Where the Borrower Is King

By Ellie McGrath

The well-bred Boston Athenaeum marks its 175th year

It began in 1807 as a reading room for Boston merchants who wanted to keep up with American and European literature and periodicals. In a city that considered itself to be the Athens of America, the Boston Athenaeum soon became a privately supported repository of culture, buying the best books published in the U.S. and Europe and collecting works of art as well. The imposing sandstone building at 10 1/2 Beacon Street, designed by Edward Clarke Cabot in 1846, provided sunny halls where Brahmins could read (or snooze) and scholars could work. The Athenaeum's roster of readers over the years is a Who's Who of American writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Francis Parkman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Eliot Morison, Robert Lowell.

Last week the Boston Athenaeum, just down Beacon Hill from the gold-domed statehouse, celebrated its 175th anniversary. Trustees today include descendants of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Yet for all its Oriental carpets, marble busts and Victorian antiques, the Athenaeum is no stuffy club of Yankee bluebloods. The trustees include four women, as well as an Irish American Roman Catholic monsignor, and the library's magnificent collection of 750,000 volumes is available to the scholars of the world. One of the finest independent libraries in the country, the Boston Athenaeum truly lives up to its entrance plaque: "Here remains a retreat for those who would enjoy the humanity of books."

David McCullough, who won an American Book Award this year for his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Mornings on Horseback, has researched all his books at the Athenaeum. He calls the library "a marvelous example of what a great city ought to provide." Writes Poet David McCord: "The high-ceilinged rooms, the little balconies, alcoves, nooks and angles all suggest sanctuary, escape, creature comfort. The reader, the scholar, the browser, the borrower is king."

The library is actually owned by 1,049 proprietors, or shareholders. Many of them have inherited then-holdings as valued heirlooms since the last share was sold by the library in the late 1850s. (Daniel Webster, the eloquent Senator from Massachusetts, was shareholder 296; his plaster bust stares out over a young librarian using a computer.) Most shareholders contribute at least $50 a year to the upkeep of the institution, as do "life members" of the library, who achieve their status by applying with references and paying $500. Both proprietors and life members are allotted four tickets a year for "guests" who pay the library $35. But thousands of writers and scholars use the Athenaeum every year at no charge whatever. About 90% of the $1.2 million cost of running the Athenaeum is met by earnings of the library's $16 million endowment, much of it donated by proprietors past and present. Even the fresh flowers that light up the library every day are financed by a private fund.

The great independent libraries of this country are known for their specialties. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City has a fine collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts; the Folger in Washington, D.C., draws the world's leading Shakespeare scholars. The Athenaeum has eclectic holdings that follow the interests of its members. There is, of course, an extensive array of colonial books and paintings, as well as one of the country's largest collections of works published by the Confederate government. George Washington's personal library from Mount Vernon can be found in the trustees' room on the fourth floor. Elsewhere in the building is the country's leading collection of books on gypsies, plus the 213-volume William and Mary Library that Britain's King William III gave to Boston's King's Chapel in 1698. Historian Jacques Barzun, a mystery buff, recently drew on the Athenaeum's volumes of classic crime fiction.

The Athenaeum has maintained high artistic as well as literary standards. Gilbert Stuart had a studio at one of the library's earlier homes; works collected by the Athenaeum's trustees helped form the basis for Boston's magnificent Museum of Fine Arts. In 1978 the Athenaeum unexpectedly made newspaper headlines when it tried to sell the Stuart portraits of George and Martha Washington that had been on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts since 1876. Some Bostonians accused the Athenaeum of peddling the city's culture, so the Athenaeum worked out an arrangement in which the Museum of Fine Arts and the Smithsonian shared the cost and custody of the paintings.

The sale netted the library nearly $5 million to help repair the building, pay professional salaries and improve the security system.

The Boston Athenaeum does not try to do everything, but, says Director and Librarian Rodney Armstrong, "This institution has to excel in everything it does." In particular, the Athenaeum and the few distinguished independent research libraries like it are fulfilling a role increasingly neglected by universities hard-pressed to pay professors and educate students: preserving past treasures and supporting fine contemporary works. As part of its 175th-anniversary celebration, the Athenaeum last week opened an exhibit of Polaroid photography portraits by Boston Artist Marie Cosindas. Next month will be a retrospective of Athenaeum writers. With its collections and exhibits, the Athenaeum remains both custodian and patron. Says McCullough: "You go in there and you get a sense of the layers of civilization."

--By Ellie McGrath. Reported by Ruth Mehrtens Calvin/Boston

With reporting by Ruth Mehrtens Calvin

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