 . . . Summer 1998
The William L. Clements Library turns 75 on June 15. This University gem is so widely prized that its value can be taken for granted. It's worth reminding ourselves of the insight, work and support that underlie the Clements's fame. Michigan Today's John Woodford asked Clements Director John C. Dann to discuss the institution's history and main features. Here are the highlights of that discussion: I T H E F O U N D E R The University had very little bureaucracy back then; the administration comprised a president, secretary, treasurer and a couple of dozen non-teaching employees. Regents sat on all important committees and also did some administrative work. Libraries and buildings fell under Clements's charge. Given the avidity of his book collecting, it was probably inevitable that he would move to establish some sort of library on campus.
By 1915, Clements had collected 15,000 to 20,000 books and titles in his home. The fact that Clements was a Middle Westerner is an important aspect of his collecting. In Boston and other Eastern cities, American history tends to be seen as emanating from their city or state. Bostonians focus on the Winthrops, Mathers, pilgrims, witch hunts and so on; Jeffersoniana is big in Virginia; works on Franklin and the Liberty Bell attract Philadelphians.
But in Bay City, as in many former frontier sites, the historical outlook has embraced American Indians, the conflicts between French-speakers and English-speakers, the lives of trappers, lumbermen, pioneer women and so on. It's a different perspective. Furthermore, many Americans don't realize how much history is in the Middle West. Detroit was founded in 1701. It's about as old as Williamsburg, Virginia, and older than many East Coast towns. From early on, our historical outlook in Michigan has been more national, even international, and there has been a stronger anthropological attitude about what American history is all about.
Growing up, Clements imbibed the broader view of North America. He saw Indians living a fairly traditional lifestyle on the Great Lakes. Rough and tough lumbermen and fur trappers lived there, too. He saw American history as a larger entity than the events that molded his hometown or state. He was interested in the settlement of the whole country.
Following the advice of a friend that he should avoid giving a rare books collection to the main University library system, because then his collection would always be secondary, Clements established a separate library for his collection. Under the Clements gift agreement, the director reports directly to the provost rather than through the intermediary of a dean or department head. Clements knew the importance of establishing the library so that the president would have it under his or her wing.
He put two-thirds of his worldly wealth into this place. It was not just a gift to the University, it was his life. He believed in the importance of what a library like this does for this country. It was almost a religion. You have to have a touch of that missionary impulse to do what he did and to perpetuate it.
The Clements Library is unique at the University in that it was not created by the University but by a legal contract between a donor and the University. (The Rackham Building shares aspects of this distinct formation.) Under the Clements agreement, he built the building and the University agreed to pay staff salaries, maintain the building and provide some funds for acquisitions. II D I S T I N C T I V E F E A T U R E S The Clements is one of no more than a dozen libraries in the world that has these materials, and a third to a half of our collection is unique. Places like the Smithsonian or the British Museum have tremendous resources, too. But anyone interested in the areas we collect in would have to come here to work as well. III T H E L I N E O F C O L L E C T O R S This pattern of succession has given me great strength in my collecting. I've seen the gaps that Clements and his successors have seen as if it's through their own eyes. There has been remarkable continuity in collecting focus here, as if one person had been building the library for 100 years. And each of us has collected from the historian's perspective. That is, we've kept in mind what our contemporary American historians are doing, what their interests are, what they are looking for. You might say the Clements is more of a research center than a "rare book library." Materials needed for such research just happen to be very valuable, very rare and, in many cases, very beautiful. At most rare book rooms, preservation of books as precious objects is the primary focus. Our interests go far beyond that. IV T H E C O L L E C T I O N At just about the time the Library opened, it seized the opportunity to acquire the collection of Henry Vignaud, a US Consul in Paris who was a scholar and collector of historic explorations and discoveries. At one shot, the Clements bought his 50,000-piece library. It had all the notable atlases of Ptolemy, Mercator, Ortelius, Blaeu and other key creators of maps from the 15th through 18th centuries. So by 1930, the Clements had become a great manuscript and map library in a building originally intended to be a rare books library.
Another way we expand our focus is that we try to respond to the interests of scholars and students. When he was a graduate student in the 1940s, the U-M music historian Allen Britton was interested in early American tune books, so the library started collecting them. We now have a strong collection of 18th and 19th century music. We got them for $5 to $10 apiece. Now they range from $500 to $5,000. These acquisitions led us to start a sheet music collection. So now we are a great resource for music historians.
Peckham was especially interested in social history, material culture, the decorative arts, Indian captivity narratives and early architectural books. He made purchases in these areas when collector interest in them was low and prices were very reasonable. V U N D E R G R A D U A T E S Clements had no idea that undergraduates would use the library at all. He saw it as a place for advanced scholarship only, a place apart from the University's general teaching function and from its general library system.
