A Good Home For Old Words (July/August 1987 | Volume: 38, Issue: 5)

A Good Home For Old Words

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Authors: Gillian Avery

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July/August 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 5

The American Antiquarian Society, which houses two-thirds of all the material known to have been published in this country from 1640 to 1821, this year is celebrating its 175th anniversary. Located in Worcester, Massachusetts, it is an organization of great distinction as well as unique gentility. Its membership, limited to five hundred at any one time, has included twelve Presidents of the United States and forty-eight Pulitzer Prize-winning authors.

The work as well as the atmosphere of this superlative depository of our history was described by an appreciative English scholar of children’s literature who originally published her impressions of the society in the London Times Literary Supplement:
 

Those who are used to working in the rare-book rooms of American libraries behind bullet-proof glass and electronically controlled doors, scanned by closed-circuit television and frisked by armed guards, cannot fail to be struck by the gentlemanly way in which the American Antiquarian Society, the chief repository of early American historical material, treats its readers, or by the tranquillity of its reading-room, in which it is often difficult to discern other readers, even at what the library avers to be high season… .

Towards the end of Salisbury Street [in Worcester, Massachusetts] are the porticoed classical premises which the Society has occupied since 1910. It is rather like arriving at a club or a country house. There is a subdued but cordial welcome from a courtly major domo who presents the readers’ register with the air of a trusted family servant. Within are fine examples of colonial furniture and portraiture—objects which the Society has acquired almost absent-mindedly over the years. Melodious clocks chime out the quarters and the hours. The service is deft, rapid and personal—your books appear unsolicited on your desk the instant you are seen advancing over the threshold. The reading-room is comfortably small; the catalogues, issue desk and all the reference books you need are only a step from your chair. If American history is what you are after, then this must be the most agreeable library in the world.

Across the road is the private house (the last owner’s family portraits still hanging on the walls) which the Society has recently acquired and adapted to lodge five readers—its Fellows, for the most part—working on long-term projects, who before this would have had to find their own accommodation....There is a lot to be learnt from the other inhabitants of the Goddard-Daniels house....One was studying the book-trade in eighteenth-century America, one pursuing early Vermont families, a third scrutinizing old almanacs for mention of weather, a fourth reading Increase Mather’s journal, a fifth early children’s books.

When one’s research is in American history, this must be the most agreeable library in the world.

We were grateful for the comfort of the Goddard-Daniels house, since many of our hours were spent there. The gentlemanliness of the Society extends to the hours it keeps: it is open only until five o’clock, and closed the whole weekend....But you