Idle Curiosity and Serious Research: Rauner Library
Just another day at the office. Not. Not when you can hold in your (bare) hands an item that brought together Robert Frost, William Yeats, and Ezra Pound.
Jay Satterfield gets to see, read, and touch the extraordinary every day. He’s the Special Collections Librarian (since 2004) at Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, which “ . . . provides access to the rare books, manuscripts, and archives for the Dartmouth Library . . . You can find all kinds of things here, from cuneiform tablets, to medieval manuscripts, to early printed editions, and modern manuscripts and pretty much anything to do with Dartmouth's history. Our collections are very broad—there is something here for everyone. Whatever topic you're into, we probably have something to thrill you.”
My hazy memories of a visit to Rauner decades ago made me think it might have been a more solemn place then. I believe I had to wear protective gloves to examine not some sacred text, but an old copy of The Dartmouth that was relevant to a class I was teaching at the medical school. (More on the issue of gloves later.) Satterfield’s descriptions make Rauner now seem more lively and filled with a shared sense of wonder. While its official purpose is to aid in academic research, Satterfield insists that the “idly curious” are welcome too. “Really?” I inquired. “Any recent examples of what the idly curious have come to see at Rauner?” He replied without hesitation:
Two medical students stopped by the other day to look at a first edition of Pride and Prejudice and Shakepeare's First Folio from 1623. They were visibly moved by the experience. Another person came in saying they were interested in politics: we grabbed the first edition of Hobbes's The Leviathan. The title page blew them away with its giant made up of thousands of little people.
Of course it would seem working in a place like Rauner would result in one having some favorite items. Jay says not necessarily, although . . .
Okay, this answer sounds like a copout, but it is true. My favorite thing is what I need that day. Everything here is pretty amazing in some way or another. When I stumble on the perfect thing to help teach a class and make some abstract concept concrete it is a total thrill. That becomes my favorite thing in the collection. That said, I have a few personal favorites. One of them is a postcard with handwritten directions to Yeats's house in London. The postcard was handed to Robert Frost by Ezra Pound. That one gives me chills. There are about 1,000 other things that have that effect on me.
Back to the gloves. What prompted me to contact Jay was a recent article in the New York Times about the current disapproval of the older practice of wearing protective gloves when handling old books and manuscripts. (Readers had reacted negatively to photos of an auctioneer holding, with bare hands, a medieval Hebrew Bible worth $50 million. ““The glove thing,” Maria Fredericks, the director of conservation at the Morgan Library and Museum, said when contacted about the matter, sounding slightly weary. “It just won’t die.””) It reminded me of a more recent experience with Jay in which many publications, rare books, and artifacts had been spread on a table in an art class I was auditing. It was shocking (to me) when Satterfield invited the entire class to walk around the table and see and touch the items. Not a glove in sight.
Asked about the no-gloves policy described in the NYT, Jay responded “We do not use gloves except for photographs. We agree with the general consensus in the article that they tend to do more harm than good. Our rare books are used in the reading room and in our classrooms. We use book cradles to support the spines, but generally speaking, we are a high-touch special collections where we want people to experience the book with multiple senses. Old books are remarkably sturdy objects.”
For more information, the good folks at Rauner invite you to take a look at its blog at https://raunerlibrary.blogspot.com and its Instagram account at https://www.instagram.com/raunerlibrary/.
(Thank you to Jay Satterfield. Photo, above, via Wikicommons, public domain.)
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.