THE JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY H A HISTORY • ; --"J* 11 : ; - Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/johncarterbrownlOOwins THE JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY » THE JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY A HISTORY BY GEORGE PARKER WINSHIP PROVIDENCE 1914 B. UPDIKE, THE MERRYMOUNT PRESS, BOSTON A HISTORY THE FAMILY THE John Carter Brown Library has a his- tory that goes back as far as that of the University to which it now belongs and to which it has been linked for a hundred and fifty years by the family that gave its name to both. Starting as a family library, it has grown into an institution for historical research, widely known among scholars as an unequalled collection of Americana. The handful of pamphlets taken home from the country store passed from mother to son and grandson. They grew in number with the widening interests of two prosperous mer- chants and public-spirited men of affairs. The next generation bought rare books. John Carter Brown, turning his hobby toward the subjects that he most enjoyed reading about, became a collector of old books on America. His library came to be famous for its treasures and for the generosity with which he allowed scholars to use it. After his son's death, it passed in 1 904 into the keeping of Brown Uni- versity. There it is a lasting memorial to the col- lector and a permanent endowment for American scholarship. The copy of "The Secretary's Guide, or, Young Mans Companion, " printed by William Bradford c 3 n JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY at New York in 1728, in which Nicholas Brown, aged eleven years, wrote his name in 1740, is the earliest of the family possessions now in the col- lection. The accumulation of a library cannot fairly be dated from this, however, nor from the tract on "The Importance of the British Plantations in America, " in which his signature was written in 1749. It was in July, 1769, when the contest over the location of Rhode Island College was at its height, that Nicholas Brown "bot at Dot r . Gibbs Vendue" at Newport an author's presentation copy of Judge Samuel Sewall's "Phenomena quaedam Apocalyptica Ad Aspectum Novi Orbis configu- rata," which was printed at Boston in 1 727. At this auction sale he also secured "A brief Account of the Revenues, Pomp, and State of the Bishops, and other Clergy in the Church of England/' printed at the same place two years earlier. As Nicholas Brown owned two copies of the Book of Common Prayer, it is probable that a keen but tolerant interest in matters of religious concern, rather than any feeling inspired by controversial dogma- tism, led him to buy these books. They are now treasured by the Library because they belong within its especial field of collecting as well as for their sentimental value. Since 1 769 there have been c 4 ] THE FAMILY few years during which purchases were not made at book-auftions for the Brown family library, and scarcely one in which the Library records do not showthatsome addition was made to the collection. One of Nicholas Brown 's earliest possessions was a copy of "The English Pilot. The Fourth Book. Describing The West-India Navigation, from Hudson's-Bay to the River Amazones," which was printed at London in 1 745. This useful volume had belonged to his seafaring brother, who carried it with him on his last voyage. On the final fly leaf is found the record: "York in Virginy, Febery i5 ye 1 750-1 , Capt. James Brown Died half a Oure Past 6y 2 at Nite." Captain James was the oldest son of James Brown of Providence, who had likewise followed the sea in his younger days. The elder Captain James Brown sailed on one of the little vessels with which a flourishing trade to the south- ward was managed by Nicholas Power, whose daughter Hope he married in 1722. Shortly there- after he left the sea to enter the business of keep- ing a general store. Four of the sons of James and Hope Brown grew up to become the famous " Four Brothers" of eighteenth-century Providence. As "Nicholas Brown and Company" the four brothers carried on the family business after 1 762. They had diverse interests, however, and the sen- 1 5 1 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY ior soon came to be the only aftive partner. Of the others, Joseph devoted himself to scientific pur- suits, studying architecture and astronomy. The present Transit Street marks the location of the telescope, imported for the occasion, with which he made observations of Venus in 1 769. At the time of his death in December, 1785, he occupied the chair of Natural Philosophy in Rhode Island College. John and Moses devoted themselves to their in- dependent business affairs, and to politics. Moses Brown was a keen judge of men and a shrewd in- vestor. The establishment of the first cotton mill in Rhode Island was due to his confidence and cap- ital. He endowed the Friends' School which now perpetuates his name, and the gift of his life-long accumulation of papers relating to the history of the state made him the most important contribu- tor to the foundation of the Rhode Island Histori- cal Society. Nicholas Brown and his brother John, in more or less friendly rivalry, came to be the leadingmer- chants of Providence. One or the other served on most of the important committees appointed by the Town Meeting to pave the streets, build bridges, and raise money for a Market House. When the recently organized Rhode Island Col- lege was seeking a home, Nicholas and John Brown c 6 3 THE FAMILY secured the subscriptions, while their brother Mo- ses attended to the legislative negotiations which brought this institution of learning to Providence. Nicholas Brown paid the bills and collected the funds for building the original edifice, University Hall, on the hill overlooking his home on the Main Street. Five years later, in 1774, when the Boston Port Bill threatened the mechanics of the neigh- bouring city with starvation, Nicholas Brown sent word that they could find work in Providence. He organized a lottery, signing the tickets with his own hand and taking up the unsold chances, to raise the money with which to pay the Boston craftsmen for the work of erecting the First Bap- tist Meeting House, still standing "for the public worship of Almighty God and to hold Commence- ment in." The four brothers, with their friend Stephen Hopkins, were leaders in the group which in- duced the first Providence printer and newspaper editor, William Goddard, to establish himself in their town. Goddard's son became the Professor of Belles-Lettres in the local university, and married Nicholas Brown's granddaughter. Through herthe management of the family affairs descended to the members of the present firm of Goddard Brothers. William Goddard's business was acquired by a c 7 n JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY protege of Benjamin Franklin, John Carter, under whose direction the Providence "Gazette" became one of the most influential of New England news- papers during the Revolution and the subsequent years of political and economic uncertainties. Nich- olas Brown's son married John Carter's daughter, and their youngest son, John Carter Brown, col- lected what was for many years the most widely known American private library. The second Nicholas Brown was born in 1 769 and graduated from Rhode Island College in 1 786. After his father's death, in the year 1 791 , he began the business career in company with his sister's husband, Thomas Poynton Ives, which made the name of Brown & Ives respe6ted wherever there was knowledge of American commerce. His ear- liest purchase of a book now in the Library was made in 1 792, but for several years before this his ministerial friends had been in the habit of sending him copies of their printed sermons inscribed with his name, which are valued among its American imprints. His conneftion with the management of the College, to which his name was given in 1804, began when he succeeded to his father's place as Trustee in 1791. He was elected Treasurer five years later, when his uncle, John Brown, resigned C 8 D THE FAMILY the office which he had held for twenty-one years. Nicholas Brown performed the duties of this posi- tion until 1825, when he turned the college funds over to his successor and nephew, Moses Brown Ives, who filled the office for the ensuing thirty- two years. He built Manning Hall to house the college library, whose steady growth was due largely to his contributions. The former Presi- dent's House, with its site on which the John Hay Library now stands, was also given to the College by the second Nicholas Brown. He shared with the children of his sister, for whom it was named, the cost of building Hope College. The third Nicholas Brown, born in 1 792, began buying old American books in his twenties. His brother, John Carter Brown, five years his junior, possessed himself of a copy of Thomas Hobs's "Behemoth; or an Epitome of the Civil Wars/' printed in 1 679, in his twelfth year. The two broth- ers were predisposed to infection with the epidemic Bibliomania which raged in England at the begin- ning of the nineteenth century, and of which Dib- din made himself the historiographer. The elder, Nicholas, became interested in the books which were sought after by the famous collectors of that generation, and some fifteenth-century printing and editions of the classics found their way to his it 9 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY shelves. Europe early exerted a powerful attrac- tion upon him, and he decided to make his home in Rome, where he was for a time the American consul. He sold his Americana to his brother, who thereupon committed himself to the task of col- lecting a library of books relating to the western hemisphere. THE COLLECTOR JOHN Carter Brown bought books of travel and history as they appeared at the bookshops while he was a college undergraduate. The reading of these led him back to the older works, more es- pecially to such as contained the original accounts of the settlement of New England. Among the purchases in which he dated his signature before he was thirty were a copy of" Simplicities Defence against Seven-Headed Policy/' written by Samuel Gorton of Warwick in Rhode Island, and printed in 1646; the 1713 edition of Nathaniel Ward's " Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America and Thomas Shepard's "Theses Sabbaticae"of 1649. In most of these early acquisitions Mr. Brown noted on the fly leaves the references to his native state. He marked the passages that especially in- terested him, and controversial remarks animad- verting on Roger Williams almost always called forth some succin6l comment. He also bought at this time White Kennet's " Bibliothecae Americans Primordia," which was published in 1713. A hun- dred years later this "Attempt Towards laying the Foundation of an American Library" was almost the only comprehensive and helpful guide for those who wished to find the original narratives of z » 1 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY the discovery and exploration of the New World. For a score of years John Carter Brown was one of a small group of American gentlemen of means who found in the London and Continental book- shops a reason for a European holiday. Ameri- can books, which had been a neglected by-produCt with the dealers who were searching for first edi- tions of the classics and for the notable productions of the "cradle period" of printing, gradually be- came an objeCt of attention. Some of the shops began even to specialize in " Americana." Obadiah Rich of Boston, who was the Ameri- can consul at Valencia in 1 8 1 5 and later at Madrid , found the means wherewith to accumulate a library for himself by making occasional trips to London with boxes of old books. There he met most of the American collectors of that generation and aroused their interest in the records of the early Spanish voyagers by showing them what he had to sell. The habit of trading in due course of time became stronger than the passion for collecting, and in 1828 Rich established himself in London as a bookseller. Four years later he