I occasionally teach, and you can't believe how excited students are when they get an original letter or pamphlet in hand. You are showing students a great deal of respect in letting them do this. It's telling them, you are competent to analyze the past without needing an interpretation of the material from textbook writers. Not to mention the fact that they get to see and touch old things. Mainly, it's that they get the chance to draw their own conclusions. That sets them on the course of producing mature scholarship earlier; it's better than having them regurgitate what someone else has said. There is no equivalent of the Clements at most universities in the United States. Another change is that the library realized that it needed to raise money. That's why the Clements Library Association was created in 1947. Raising money is extremely important, so we can keep up with acquisitions. We have a national and international constituency. People give us support through bequests and other means. It adds to the excitement of working here to know that others appreciate what you are doing. VI T H E A R T O F C O L L E C T I N G Each director of the Clements has brought a double expertise. We've all been historians, so we have understood what items have original research value. And we are all collectors, too. I began hanging around bookstores when I was 10. I was out of school with polio then, so I accompanied my grandfather, who was an Americana book-collecting nut all his life. Adams started at about the same age. You have to get bitten by this bug early. I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and used to go to bookstores there and in Philadelphia and Baltimore with my grandfather. A mania for Americana was my birthright. I grew up in the 1940s and '50s near where the Battle of Brandywine took place. I could go out and trace the paths that Washington's army had walked. All collectors are inspired in part by a sense of the romance of history and biography. It takes long exposure to the market for you to know what's worth acquiring and what a reasonable price for it is. A successful collector has to recognize what is about to become hot because of the interesting qualities latent within it. The time to collect is before a field becomes hot, and familiarity with both history and the book market provides you with that intuitive sense. When I first came to Ann Arbor I went over to the first Borders bookstore, which was on Williams Street. I saw they had a Washtenaw County Atlas from the 1870s and bought it for $35. It had wonderful lithographs. These handsome county atlases were a Midwestern thing-Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois. Local historians have always valued them, but recently they're seen as wonderful expressions of ideals and aspirations of middle-class America of the 1870s. They now cost several hundred dollars apiece, but I managed to accumulate several hundred of them for the Clements at a fraction of that price before they "took off" with general collectors. Another newer type of new resource we've acquired for 20 years is the road maps and travel brochures that used to be free. Until quite recently, travel materials--which have been published since before the Civil War--were considered to be almost valueless, but now they've become highly collectible. You find lots of things by sheer luck, by serendipity. I can be sitting here with almost no money for an acquisition and get a call from someone. In my world, they knock only once. About four years ago I got a call from a book dealer in Vermont, a friend. He said a quiet man who lived in Brooklyn, a lithographer who wrote detective stories for Ellery Queen Magazine, was fascinated by the history of murder. For 40 to 50 years this man accumulated every pamphlet and book on true crime up to 1900.
VII W H A T T H E C L E M E N T S N E E D S The market we are involved in is bullish. It's difficult to keep up. I want the Clements to have income sufficient to meet its acquisition opportunities as they arise. We need a substantial acquisitions endowment of about $1.5 million. Our greatest problem, however, is that we're out of space. We have a great expansion plan. I hope that by the time of our 100th anniversary, we will have marvelous new stack space underground, an auditorium and an expanded museum function. This "Center for American History," or some such entity, could be named after the donor, and I hope in that way to have the pleasure of ensuring someone's earthly immortality before I retire. The cost would be $10 million or $15 million at least--a lot of money--but this person's name would have prominence as long as our civilization survives, which is not the case with most charitable gifts. Clements Library publications--books, maps, bulletins, posters, periodicals and notecards--may be ordered from the Web at: http://www.clements.umich.edu/store.html or by obtaining a catalog by calling (734) 764-2347. Black and white illustrations in this article are from One Hundred and One Treasures From the Collection of the William L. Clements Library, a fascinating 180-page commemorative book available to Clements donors of $100 or more. John C. Dann edited the volume, which was published with the support of the Mosaic Foundation of Rita and Peter Heydon.
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Having developed, as a Regent, a close working relationship with the architect Albert Kahn, Clements asked Kahn to design the Library. The Library was established at no cost to the state.
We're living in the day of the computer and virtual reality. We're exposed to a type of fiction or drama or movies in which writers present real historical figures as characters and have them say or do things that conflict with the historical record, or have them meet with people they were never together with in real life. Authors don't blush at concocting "histories" that willfully distort the historical record. I don't care for this use of history. But in such a time, it's important to have a place where you can read what Thomas Jefferson's true attitudes toward race were, where you can prove Columbus or Magellan took a trip to this or that locale, where you can read what the pilgrims wrote down firsthand about life in their settlements.
I am the fourth collector and third director, and each director has worked for his predecessor. I worked for 
Clements liked beautiful 
Now, however, the Clements is deeply involved in undergraduate education. Undergraduates studying American history, literature and political science use the library regularly, a privilege that used to be enjoyed only by senior scholars. Classes even meet here. That's a great change, which reflects the change in teaching history: the textbook is out. Students are excited by exposure to original materials.
My book dealer friend told me that the Brooklyn collector had some steep medical expenses and wanted to sell all 1,600 titles. Was I interested, yes or no? I said yes instantly. In one shot we owned 40 percent of the American crime reports written up to 1900. It's our James V. Medler Collection. These reports tell not only about crime but about what people ate, how they lived-there are endless numbers of ways to use the material. An undergraduate English class is using the crime narratives right now. We went from being a modest player in this area to ranking in at least the top three. And since acquiring the Medler Collection, we've added another 35 to 40 related items on crime from pre-1900 and are getting material after 1900, maybe to 1930. What may be boring or banal recent history for one generation becomes a treasure to the next one. Now we're beginning to get World War II and even Vietnam-era collections. It's a continuum.