From the Director
Watching the installation of the exhibition, “A Definite Claim to Beauty: William Morris and the Kelmscott Press, 1891 –1896” this spring in the Mariam Coffin Canaday Library and listening to the finely-crafted lecture by William S. Peterson, “The Kelmscott Chaucer: Pocket Cathedral or Nonbook?” helped me to reflect on the ways in which libraries mirror the best creative impulses of the human spirit. Two wonderful members of the Special Collections staff, Barbara Ward Grubb and Marianne Hansen, assisting and assisted by a guest curator from the History of Art department, Ph.D. candidate Rebecca Hable, worked diligently, efficiently and swiftly to install the exhibit in our marvelously restored Class of 1912 Rare Book Room. A Kelmscott Press book is immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever seen any one of the press’s fifty-three titles, of which Bryn Mawr owns forty-two. The typeface, the way the pages are designed, the illustrations, constitute a unified vision of what the making of a fine book could and should be. As William Peterson said, these books were intended to be works of art, and they succeed in awakening that feeling in the viewer.
But beautiful books and a handsome room do not alone make an exhibit. The work
of the staff and guest curator to assemble, label and display drew upon all
of the know-how that the three of them had amassed throughout their careers.
To make an exhibit of books come alive requires the skills of an artist and
of a craftsperson and of a handyperson and of an engineer. And all of these
skills need to be blended together in such a way that the end result does not
reveal the individual contributions from the arts and the crafts that go into
exhibit-making. The attention is directed towards the works of art and the coherence
of the intellectual conception of the exhibit. What we learned at the talk by
William Peterson was that Morris and his collaborators also needed all of the
skills mentioned above and many more to accomplish their art, all bending their
individual talents to the same end. There were many obstacles in their path,
compromises with their holistic notion of how a book should be made, but in
the end, we have their work to cherish.
A library works in just such a way when it works well: it marshals the skills
of all of its staff, the resources made available to it by its supporters, and
the physical and virtual spaces it inhabits to present to its patrons a way
in which to understand the world that allows the most creative parts of us to
roam as freely and widely as we know how. How a library gets there, how it manages
to amass its treasures, present them to the reader and make the space in which
one can think as wide and as high as is possible, requires all of the skills
that the Kelmscott books and the exhibit in which we enjoy them needed –
and more.
Elliott Shore
Chief Information Officer and The Constance A. Jones Director of Libraries and
Professor of History