issued a catalogue contain- ing a chronological list of books about America printed between 1492 and 1700. This catalogue became the basis for Mr. Brown's collection, as well as for those of Peter Force, Colonel Thomas l 12 n THE COLLECTOR Aspinwall, James Carson Brevoort, Henry C. Murphy, and James Lenox. Colonel Aspinwall's books were bought by Samuel Latham Mitchill Barlow, who luckily had the most precious of them at his house when the larger part was burned while in storage, in 1864. The Barlow Library was dis- persed in 1890 by auction, as Mr. Murphy's had been six years earlier. The Force collection is now in the Library of Congress, and the Lenox Li- brary has been absorbed into the New York Pub- lic Library. This earliest group of American collectors bought the books printed before the eighteenth cen- tury, which was then too near to seem important. Obadiah Rich, after he settled in London, began to realize that his fellow-countrymen would soon be searching for the pamphlet literature of the French wars and for that of the American Revolution. He gathered a large number of these eighteenth- century tracts, and in 1835 issued a " Bibliotheca Americana Nova," chronologically arranged for the hundred years beginning with 1701 . Most of Mr. Brown's contemporaries refused to be drawn into this later period, and it was only after a pro- longed consideration that he made his decision to buy a large part of the titles on Rich's list. His order reached London too late to secure some of c 13 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY the things he wanted, among which were a few that have not since come upon the market. Mr. Brown secured, however, a considerable proportion of Rich's stock, which became the framework for the later seftion of his library. While Obadiah Rich was helping his American friends to fill their shelves with Latin and Spanish works, a Frenchman had been quietly amassing a library that left them all far behind. Like most successful collectors, he was a modest, unobtrusive student, who worked with his books. He gathered information as well as books and manuscripts, and in 1 837 published the results of his collecting under the title of" Bibliotheque Americaine ou Catalogue des Ouvrages relatifs a FAmerique qui ont paru jusqu'a Tan 1 700 par H. Ternaux." He also trans- lated many of the contemporary narratives of the exploration of the western hemisphere, and sup- plemented his list of the printed books by a se- ries of nineteen volumes, issued between 1837 and 1840, of "Voyages, Relations et Memoires origi- naux pour servir a Fhistoire de la decouverte de FAmerique publies par H. Ternaux-Compans." The original manuscripts from which these trans- lations were made, like the books described in his catalogue, were nearly if not quite all in the edi- tor's own library. [ 14 n THE COLLECTOR The Ternaux Catalogue established a new goal for Mr. Brown and Mr. Lenox, as well as for their rivals who were already beginning to drop behind in the race. The two leaders each secured a copy of the book, which was printed on large paper, and had it interleaved. These copies served for many years as the working catalogues of their libra- ries. " Not in Ternaux" became the note by which Mr. Brown designated a title which he wanted when he read an auction sale catalogue or a book- seller's list. In 1841, upon his father's death, John Carter Brown came into possession of the active family interests, including the family library. The time was opportune, and the book-buying which had been an occasional diversion soon became a per- sistent and absorbing passion. Two circumstances combined to give a fresh impetus to the collecting of Americana, upon which he had embarked fif- teen years before. In 1841 John Russell Bartlett opened a bookshop in New York. In 1843 Henry Stevens of Vermont graduated from Yale Col- lege and determined to pay his way through the Harvard Law School by trading in old books. Mr. Bartlett, who had received his business train- ing with Cyrus Butler, a name of some note in Providence, had as a partner Charles Welford. 1 15 n JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY The firm of Bartlett & Welford was short-lived, but a friendship was formed in their store which identified Mr. Bartlett with the John Carter Brown Library more and more intimately for the rest of his life. To Henry Stevens was direftly due the preeminent position which Mr. Brown's library secured before the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury. Henry Stevens became acquainted with old books in the library of his father, who was the founder of the Vermont Historical Society, and he devel- oped an instincl for finding them while wandering through New England. During his travels, he met John Carter Brown. No records have been found of the earliest trading between the young law stu- dent and the Providence merchant, but when, in 1845, Stevens decided to abandon the law and carry his talent for picking up rare books to Europe, he took with him a very clear idea of what Mr. Brown wanted. It is probable that the understanding between them was definite, and that Stevens was encouraged to go abroad in order to buy books for his Providence client. The venture was most successful, and John Carter Brown received from Stevens during the next two years over fifteen hundred titles for his collection. Nearly all of these, like many which Mr. Lenox secured at about the C 16 ] THE COLLECTOR same time, are in bindings on which are stamped the initials, H. T. beneath a ram's head crest, of Henri Ternaux-Compans. It seems likely that the prospe6t of purchasing the Ternaux books for Mr. Brown had much to do with the transfer of Mr. Stevens's energies to the European field. The Library archives contain six of the seven invoices on which were listed the books sent from London to Providence in 1 846 and 1 847. The miss- ing one can be reconstructed very largely by an examination of the volumes in which Stevens's neat figures are to be seen on the lower inside corner of the leaf facing the title-page. The first of these in- voices begins with the " Ymago Mundi" of Pierre d'Ailly, printed about 1485, in which Columbus found some of his inspiration. This is followed by three editions of the " Columbus Letter" printed at Rome and Paris in 1493, the three amounting to thirty-eight pounds; a Vespuccius "Mundus Novus," priced at four pounds ten shillings; five editions of the letters in which Cortes reported to the Spanish monarch his exploits in Mexico, the most expensive of them entered at nine guineas; and an assortment of other "nuggets," as Stevens was wont to call them. The names of Peter Mar- tyr; Hakluyt, whose "Virginia richly valued" of 1609 was priced at two guineas; John Smith; c 17 n JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY Lescarbot; Champlain, whose "Voyages" in the 1613 edition was marked two pounds without the shillings; John Cotton; Richard Mather; Hugo Grotius; Walter Raleigh; Edward Winslow; John Eliot, whose Indian Tracts were entered at one pound ten shillings or less ; Hennepin ; Anne Bradstreet; and Mary Rowlandson will suggest how solid was the structure of the Library which was then established. Mr. Brown already owned a number of the Jesuit "Relations" in which the Fathers of the Order published the reports of their missionary labours in Canada between 1632 and 1672. TheTernaux set of these "Relations" added twenty-six editions to his collection. He had likewise made a begin- ning in earlier years with the series of illustrated narratives of voyages which were brought out by Levinus Hulsius at Nuremberg between 1598 and 1663, and by Theodore De Bry and his successors at Frankfort from 1590 to 1644. Mr. Brown tried to resist temptation, writing in December, 1848, that he "should hardly be willing at present, in these dull times, to launch into the Ocean of de Bry." A few months later he reconsidered this resolution and gave the order to secure what he lacked to make these sets complete. Stevens set himself to the task, which occupied him at inter- n is n THE COLLECTOR vals throughout the rest of his life, and his grand- son after him. John Carter Brown stole a long march on all his rivals by the purchase of the Ternaux books. The only one who refused to recognize his lead was his Newport summer neighbour and friend, James Lenox of New York. The story of the fight between these two great collectors has been told in part in Mr. Stevens's entertaining " Recollections of Mr. James Lenox," published in 1886. Each recognized that Stevens held the key to their ulti- mate vi6tory, and the latter found the problem of satisfying both of them at times quite impossi- ble of solution. All three made many skilful turns, and some mistakes, and each did each of the others great service. It was a fair and a friendly fight to the end between the two rivals. Mr. Lenox, who never married, overtook his competitor, made care- less by early good fortune. When at his death the Lenox Library became the property of the public in the beautiful building which he had erefted as a permanent home for his books, this was the finest American library. John Carter Brown started to follow Mr. Lenox in the quest for old Bibles, but he gave up the attempt to become interested in these. He wrote Mr. Bartlett in Oftober, 1846, that "My Bibles [ 19 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY stand quietly on their shelves, as they have done for ages past & gone, nobody troubles them." He was also tempted by the a6livity of otherbuyers,and by a clerical trader in old books whom he was glad to help, into adding to his collection of Aldines. The fa6t that some forty of these had long been boxed in his stable, however, led him to decide that "I shall not probably buy many more, as I have already so large a stock on hand. Mine came principally from the Duke of Sussex' Library, which I think gives them an additional value, having been collated by his learned Librarian." The Library now contains three hundred speci- mens of the work of Aldus Manutius of Venice, his successors and imitators. It is an excellent repre- sentative collection, but nowise distinguished. The principal Bibles in the collection are the five great polyglot editions: the Complutensian, published at the expense of Cardinal Ximenes in 1514-1 7 ; the Plantin of 1 569-73, which the publisher supposed that Philip the Second had promised to pay for; Hutter's incomplete Nuremberg edition of 1 599 ; the Paris edition of 1628-45 ; and Bryan Walton's work published at London in 1657, with the ori- ginal leaf containing the tribute to the Lord Pro- tector Cromwell, for which two others were substi- tuted five years later, praising the incoming King, c 20 ] THE COLLECTOR Charles II. There is also a Bible printed at Venice in 1494, which was given to John Carter Brown by his brother in 1851, and a Nuremberg 1523 edition with an inscription to the Duke of Sussex from the Prince of Capua, dated 1840. Prince Eu- genes vellum copy of the 1462 edition, printed at Mainz by Fust and Schoeffer,was added to the col- lection at the Syston Park sale in 1884, by Harold Brown. Stevens, meanwhile, stayed in London," as quick on the trigger after an American Book as a cat is after a mouse," as Mr. Brown wrote in the spring of 1849. He knew the books that his correspond- ents wanted, and he also understood how to satisfy the standards by which they judged the copies which pleased them as bibliophiles. Few of the col- lectors of that generation knew how to recognize the possibilities of the trash that came out of coun- try shops and negleCted store-rooms. When other agents and the established booksellers, who were used to handling fifteenth-century folios, tried their hand at the game of Americana, the results were almost always discouraging to all concerned. The supply of satisfactory copies of desirable books seems to have been then, as at all other times be- fore and since, a little less than the demand from contemporary collectors with a fastidious taste c 21 n JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY and the means to gratify it. The result has been a constant advance