depicting the world view at the time, with the earth at the center of the universe.
“It’s written in Italian verse, with little pieces of maps in the margins,” said Robert Karrow, curator of special collections and maps.
Karrow and curator James Akerman, director of the library’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, selected the maps for the exhibit.
Some maps in the exhibit are valuable, rare treasures but others could be bought from map dealers for less than $100, Karrow said.
Even though they wouldn’t command much in dollars, “they’re valuable for other reasons,” he said. “They might be documentation of a particular era.
“For example, we have a late 19th-Century railroad map of Texas from the era when that was the way to get West.”
A tourist map of gangland Chicago also is in the exhibit.
The library got the idea for the map exhibit because a conference of map collectors was held in Chicago this month. The exhibit, though, is intended not just for cartography experts but for the general public as well.
“We hope it will appeal to anyone who’s ever been interested in looking at a map,” Karrow said.
All the maps are from the Newberry collection.
“All of the exhibits are grounded in our collections,” Janzen said. “The purpose is to let people know about what we have here and give them different ways to enjoy it.”
Book sale and concerts
The library’s biggest fundraiser each year is its summer book fair, held the last weekend of July, when some 100,000 donated books in 50 categories go on sale to the public.
Although many are priced under $2, there are a few treasures for sale each year, for which collectors pay hundreds of dollars. Admission is free. This year, the library grossed $118,000.
The library also holds several concerts each year, again based on its collections.
It has a large collection of sheet music and printed collections of early music, and the Newberry Consort, an in-residence ensemble, plays these medieval and baroque pieces on period instruments.
Two musicians form the core of the ensemble and guest artists from around the world join them.
Reading rooms stay busy
Musicians are one of the many kinds of professionals who can be found in the reading rooms on any given day, “using the collections to look for music to play,” Wyly said.
“We also have a strong following of graphic artists using our History of Printing collection. … Or we might have someone here studying Native American treaties in upper New York State, or studying railroad history, because we have archives of the Burlington Railroad, the Illinois Central Railroad and the Pullman Co.”
In many cases, people can view the original documents, but some holdings are too old or too fragile. In those cases, photocopies of the documents are used.
Among the many notable works in the collections are first folios of William Shakespeare’s collected works, printed in 1623; the first opera ever written, “L’Euridice” by Jacopo Peri; and first editions of “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville and “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte.
“The Newberry collections are really a public good, one that has been sort of unknown to the public,” Wyly said.
“We were established as a public library, even though we aren’t publicly funded, and it’s important for people to know that there’s a great cultural resource in their midst.”
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For more information on the Newberry Library, call 312-943-9090, or visit the Web site at www.newberry.org.