in prices. This was a persistent source of annoyance to Mr. Brown, and of reso- lutions to abandon the chase, resolutions which were bravely broken when the temptations were renewed. # The steady rise in the prices at which old Amer- ican books sold, from the dealers' catalogues as well as at auction, caused John Carter Brown much anxiety. His hobby had become popular, and many of his rivals were men of large means or of few other interests. In January, 1847, he wrote to Mr. Bartlett that "So many people of late have gone crazy on the subject of 'American Books' & prices have ruled so high at the Sales in Boston & N Yk: that I am strongly tempted 'to submit' my own Collection 'to public competition' as the London Auction^ phrase it. Whose Books are these that are to be sold Tuesday ? " Soon after this he wrote : "Another Sale of American Books. One would al- most suppose the whole world had been ransacked for American Books, they seem to be brought for- ward so rapidly. Whence come these that are now offered for sale?" A few years later John Carter Brown was again disturbed by the idea of selling his books. An enter- prising and persistent dealer approached him with THE COLLECTOR the proposal, offering #50,000 for his whole col- lection. Fortunately, at the then ruling prices, this seemed to the owner less than the books were likely to fetch if offered for sale in the open mar- ket. He withstood the temptation, although with many misgivings lest they might never again be worth as much as at that period of seemingly inflated values. The middle decades of the nineteenth century offered many opportunities for a courageous col- lector of Americana. Not all of these were taken. The list of the books which John Carter Brown lost because his bids were just under the success- ful ones, or which he declined because the book- sellers' prices seemed to him high, is a long one. It contains many titles at the sight of which the librarian sighs enviously half a century later, or regretfully when, as happens from time to time, the stone rejected by the builder is finally put in its place, brought home at a price which would once have bought a score like it. But the mistakes are easily forgiven as one goes over the much longer lists of books that were bought. The catalogues of Asher of Berlin, Weigel of Leipzig, Muller of Amsterdam, and Tross of Paris yielded many a parcel of old books which year by year helped to round out the collection. The auc- C 23 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY tion sales contributed their quota. Despite his fre- quently expressed irritation at the shortcomings of printed descriptions, and his determination never again to buy a book until he had examined it, John Carter Brown let pass few of the sales which contained important American items. In 1859 he secured from the George R. Haze well sale in New York over fifty of the Revolutionary trails which had once formed a part of the library of the Reverend Thomas Bradbury Chandler, himself an aftive participant in that wordy warfare. The book-plates in another large lot recall the tragedy of Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, whose books were distributed at the Abbe Fischer and the An- drade sales, and reappeared in the ensuing book- sellers' offerings. The Henri Ternaux volumes secured in 1846 and 1 847 probably very nearly doubled the size of John Carter Brown's collection. It doubled again during the ensuing fifteen years. Toward the end of this period, the question of where to find shelf room for the contents of each incoming parcel became more and more perplexing. To the bachelor bibli- ophile of fifty the problem was perhaps one of the minor pleasures which he derived from the hours spent with his books. A further complication en- sued when, in 1859, to the frank astonishment of I 24 ] THE COLLECTOR his correspondents and the consternation of some in the old book trade, Mr. Brown married. Hap- pily, the fears of those who had foreseen the Li- brary disappearing from its paramount position among his interests were unnecessary. His bride, Sophia Augusta Brown, the daughter of the Hon. Patrick Brown of New Providence in the Baha- mas, yielded at once to the charm which the books exerted. Nevertheless, she declined to give up her home to them. John Carter Brown's earlier purchases were placed upon the shelves of two old mahogany cases with sliding doors, which lined the upper hallway of his residence at No. 357 Benefit Street in Providence. In these cases he continued to find room for his more precious treasures, some of which have never been shelved elsewhere since they came into his possession. His "Biblio- theca Americana/' however, long before his mar- riage, had overflowed from the upstairs hallway. Books were to be found wherever there was room for a press or for shelves, and unopened boxes remained in the store-room over the coach house. This state of affairs nowise pleased the most excellent housewife who had become the mistress of Mr. Brown's home. She very soon convinced c 25 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY her husband that his books were far too valuable a possession to remain scattered about in a wooden dwelling, exposed to the danger of fire. Mr. Brown recognized the danger, as well as the underlying reasons for her anxiety. In the spring of 1862 he constructed a library room, adjoining the north- east corner of his residence, which was intended to be fireproof according to the accepted standards of that time. In this room, its walls lined with books to the ceiling, John Carter Brown was accustomed to pass much of his time. Every Saturday afternoon when he was in Providence was specifically re- served for the Library and its affairs. When this room was deserted for the building erefhed in 1904, the library table, on which every purchase had been examined for over forty years, accom- panied the books to their new home. There it con- tinues to be the first resting-place of each volume that is added to the collection. The old table with its inkstand, the movable cases, the chairs, and the rug with which John Carter Brown furnished his library room, remain together. They help to main- tain the traditions of a gentleman's library, which were in danger of being lost in the transfer to a separate building and the distractions of a public institution. It is a pleasant sentiment, not without C 26 3 THE COLLECTOR value for the future, which places each addition to the collection before the chair in which John Carter Brown was accustomed to sit when he looked at his books. C 27 3 THE CATALOGUE THE Astor House bookshop of Bartlett& Wel- ford was in 1841 the intellectual centre of New York. The firm began business with an invoice from London, which included a good many out- of-print books and some first-class rarities. John Carter Brown was only one of many who found that the store was an attraction drawing book-lov- ing people to New York. Mr. Bartlett had an un- usual faculty for making and keeping friends who were worth knowing. They gathered before his shelves after business hours, and those who resided at a distance made his office their headquarters in the city. A regular and informing correspondent, he carefully preserved the letters that came to him and arranged them in volumes. The index to these volumes, which were given to the Library by his grandson in 1914, will contain most of the remem- bered names of nineteenth-century American his- torical students and book-lovers. To many of these his friendship with Mr. Brown proved useful. The fame of the Brown collection had spread widely, and it was known to be the place where a rare book about early America was most likely to be found. Albert Gallatin, Sir Arthur Helps, Francis Parkman, Dr. E. B. O'Callaghan, Evert 1 29 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY A. Duyckinck, Samuel G. Drake, Charles Deane, and a score of others bore testimony in prefaces and footnotes to the generosity with which Mr. Brown made his choicest treasures available for their use. Some of them may also have suspefted the misgiv- ings with which he awaited the return of the vol- umes. In his letters to Mr. Bartlett, through whom most of these loans were suggested, the owner frequently expressed his anxiety, and commented on the long time that was sometimes taken to read a very small book. The bookshop under the Astor House must have been a delightful place for a literary rendez- vous, but the profits of the business were not suf- ficient to maintain two growing families. In 1849 John Russell Bartlett withdrew from the firm. The business continued, under the name of Scribner & Welford, later becoming Charles Scribner's Sons. Mr. Bartlett secured an appointment as Commis- sioner for the survey of the international boundary between the United States and Mexico. After his return from the exploring expedition which this entailed, he was elected in 1855 Secretary of State for Rhode Island. This position he occupied until 1872. During the years of his service as Secretary of State, Mr. Bartlett found time for a large amount [ 30 3 THE CATALOGUE of literary and historical work. He enlarged his " Dictionary of Americanisms ;"indexed theRhode Island Session Laws ; edited the Rhode Island Rec- ords from 1 636 to 1 792 ; published a volume of bio- graphical sketches of Rhode Island officers who served in the Civil War ; and compiled a bibliogra- phy of "The Literature of the Rebellion." Among his fellow-workers in the United States and abroad he acquired a considerable reputation as an histori- cal scholar and an authority upon themanysubjefts to which he gave his attention. Throughout these years he also maintained his correspondence with those who shared his interest in ethnology and an- thropology, contemporary as well as early Ameri- can history, Arctic exploration, and the never-fail- ing subject of old books. After Mr. Bartlett settled in Providence, John Carter Brown came to rely upon him more and more for advice and assistance in building up his Library. His acquaintance with the routine of the book trade made it easy for him to negotiate many of Mr. Brown's orders, as well as those of the other collectors who made Providence known as the home of bibliophiles. Many of the choicest treas- ures which were acquired by Caleb Fiske Harris, who was then gathering the collection of Ameri- can Poetry which was afterwards given to Brown c 31 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY University by Mr. Bartlett's brother-in-law, Sena- tor Henry B. Anthony, were secured through John Russell Bartlett's agency. He was equally helpful to Royal C. Taft, Alexander Farnum,and Joseph J. Cooke. Mr. Brown also found in Mr. Bartlett a sympathetic gossip, who was always ready to en- courage him and to furnish reasons for making an addition to the collection. The fame of the Library led to a steadily in- creasing number of requests for information con- cerning its contents. Mr. Brown decided to meet this demand by printing a catalogue of his books. An additional reason for doing this was the diffi- culty of keeping his own lists so that he could tell what he possessed, and of finding places for the record of his purchases. The interleaved copy of Rich's " Bibliotheca Americana Nova" had been crowded out of its bindings by the insertion of ad- ditional leaves, and there was scarcely room any- where in the Ternaux Catalogue for further titles. John Russell Bartlett was largely responsible for the details of the plan for the printed cata- logue. He proposed to give a transcript of each title-page or colophon, with translations of those in foreign languages, exaft bibliographical descrip- tions of the volumes, biographical and historical notes with critical estimates of the value of the dif- [ 32 ] THE CATALOGUE ferent works, and lists of all the known editions and translations. The plan was in almost every respeft far ahead of anything in this field that had been undertaken up to that time, and it has not since been improved upon in any essential particular. The execution left much to be desired, but it was not until the year 1907 that it was supplanted as the best reference catalogue of Americana by a completed better work. This is the altogether satisfactory " Catalogue of Books relating to the Discovery and Early History of North and South America forming part of the Library of E. D. Church/' prepared by Miss Henrietta Bartlett under the direction of Luther S. Livingston, and edited by George Watson Cole. The first volume of the John Carter Brown Cat- alogue was issued in 1 865, the second a year later, and in 1870 appeared the two volumes which con- tain the 4173 eighteenth-century titles. The first contained 302 entries dated before the year 1601, and the second 1160 dating from 1601 to 1700. A supplement to the seventeenth-century volume, pages 251-261 , printed separately, gives a descrip- tion of the set of Thevenot's "Relations de Divers Voyages Curieux." New editions of the first and second volumes were published in 1875 and 1882. An erudite German physician, Dr. Carl Hermann C S3 H JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY Berendt, assisted Mr. Bartlett in the work of com- piling the material for the first and second volumes of the Catalogue. Dr. Berendt, during a residence in Spanish America, had acquired a familiarity with the Maya and other native languages of Central America and Mexico. He also possessed a number of rare works dealing with those languages, includ- ing an important seventeenth-century manuscript dictionary of the Motul dialeft of Yucatan, which Mr. Brown secured for the Library. Neither Dr. Berendt nor Mr. Bartlett was able to attain the high standard of accuracy which they had set themselves, in all the details of preparing the manuscript of the Catalogue for the printer. In addition to the lapses from exactness which are difficult to avoid in any extended bibliographical work,thenotes in the first two volumes show occasional traces of the foreign- er's misconceptions regarding the precise meaning of some English words. These faults attracted attention, and Mr. Brown promptly destroyed most of the copies and prepared to reprint the catalogue in a form more worthy of the prestige of his collection. An additional rea- son for doing this was that he had already secured enough additional titles to justify a second edition. Despite all his precautions, two or three copies of the Catalogue had reached the hands of alert C 34 ] THE CATALOGUE booksellers, who were able to offer him important rarities not described on its pages. The prices at which these offerings were made, and the ominous phrase, "Not in the John Carter Brown Cata- logue," which occasionally greeted him on the pages of auction catalogues, gave the owner of the Library varied feelings regarding the cost at which he had added so considerably to the fame of his collection. The new edition of the first volume of the Cata- logue was nearly ready for the printer when John Carter Brown died, on June 10, 18 74. The owner- ship of the books passed to Mrs. Brown, and she at once gave directions that the work should be com- pleted as her husband had planned. She felt that the catalogue of the books with which he had passed so large a part of his life was to be his most last- ing monument. It established his position as a great benefactor of American historical scholarship. Mrs. Brown determined to make it representative of his notable achievement and his high ideals. The first volume of the new edition was issued in 1875. It is a handsome volume of 526 pages, containing six hundred entries dated from 1482 to 1600. The transcripts of titles and colophons are supplemented by 47 facsimile plates, reproducing when necessary the red and black of the original [ 35 u JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY printing, and 74 cuts of vignettes, maps, and por- traits. The frontispiece is a lithographed reproduc- tion of the painted initial at the beginning of the 1482 edition of Ptolemy's " Cosmographia." This was made in Paris by Pilinski from the example of the book on vellum in the Bibliotheque Nationale. It is quite different in colouring and treatment from the copy then in the Library or either of the variant issues which have since been acquired. The notes in the new Catalogue are much longer than those in the previous edition. They give an analysis of the contents of many of the larger vol- umes which are described, and explain the Ameri- can interest of those works whose titles do not sug- gest their intrinsic importance. The entry of the earliest Mexican imprint then in the Library is fol- lowed by a sketch of the history of the introduction of printing into the New World. This is supple- mented by a list of sixteenth-century Mexican and Peruvian publications. Fourteen pages are devoted to the contents of Hakluyt's " Voyages/' 36 to the collection of Hulsius,and 94 to that of DeBry. This last se6lion was reprinted as a separate publication. The regular edition of this volume consisted of one hundred copies. Seventy additional copies were printed with a different title-page, reading, " Bibli- ographical Notices of Rare and Curious Books re- C 36 j THE CATALOGUE lating to America printed in the XVth and XVIth Centuries in the Library of the late John Carter Brown/' These copies are on a better paper than the others, and were designed to be used as gifts to persons whose interest in the volume was per- sonal rather than bibliographical, and who would not care to possess the complete work. The new second part of the Catalogue was ready in 1882. It is a volume of 647 pages, with author, place, and subject indexes, and 14 facsimile plates, in addition to the vignettes and printer's devices reproduced for use with type-copies of other titles in the text. There are 1642 entries of seventeenth- century titles. The descriptions are in most cases not so elaborate as those in the previous volume, to correspond with the lesser importance of the books of this century, but the general plan of the work is the same. The two sons of John Carter Brown spent many hours in the library room while Mr. Bartlett was preparing the material for the seventeenth-century volume. Under his guidance they becam e acquainted with most of the treasures, and learned to know what the books stood for. They helped him by copying titles and by verifying the references for the notes. The elder, John Nicholas Brown, was especially interested in this work. When the Cat- 1 37 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY alogue was at last in the printer's hands, he read much of the proof and insisted upon the correction of every error which his keen eye noted. "The printers seem to have made sad havoc and blunders with the collations/' he wrote on Sep- tember 15, 1880. "Some they have so mixed as to be unintelligible. I have corrected these as far as I am able, but trust to your discrimination to revise what I have done. . . . Don't you think the facsimile titles look rather blurred and the words run together? but I suppose that these will all be reset and put into shape for the final issue. I hope you won't think I am all the time 'straining at gnats' or 'making mountains out of mole-hills.'" His corrections ranged from omitted Spanish tildes to misdated titles, from inconsistent uses of type or of bibliographical terms to translations that did not represent the meaning of the original text. "You must not think I am too particular about trifles," he adds to a letter dated September 7 of the same year, "but you know how anxious we both are to get everything to the smallest iota just right, so I know you will excuse the criticisms I have made." I 38 3 THE TRANSITION SOPHIA Augusta Brown's interest in the Li- brary was not limited by her regard for her husband's memory. Very soon after her marriage she had begun to share his fondness for the books. Her " lively pen " wrote many of his letters dur- ing their long Newport summers, and when these were concerned with Library matters there was never any uncertainty about the instructions which she phrased. More clearly than her husband, she foresaw that this was to be the most precious of their family heirlooms, and she encouraged every purchase which promised to give it increased dis- tinction. " Sealed my long letter to you & was just going to the P. O. when Mrs. Brown asked if I had au- thorised the purchase of the * Vespuccius of 1504/ Finding I had not, she has persuaded me to send you an order for it which on ' sober second thought' I have concluded to do," wrote John Carter Brown tohis agentin France in July, 1 872. If Mrs. Brown's advice had prevailed, the Library would have secured the Gutenberg Bible from the Perkins collection, and other of the more monumental volumes that came upon the market during the years of her married life. [ 39 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY After her husband's death, Sophia Augusta Brown assumed the responsibility for maintain- ing the Library. She bought only a few books, but these were selected with very sound judgment and with a deliberate purpose. Mrs. Brown apparently felt that the concentration of attention upon a single subject had deprived the Library of cer- tain characteristics which it ought to have in order to acquire a lasting distinction. To remedy this by broadening its range, she secured half a dozen vol- umes of the highest importance, without any one of which no great collection would seem quite com- plete. These and the others in which her firm sig- nature appears upon the first fly leaf have each an intrinsic interest which appeals to every visitor, however general his information or narrow his special knowledge. During one of her visits to London, Mrs. Brown made the acquaintance of Frederick S. Ellis. A friendship developed which was of the utmost con- sequence to the Library. Ellis's intimacy with Wil- liam Morris and his editorial share in the work of the Kelmscott Press is likely to obscure the facl that he was one of the great English booksellers. Under his guidance Mrs. Brown purchased a very fine First Folio Shakespeare, and good copies of the other three seventeenth-century editions. He [ 40 3 THE TRANSITION likewise found for her the first and second edi- tions of " Paradise Lost" and the first "Paradise Regained/' Much more to her personal liking were the four "Books of Hours" which Ellis selected as examples of the work of the fifteenth-century illu- minators of manuscripts. Somewhat later in date is an exquisite little manuscript "Horae" in a con- temporary Florentine goldwork binding. This was once in the possession of Horace Walpole, who en- tertained the belief, no longer tenable, that it was the work of Giulio Clovio. A printed "Horse" of Pigouchet's edition of August 22, 1498, is likewise in its original binding. A very early Swabian manu- script " Graduale," and a delightful " Horse " from the hand of a Spanish scribe, were added to this group of his mother's favourites by her younger son. Mrs. Brown brought up her children to regard their father's Library as the most precious of their possessions, and the one having the first claim upon them to maintain its prestige and its preeminence. Harold Brown, the younger son, made a number of purchases for the Library under Mr. Bartlett's direction. One lot which he secured at the sale of the Henry C. Murphy library in 1884, interested him especially. It comprised an unbroken series c 41 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY of the sermons published by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts dur- ing the hundred years following its organization in 1701. A devoted Churchman, Harold Brown was particularly pleased when he found his interest in his father's Library joined that in the history of the church. All the records of the activity of the "S.P.G/'made a strong appeal to him. Besides this set of the sermons, the Library secured another collection of untrimmed copies of these publica- tions, many of which are printed on a larger paper than the ordinary issues. It also has a number of broadsides and occasional tracts relating to the Society and its efforts to provide for an American bishopric. Harold Brown was a diligent student of Church History, and especially of the doctrine, organiza- tion, and ritual of the English Church. Soon after the building of a chapel in memory of Bishop Berkeley at Middletown, near Newport, he was asked by Bishop Clarke to name it, and for it he chose the dedication of St. Columba. It was in this connection that, with his friend Daniel Berkeley Updike, he made "an inquiry into the naming of churches in the United States/'the results of which they issued in a volume, privately printed in 1 891 , " On the Dedication of American Churches, by two t 42 ] THE TRANSITION Laymen of the Dioceseof Rhode Island." Both were deeply interested in the history of the Episcopal Church, the Catholic aspe6l of which more partic- ularly attracted them. They again joined forces to produce in 1896 a splendid Altar Book, which, although exaclly conforming to the Standard Book of Common Prayer and duly authorized, it was their aim to show indistinguishable in most respe6ts from the pre-Reformation Missals. It was through the preparation of this book that The Merrymount Press had its beginnings — a venture in which Mr. Brown was deeply interested. In connection with his studies of the history and teaching of the English Church and of the Epis- copal Church in America, Harold Brown secured perfect copies of all but one of the original editions of the significant revisions of the Book of Common Prayer. The Prayer Books and the publications of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts form the nucleus of " The Harold Brown Collection of Books on the History of the Church in America," to which the room at the left of the entrance to the Library building is devoted. These books, together with his twelfth and fif- teenth century manuscripts, his collection of auto- graphs of the Signers of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, and other books of value to the Library, C 43 D JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY were given to it by Mrs. Harold Brown after her husband's death on May 10, 1900. The Harold Brown Colle6tion, besides sharing in the general growth of the Library during its first decade as a separate institution, has received a number of gifts from Mrs. Harold Brown. The most important of these are the " Franklin Prayer Book," published by Lord Le Despenser in 1773; Henry the Eighth's " King's Book" of 1543; and a delightful copy in its original covers of the " Christian Prayers and Meditations in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greeke,and Latine,"pre- pared for the personal use of Queen Elizabeth in 1569. The Library also possesses a copy of the "Defensio D. Petri Martyris ad Riccardi Smythaei libellos de Caslibatu sacerdotum" which was once in the library of the Virgin Queen. In the pleasant task of inspiring her sons with an appreciation of their father's library, Sophia Augusta Brown had an enthusiastic and helpful ally in General Rush C. Hawkins. No better guide could have been found to show the way along bookish paths. General Hawkins, whose wife was a daughter of the third Nicholas Brown, began to collect fifteenth-century books in 1855. Gradually his quest narrowed to the " first presses," the typo- graphic beginnings in each town where printing [ 44 ] THE TRANSITION started before the year 1501 .His researches, persis- tently followed, carried him into intimate friendly relations with the men at the head of most of the important European libraries and all the lead- ing booksellers to whom a book meant more than the price it would fetch. With their help, General Hawkins secured a notable proportion of the " first books of the first presses." The catalogue of his collection prepared by Alfred W. Pollard of the British Museum, in 1910, is almost a history of the first fifty years of printing. These volumes are now deposited in the Annmary Brown Memorial, which was erefted by General Hawkins after his wife's death in 1903. The Annmary Brown Memorial building is situ- ated only a few rods from the John Carter Brown Library. In anticipation of this neighbourly future of the two collections, and under General Haw- kins's guidance, Mrs. Brown and her sons pur- chased a number of early printed books. Among these are the " Catholicon" of 1460, Fust and SchoefFer's Bible of 1462, and an unsurpassed copy of Bocace, " De la Ruine des Nobles Hommes et Femmes," printed by Caxton's collaborator at Bruges, Colard Mansion, in 1476. The Ratcliffe copy of Caxton's "Ryal book, or a book for a kyng," printed in 1484, begins a shelf of English I 45 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY books which holds the 1493 edition of the " Golden Legende," Wynkyn de Worde's "Thordynary of Crysten Men" of 1506, and Guillame Owein's "Le Bregement de toutes les estatutes," printed by Pynson in 1521. The only block book in the collection is one of the first edition of the " Pauper Bible/' A copy of a Strassburg edition of the " Scru- tinium Script urar urn/' by Paulus de Sanfta Maria, not otherwise significant, is in a binding signed by Richenbach of Gyslingen in the year 1470. C 46 3 THE DONOR JOHN Nicholas Brown, during his frequent trips to Europe, visited the important public li- braries and many of the notable private collections. With the help of General Hawkins andof Mr. Ellis he learned to recognize the distinguishing char- acteristics of the really great books. They also taught him the rudiments of bibliography, exact- ness and completeness. The notebooks which con- tain memoranda in his boyish hand recording his examination of copies of the Columbus Letter, the Vespuccius traCts, and the Colard Mansion im- prints, show an intelligent understanding of the essentials of book description that leaves little to be desired. More important than all the books were the friendships that were formed with Father Ceriani at theAmbrosian Library, Charles Ruelens of Brus- sels, who dedicated his facsimile edition of the Co- lumbus "Epistola" to Mr. Brown, Alfred Henry Huth, and others whose experience and advice had a strong influence upon his future book-buying. At the Grolier Club in New York he made the acquaintance of Charles H. Kalbfleisch and some of the other rivals of his own generation in the field of Americana. Whenever opportunity offered, C 47 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY he compared their treasures with the copies in his father's library. The test was often disappointing. The prizes which his contemporaries had secured were in altogether too many instances larger than his, in finer original condition, and more perfeCt in minute but all-important particulars. His Library contained most of the famous American books, but these had been secured in the days when the title of a volume and its appearance, rather than its size and collation, formed the usual basis for a book- buyer's decision. Half a century later the standards of collecting had become more definite. The pos- session of a title no longer guaranteed that the pages which followed it were what a discriminat- ing bibliophile ought to desire. John Nicholas Brown set himself to the task of restoring the Library to the position from which it had been allowed to slip. He found a loyal and enthusiastic helper in the son of his father's first agent, Henry N. Stevens. The London and Con- tinental book markets were watched attentively, and year by year, as opportunity offered to secure satisfactory copies of important books that the Library needed, the quality of the collection improved. All told, the number of volumes pur- chased by John Nicholas Brown makes very little impression upon the Library statistics. By C 48 ] THE DONOR any other standard they added at least a half to its value. There have been many " red letter days" in the annals of the Library. One of these, in the father's time, was August 25, 1873, when John Carter Brown decided upon the extravagance of sending a message by the telegraphic cable to order the " Dutch Vespuccius." He was taking the waters at Saratoga, where the advance sheets of the cata- logue of Muller of Amsterdam reached him after a fortnight's delay. The tra6l was described with- out a price, but after some thought he decided to try for it and at once wrote to a New York friend asking him to send the message. The dozen words cost $26, but they won the book, which is still the only recorded copy, by arriving two hours ahead of a letter from Mr. Lenox, who had counted upon the advantage which New York enjoys over Provi- dence in matters involving a foreign mail. None of the earlier dates, however, compare with the first two days of June, 1 893, one of which brought word that the "King Philip the Second" atlas had been secured at the sale of the Spitzer colle6lion, and the next that the volume of man- uscript maps dated 1511 and signed by Vesconte de Maggiolo, from the Heredia library, would accompany it from Paris to Providence. These C 49 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY and twenty-four other manuscript maps are de- scribed in the Library report for 1913. One of them, dated 1667, had been in the family's pos- session since it was brought from Surinam by the captain of one of the first Nicholas Brown's ves- sels. More recent acquisitions are the Glareanus manuscript of about 1516, and Louis Joliet's large map showing the country he traversed during his descent of the Mississippi River in 1673 and 1674. Manuscripts do not come properly within the scope of this Library. John Carter Brown bought a few documents before he definitely decided upon his limits, and his sons secured a number of valuable autographs. Several manuscript vocabularies were added to the shelves which hold the works on na- tive American linguistics, at the suggestion of Dan- iel G. Brinton, Charles P. Bowditch, and other stu- dents who have used this part of the Library. Five volumes of papers relating to the Bahama Islands came from the sale of George Chalmers's library. These were supplemented by a collection of docu- ments made by Lord Sheffield which concern the British island colonies. One of the volumes in which the Earl of Clarendon bound his correspondence was purchased in order to secure two letters written by the militant Rhode Islander, Samuel Gorton. With the Leon library came fourteen thick tomes of c 50 3 THE DONOR "informaciones" presented by the novitiates of the Franciscan Order in New Spain between 1576 and 1822. The initial document signed and sealed by the first American archbishop, Juan deZumarraga, in 1535, came from the Barlow sale. Champlain's account of his voyage to the West Indies in 1598 has been reprinted several times from the manu- script belonging to the Library, but the coloured illustrations have not yet been reproduced. Washington's confidential letters to Joseph Reed, and his cash memoranda books for the years 1 794 to 1 799, are worthy memorials of the Father of his Country. The founder of Rhode Island is even more adequately represented by six long autograph letters. Many other names of national renown from the time of William Bradford to that of Thomas Jefferson are signed to letters in the collection. Visit- ors are always interested in these documents, which are of the utmost value for making the figures of the past seem real to the present. Their use is, however, almost wholly illustrative. Each purchase of a manuscript has confirmed the successive own- ers of the Library in the opinion that their sys- tematic collecting should be restricted to the printed books. With the manuscript material have likewise been rejected the printed volumes containing doc- c 51 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY uments of earlier centuries first published in the nineteenth. These volumes of colonial source ma- terial are found in every large library. With these libraries the John Carter Brown Library has no intention of competing. Mr. Brown devoted his efforts to securing the books which the public libraries could not afford to buy. He kept these for the use of students to whom they would other- wise have been inaccessible. The institution which his son established has maintained these essential characteristics of the colle6tor , s policy. Another date which still arouses a thrill in a bookish spirit is that of May 1, 1896, when John Nicholas Brown brought home the " Pictorial Co- lumbus" to take the place of the only known per- fect copy, from theLibri sale, which his father gave to Mr. Lenox in 1849. The instructive story of that episode is familiar to readers of Mr. Stevens's " RecolleCtions/' The days when the boxes contain- ing the Ternaux books and those from the Duke of Sussex sale were opened, were recalled in Sep- tember, 1896, when the library of Dr. Nicolas Leon, of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico, with its handful of the Zumarraga tra6ts of 1 543-46, Molina's Na- huatl dictionary of 1555 in the original decorated binding, the sixteenth-century Tarascan publica- tions of Fray Maturino Gilberti, and two hundred C 52 J THE DONOR other volumes in the native languages of Mexico, arrived in Providence. Pleasant hours followed the unpacking of the copies of Ptolemy's Geography, printed at Bologna with the erroneous date " 1462," and at Ulm in 1 482, the latter containing certain leaves for which students had been hunting since 1803. These two volumes in their dingy old bindings, and the world- map taken from a copy of the 1513 Strassburg edi- tion, on which the word "America" was printed perhaps for the first time, help the Ptolemy cor- ner of the map room to maintain its proud position of superiority over all its rivals. The " Relation de la ViCtoire remportee par les Franfois, sur le Ge- neral Braddock," the two books containing notes written by Ferdinand Columbus which came from the Barlow collection in 1890, the "Plan pour former un Establissement en Caroline" in 1686, from the Lobris sale of 1895, and the first edition of John Brereton's " Relation " of his visit to the New England coast in 1602, brightened other days. One by one John Nicholas Brown added most of these and many more treasures to the collection. The copies that he secured left little chance for any rival to show him a better. He loved his books for their many-sided individual characteristics. He liked to handle those that he knew about, and when [ 53 n JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY they satisfied him, he wanted to have them cared for as their merits deserved. In Paris, while exam- ining the treasures of Baron James de Rothschild's collection, and elsewhere, he learned to appreci- ate good binding. He sought the acquaintance of the craftsmen at the head of the leading ateliers, and Paul Lortic, Chambolle-Duru, and Thibaron- Joly were given an opportunity to send him what they considered their best work. Adolphe Cuzin, however, was the one who pleased him thoroughly. To this master workman he entrusted most of his purchases that needed a binder's attention. When he secured a copy of the edition of the Columbus "Epistola" of 1493, which Harrisse placed as Number One in his " Bibliotheca Ameri- cana Vetustissima," he asked Cuzin to put it in a binding worthy of this corner-stone of an Ameri- can library. Owner and craftsman consulted over every detail of the design and the execution, and the result ranks high among examples of the bib- liopegic art. It might have been surpassed by the binding on the " Pictorial Columbus," which was entrusted to Cuzin's pupil and successor, Mercier. This had been in hand for more than three years at the time of Mr. Brown's death, and was com- pleted as nearly as possible in accordance with his intentions. These and the other bindings by these C 54 ] THE DONOR two masters of the craft constitute John Nicholas Brown's more distinctly personal contribution to the Library. John Nicholas Brown welcomed every oppor- tunity to become acquainted with his books and with those who shared his interest in them. The Library correspondence occupied much of his time whenever he was in Providence. Justin Winsor,Sir Clements Markham, Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, William I. Knapp, Moses Coit Tyler, George H. Moore, Charles Francis Adams, Lyman C. Dra- per, James Grant Wilson, Samuel Abbott Green, and Frederick D. Stone are among the names that recur in his files and letter-books. A long series of letters from Wilberforce Eames mark the prog- ress of the work for Sabin's Dictionary, and show how freely he drew upon his Providence corre- spondent for minute details. Almost as many from James C. Pilling ask for information which reap- pears on the pages of the bibliographies of Amer- ican native languages printed by the United States Bureau of Ethnology. There were many other letters from investi- gators about whom Mr. Brown had no personal knowledge, but whose questions he would gladly have answered if he could have found the time to do so satisfactorily. He recognized that the Library C 55 ] * JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY had become an institution and that American schol- ars were justified in feeling that they had a right to use it. He had no desire to ignore these ques- tions, but many things had a more imperative claim upon his attention. The care of the books, as well as the correspondence, demanded personal atten- tion which he was no longer able to give, and so on May 1 , 1 895, George Parker Winship was en- gaged as his librarian. The first business of the librarian was to find the books. The library room, into which they had moved when they crowded themselves out of the house, had come to be too small to hold them all, in Mr. Bartlett's time. In the store-room over the coach house shelves were built for the more bulky tomes, — the sixteenth-century cosmographies of Sebastian Minister, the seventeenth-century works of Linschoten and de Laet, and the eighteenth-cen- tury compilers, — and for most of the nineteenth- century volumes. Among these later books were a considerable number of the narratives written by von Humboldt and the other European visitors to North and South America during the first third of the last century. After Mr. Bartlett's death, on May 29, 1886, the books were cleaned carefully and periodically. Each time they were replaced with a proper regard for the appearance of the i 56 ] THE DONOR room, but the arrangement of the shelves suffered in the process. New volumes also arrived by gift and purchase, and found a resting-place where chance offered. The collection continued to grow, until it needed a home of its own. John Nicholas Brown, to whom the legal title to the Library was transferred by his mother on January 28, 1898, determined to erecl a building in which the books would be safe from danger by fire, where they might be conveniently arranged and consulted, and which should be a per- manent and appropriate memorial of his father's life-long interest in American history and scholar- ship. The plans for the Library building were the ob- ject of much thought. The idea of such a memorial began to take shape soon after he became of age, in 1882, and for fifteen years was never long ab- sent from his mind. He revisited many of the Euro- pean libraries and studied the arrangements for caring for precious volumes both in private hands and in public institutions. He watched with espe- cial interest the development of the plans for the John Rylands Library at Manchester, England. This library, which is Mrs. Rylands 's memorial to her husband, promised to be, as it has become, a model for what Mr. Brown proposed to establish z 57 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY in Providence. The purchase of Earl Spencer's Althorp collection made the John Rylands Li- brary for students of the history of early printing what the John Carter Brown Library is to those in- terested in Americana. The library at Manchester fills a broader sphere as a general reference library for the seriously minded readers of the commu- nity. In Providence, the needs of these readers are supplied by the library of the University and by the Public Library. The former occupied, until the completion of the John Hay Library in 1910, a building ere6ted as a memorial to John Carter Brown, and the latter possesses one which was built for its use by John Nicholas Brown. The gift of the Providence Public Library build- ing was made in February, 1897. A year later Mr. Brown drew up a statement of what he had decided upon as requisite for his own Library. This outline was given to a number of architects, who were asked to submit sketches and preliminary plans. After a study of their drawings, George Foster Shepley, of the firm of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, was commissioned to make the finished plans. These had been accepted, except for a few minor details, when John Nicholas Brown died, on May 1, 1900. The Trustees appointed under Mr. Brown's will, C 58 1 THE DONOR George W. R. Matteson and Robert H. I. God- dard, in 1901 presented his Bibliotheca Ameri- cana to Brown University, in accordance with the authority given them by the will. The Corporation of the University, at its meeting in September of that year, accepted the conditions of the gift and appointed a Committee of Management to take charge of the ereftion of the Library building and the transfer to it of the books, and to direft the administration of the colle61;ion. This Committee, which has continued unchanged, consists of Mrs. John Nicholas Brown, President William Herbert Perry Faunce, Robert Hale Ives Goddard, Wil- liam Vail Kellen, and Stephen Ostrom Edwards. The spirit with which the Committee of Man- agement entered upon its responsibilities is shown by one of its first a&s, by which the members agreed to provide by personal subscription such funds as might be needed for desirable purchases* before the income from the endowment fund be- came available. They were joined in this subscrip- tion by Colonel William Goddard, the Chancel- lor of the University and the senior member of the firm of Brown & Ives. The money provided by the Committee enabled the Library to secure an autograph letter of Roger Williams, a copy of Ptolemy's " Cosmographia" of 1482 which con- C 59 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY tains a world-map otherwise unknown, and a large colle6lion of the official publications of the Con- tinental Congresses of 1775-1783. A site for the Library was selected adjoining the Middle Campus of the University, and on this the building, for which the will provided $1 50,000, was erected substantially in accordance with the plans approved by Mr. Brown. The location on the University grounds made it possible to eliminate the furnace, with its dirt and danger, by heating the building from the college boiler plant; and there were other minor alterations due to the changed conditions of a public institution. The building with its contents, and an endow- ment fund of $500,000, was formally transferred to the University on May 17, 1904. The exercises on this occasion included an address by Professor Frederick Jackson Turner of the University of Wisconsin, and an historical account of the Li- brary by Dr. William Vail Kellen of the Cor- poration of Brown University. These addresses, with the report of the other exercises of the day, were printed by the Library. The Dedication Vol- ume also contains the portions of the deed of gift that are of permanent interest, and the seftion of Mr. Brown's will which governed the arrange- ments for the future of the Library. Colonel God- [ so 3 THE DONOR dard, on behalf of the Trustees, delivered the Li- brary into the keeping of President Faunce of Brown University, to whom the keys of the build- ing were handed by Mr. Brown's son, John Nicho- las Brown, born February 21, 1900. C 61 ] THE BUILDING THE Library building covers an area eighty feet square, and is subdivided into a cruci- form main portion and lower rooms occupying the four corners of the structure. The design of the ex- terior is monumental in scale, with details derived from the German Ionic style. Limestone has been used for the walls and cornices, and red tile for the roof of the high portion. A richly carved cresting breaks the line between roof and cornice. Spacious stone steps flanked by heavy buttresses ascend to the entrance, which is deeply recessed and flanked by Ionic columns of unusual design, above which is a pediment enriched with carving, wherein ap- pears the Brown family coat-of-arms. Over the entrance is the inscription, "John Carter Brown Library/' and below, over the doorway, the word " Americana/' A vestibule, panelled with Italian marble, opens directly into the main room of the building, which occupies about half of the floor space and the full height of the structure. Four pillarsof Indianalime- stone, with their caps lightened by gold lines, sup- port the roof and guard the doorway entering the room and the ample fireplace which faces it. Low bookcases of bronze metal line the walls. Near the [ 63 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY centre are four exhibition cases, in which books, engravings, and manuscripts belonging to the col- lection are shown from time to time. The floor is covered with heavy Turkish rugs. On the mantel over the fireplace stands a bust of John Carter Brown, by Franklin Simmons, and above this hangs a portrait, by Bonnat, of John Nicholas Brown, loaned by his son. A tablet in the vestibule reads: IN MEMORY OF JOHN NICHOLAS BROWN OF THE CLASS OF 1885 WHO GAVE THIS LIBRARY WITH ITS BUILDING AND ENDOWMENT TO COMMEMORATE THE NAME AND WORK OF HIS FATHER JOHN CARTER BROWN OF THE CLASS OF 1816 FROM WHOM HE INHERITED WITH THE LIBRARY LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE DEVOTION TO HISTORICAL RESEARCH AND APPRECIATION OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS SPEAK TO THE PAST AND IT SHALL TEACH THEE Two of the square rooms at the corners of the building have mahogany cases of the same height as those in the main room, six feet nine inches from the floor, with glass shelves behind locked doors. One of these rooms contains the Harold Brown Collection of Books on the History of the Church C 64 ] THE BUILDING in America, which has its own exhibition case. The other is occupied by the Leon library and other books on the history and languages of Spanish and Portuguese America. The map room contains larger cases for the atlases, and drawers for the separate maps and charts, the facsimile prints, and the file of engraved portraits. The southeast room, in which a gallery and bookshelves above the floor cases were added in 1913, is the work room of the Library staff. Here are the bibliographies and ref- erence books, the file of auction and booksellers' catalogues, and most of the reprints of earlier American books issued by private individuals and by printing clubs since 1800. The Librarian's room occupies the middle of the eastern side of the building, opposite the entrance. In this room the traditions of the days when the collection was a gentleman's private library are preserved. All of the furnishings, except the mod- ern letter-file and the ele6lric-lighted chandelier, came from the library room at Mr. Brown's home- stead. In the old mahogany cases, the original edi- tions of the Columbus Letter and the Vespuccius trafts,the Jesuit Relations, the writings of Roger Williams, and the volumes of De Bry, each in its brilliant binding, still hold the places to which John Carter Brown assigned them. If he could revisit C 6 5 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY his collection in its new home, he would find these friends he was fondest of, where he left them. His favourite chair has the place of honour at the table on which he examined all of the purchases of his later years. The old lamp has been refitted for an ele6lric current, but no push button has stolen its dignity from the bronze table bell. The rug and the antimacassars are the same as in the founder's day. Except for the gallery there is no upper story. The stairway from the rear hallway leads down into the bindery room. Here the cripples and in- valids that reach the Library suffering from a cen- tury or more of negleft or abuse, are restored as nearly as possible to their original strength, and put in order for a long future. The Library desires to secure perfeft volumes in immaculate condition as anxiously as ever. Any book, however, is pre- ferred in the shape in which it comes upon the mar- ket, to the same volume after it has been restored by unknown hands. Apparent perfection has too often been purchased at the cost of information which might have been important to the students who are working to reconstruct the history of printing and bookmaking. Beyond the bindery are the packing and stor- age rooms, and the photostat. This machine repre- sents the latest and most radical extension of the t 66 3 THE BUILDING Library's activities. It was installed in order that photographic copies might be supplied quickly and at a low cost to correspondents who wish to con- sult volumes which cannot leave the building. The founder of the collection loaned his treas- ures with generous freedom for many years. Grad- ually he, like his rivals, came to realize that he owned many books which he might never be able to duplicate, whatever the price he would pay. The books that were asked for were usually those that could not be found elsewhere, and John Carter Brown let them leave Providence with constantly increasing anxiety. There is no record that any of these were lost, but in time he decided that he would no longer entrust his books to the post or express, much less to the care of a borrower. This rule was sometimes broken by both father and son, but always under exceptional circumstances and with many misgivings. The employment of a libra- rian made it possible to enforce the rule more abso- lutely, and at the same time to increase the useful- ness of the collection to students. The installation of photographic copying is a further development of the policy of rendering the utmost service to scholarship consistent with the preservation of the books for those who will have occasion to use them in the future. C 67 ] THE INSTITUTION AS soon as the Library was established in its JT\. new home, an account of stock was taken. Each volume before it left the library room at No. 357 Benefit Street was given a serial number, corresponding with that on a card on which its record was kept. When all had been safely trans- ferred to the locked cases in the new building, each card was verified and the volume put in its classi- fied location. The chara&er of the collection and the limited use of it by visitors made it possible to do this with great care, to guard against oversights, and without closing the building. The verification of the twelve thousand volumes was a simple matter. The cards represented, how- ever, not only all the books in the Benefit Street house, but also every record that had been found in the printed catalogues or elsewhere that implied the possession of a title. Many of these records were inexaft, and for the next four years much of the time of the assistant librarian was spent in try- ing to untangle the confusions of half a century. For many of the cards no corresponding book could be found. A few of the missing volumes have been recovered from neighbouring libraries to which Mr. Brown had given them in his occasional C 69 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY efforts to keep his collection within comfortable or housekeeperly bounds. For most of the others, reasons have been discovered which account for the entry and which often throw light upon the way in which the collection has grown. The num- ber of titles unaccounted for, that may have been lost during seventy years, is small and includes nothing of great importance. Having found out what the Library actually pos- sessed, the next step was to learn what it need not buy. The city of Providence has many libraries, each with a distinct individuality as well as its own clientele. In each of these there are seventeenth and eighteenth century books which the John Car- ter Brown Library would like to possess. So long as they are available for its use where they are, however, it would be a waste of money to dupli- cate them. To avoid such duplication and to secure the immediate advantage of several hundred new titles, the Library staff searched its neighbours' shelves. At the Providence Public Library many inter- esting titles were found among the Updike family pamphlets and with the books on slavery collected by Caleb Fiske Harris. The archives of the state contain a number of rare official publications sent to Rhode Island by the sister governments. The c 70 3 THE INSTITUTION State Law Library possesses a good collection of colonial statute and session laws. The Rhode Is- land Historical Society has most of the things printed in this state. Friends of the Providence Athenaeum have given it some very valuable treasures. The University Library has a large proportion of the early attempts at literary expression in this coun- try in the Harris Collection of American Poetry. In the same building are the Theron Metcalf col- lection of pamphlets, the library of Spanish Amer- ican books bequeathed by George Earl Church, the Rhode Island books collected by Sidney S. Rider which were presented to the University by Marsden J. Perry, and the Wheaton Collection of books on International Law given by William Vail Kellen. Each of these, as well as the general li- brary shelves, contains volumes which many stu- dents would expect to find among the Americana at the John Carter Brown Library. The Library has therefore added these to its catalogue and treats them as among its resources. The policy of considering each of the libraries in Providence as part of the resources of the com- munity as a whole has been developed by the local librarians for more than a decade. Each library has its own field. The aim of those in charge of the neighbouring institutions has been to strengthen C 71 J JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY all the others in their especial subjects. Gifts of- fered to one have been sent frequently to another, where they more properly belong and where they acquire an increased value. Duplication of pur- chases has been avoided so far as the needs of different groups of patrons would permit, and the sum of local resources correspondingly increased. The librarians of the city are accustomed to meet at intervals, usually on the neutral ground of the John Carter Brown Library. There the various problems of each are discussed and plans made for the future, over the teacups. The John Carter Brown Library has gained largely by this spirit of community interest. Sev- eral hundred volumes have been transferred to it from the other libraries. Most of these came from places where they were scarcely ever disturbed, and where there was no opportunity to find out whether they were of especial value. On its shelves they have acquired individuality and importance. The old pamphlet which has the slightest intrinsic value by itself, gains immeasurably when it is put alongside others on the same subject, of the same year or from the same place. The Library benefits from every addition to its numbers, but there is as great a gain to the community to which it gives distinction . c 72 n THE INSTITUTION The knowledge of the aftual extent of the col- lection and of what is within its immediate reach furnished a basis upon which to plan for the fu- ture. In order to do this intelligently, it is neces- sary to find out where the Library stands in the field which it claims to occupy. The borders of that field have been marked in only a few spots. Before its limits can be found, three things must be determined. The first of these is the total num- ber of publications printed in the western hemi- sphere before 1801 ; the second, the proportion of these which are now in existence; and the third, the number that it will be possible for the Library to acquire. It is obvious that none of these can be given exaftly. As with all statistics, the figures drawn from published bibliographies are decep- tive when turned into positive statements and used for comparison with one another. The necessary explanations are more apt to confuse than to illu- minate. In spite of these difficulties, an attempt has been made to take a preliminary survey of the Library's position. The result will gain in value whenever other libraries are able to supply their figures for comparison. The only bibliographical work which tries to cover the whole field of the John Carter Brown Library is "A Dictionary of Books relating to C 73 j JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY America/' undertaken by Joseph Sabin in 1867. The 1 1 6th part, which ends with the alphabetical entry of Henry Hollingsworth Smith, the last that has appeared, was published in 1892. Most of the Sabin titles are those of nineteenth-century books, however, so that it is impossible to make any use- ful deductions from the proportion of all the en- tries which are in the Library. A test of its strength may be made, nevertheless, by certain sections. One of these contains the description of editions of Ptolemy's Geography. This was prepared with great care by Wilberforce Eames, who assumed the editorial responsibility for the Dictionary in 1884. Of the 40 titles and 8 additional issues men- tioned in the notes, the Library possesses 45. In approximate completeness the Ptolemys come nearest to rivalling the Library's set of the Rhode Island "schedules" or session laws from 1747 to 1800, which is perfect except for two leaves. Two other sections of Sabin's Dictionary were of sufficient importance to be issued as separate pam- phlets. One contains the list of editions of the works by the Spanish Historian of the Indies, Antonio de Herrera. The Library has all but 5 of the 23 entries under his name. The other shows 69 entries cred- ited to the great Apostle to the Indians, Bartolome de las Casas. Of these 56 are in the Library. C 74 J THE INSTITUTION Two French travellers whose writings have received exhaustive bibliographical treatment are Father Louis Hennepin and the Baron Lahontan. Minute descriptions of the peculiarities of all the recorded editions of their works have been pub- lished by Victor Hugo Paltsits of the New York Public Library. Mr. Paltsits found 37 distinct issues of Hennepin's publications, of which the Library possesses all but 3. It has 33 of the 51 volumes described in the pamphlet on Lahontan 's writings. The earliest publications which contain allusions to the newly discovered western world are among the books most sought by colleftors. These were described by Henry Harrisse in his " Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima," familiarly known to bib- liographers as "B. A. V." since its publication in 1866. This work lists 307 titles printed between 1493 and 1550, in which there is some reference to the New World. Of these the Library possesses 156. Harrisse was able to increase his number by 153 new titles when he issued his volume of "Ad- ditions" in 1872, and of these the Library has 31. Many of the titles in Harrisse's " B. A. V." are described from a more scholarly point of view in Jose Toribio Medina's " Biblioteca Hispano- Amer- icana," in six folio volumes, printed between 1898 and 1902. Sr. Medina found 144 works on Span- c 75 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY ish America dated before 1551, of which the Li- brary has 52. This work is the only comprehen- sive bibliography which treats of books printed in Europe that relate to America. It is in books of this description that the John Carter Brown Library has always been strongest. This fa6l gives the printed catalogue of Mr. Brown's collection its principal permanent importance. Sr. Medina limited him- self to works on Spanish America, including every- thing, on whatever subject, composed by persons born in the Spanish colonies. It is therefore not surprising to find that the Library's proportion of Medina's 5905 titles dated before 1801 grows rap- idly smaller after the end of the sixteenth century. The Library is strongest in European "Ameri- cana/' but it has a creditable number of books printed in America. Sr. Medina has provided the means of testing this for the output of the Spanish- American press. In his more than fifty volumes of bibliographical publications he described with unequalled thoroughness everything that he could find that was printed in the colonies before the end of the Spanish domination in 1820. In the city of Mexico printing began in 1 539. Be- tween that date and 1800, Medina lists 941 1 Mexi- can imprints. Of these the Library possesses 584, or about six per cent. From the neighbouring city of C 76 H THE INSTITUTION Puebla 1449 titles are recorded between the years 1640 and 1800, of which the Library has 54, nearly all of these having historical or linguistic impor- tance. Printing began in South America, half a cen- tury later than in Mexico, at Lima in 1584. The record of its presses to the end of the eighteenth century contains only 1891 titles. Of these the Li- brary has 231 , or somewhat more than twelve per cent. In addition to these it has a score of titles not known to Sr. Medina when he published his "Im- prenta de Lima" in 1904. Almost nothing has been published about the early history of printing in the West Indian Islands, with the exception of Jamaica. For that island, Frank Cundall of the Jamaica Institute has issued several valuable lists. In these he mentions 90 eighteenth-century titles printed at Kingston or at St. Iago de la Vega, its predecessor as the seat of government. Of these the Library has 16. Cun- dall lists 291 European books which direftly con- cern Jamaica, published prior to the nineteenth century, 113 of which are in the Library. Charles Evans's " Chronological Dictionary of all Books Pamphlets and Periodical Publications printed in the United States of America from 1639 to 1820" is the most satisfactory of all biblio- graphical works from the point of view of this i 77 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY Library. The seven volumes already issued con- tain 22,297 titles dated before 1790. Of these the Library contains over twenty-one per cent. It is thought that only one other library, that of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mas- sachusetts, contains a larger proportion. The future usefulness of the Library depends largely upon its policy with regard to the eighty per cent of English-American imprints which it does not now possess. All of these would be desirable ad- ditions to the collection. If this is to be the place to which students will apply, before going anywhere else, for information about any early printed book in which they hope to find something about Amer- ica, the Library must strive to buy all the books of this description which it can afford. It must also colleft all possible information about the books that it cannot hope to secure in their original form. The accumulation of data of this character will for many years occupy the time of the Library staff which is not taken for answering the questions and assisting the investigations of those who wish to make use of the collection. The intelligent pursuit of the Library's desid- erata requires a precise knowledge of the whole field. It is only by making a systematic examina- tion of each portion, comparing the published bibli- C 78 ] THE INSTITUTION ographies with what the Library already possesses, that it becomes possible to judge where the collec- tion is strong, where the weak spots are that can easily be reinforced, and where it must be content to leave some rival in undisputed possession of the leading position. This examination has already be- gun. Hildeburn's "Press of Pennsylvania, 1685- 1784/' and his catalogue of "The Charlemagne Tower Collection of American Colonial Laws," Trumbull's "Connecticut Books" and Clayton- Torrence's " Bibliography of Colonial Virginia," Hill and Collins's " Books printed at Newark, New Jersey, 1776-1900," Nichols's "Isaiah Thomas," and the "Notes on the Almanacs of Massachu- setts" by the same careful student, Seidensticker's " German Printing in America, 1 728-1 830," Phil- lips's "List of Geographical Atlases," Scott's "Bibliography of the Darien Company," Nel- son's "Controversy over the American Episco- pate," Rodriguez's " Bibliotheca Brasiliense, 1492- i822,"Gagnon's "BibliographieCanadienne,"and McLachlan's " Fleury Mesplet, the first printer at Montreal," are titles which suggest the various aspefts from which the Library's standing has been measured. The Library has also started its own survey of the ground not satisfactorily covered by other bib- C 79 ] JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY liographers. For many reasons this began nearest home. A check-list of Rhode Island imprints dating from 1 727 to the end of the century was compiled in 1914. This contains 1561 titles, of which 1095, or somewhat over two-thirds, are in the library of the Rhode Island Historical Society, which has printed the list. The John Carter Brown Library contains 228, of which 37 are not at the Histori- cal Society. Other libraries in Providence have 84 additional titles. As 68 of the entries are based on records, unsupported by any known copy of the aftual publication, nearly eighty-two per cent of what has survived of eighteenth-century Rhode Island printing is accessible in its original form in Providence. Of the titles in the Rhode Island Imprints list, 1125 date from before the year 1790, the period already covered by Evans's American Bibliogra- phy. Evans gives the titles of 809 publications by Newport or Providence printers, or about seventy per cent of those on the Library's list. This is prob- ably a fair gauge of the number of titles which will be recorded as addenda to Evans as a result of further researches. The photographing machine was a valuable ally in the work of preparing the Rhode Island list. It was used for making exaft copies of most of the C so ] THE INSTITUTION items which do not belong to the Providence libra- ries. The compilers had these prints to refer to, eliminating questions of possible error in trans- scribing, and the Library secured a large number of facsimiles for the use of future investigators. Most of the things photographed are broadsides or pamphlets consisting of only a few pages, which offer no difficulties in copying or in filing for preservation. The copying of the early Rhode Island newspa- pers was a more serious problem. The value of the papers to students of history and of bibliography is great. They exist in widely scattered deposi- tories, none of which contain all the issues neces- sary to make a complete file of any single paper. The size of page and bulk of volumes make copy- ing expensive, and when the copies are made, the keeping of them causes librarians many perplex- ities. So long as investigators want to see them, however, the business of the Library is to supply them. The Library's immediate interest in Rhode Is- land newspapers led it to try to answer some of the questions which confront every library where historical research is carried on. The photostat was put to the test of reproducing the extant file for the first eighteen years of " The Newport Mer- t 81 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY cury." Between its start in 1758 and the early winter of 1776, when the arrival of British troops forced the editor to suspend publication, about a thousand issues of this paper appeared. Of these, 701 have been found, in various collections. Nearly all of these have been photographed, and prints of the complete set are offered to students or to libra- ries at approximate cost. The experiment seems to have been successful, and it is probable that, with the cooperation of other institutions, several files of colonial papers, now praftically inaccessible to students, will be reproduced. During its first decade as a part of Brown Uni- versity, 1 1,571 titles, somewhat over one third of its total number, were added to the Library. The endowment fund yielded $207,684. 73 during this period. Of this income, the Committee of Manage- ment placed $10,671.05 with the invested funds, and spent $9351-95 on improvements to the build- ing and its equipment, and $841.24 on repairs, which were largely of a permanent character. The administrative expenses amounted to $65,948.71 for salaries and assistance, $8452.31 for the build- ing, and $5557-66 for library supplies. Printing cost $2817.98. The amount spent for books was $104,630.53. More detailed figures and a description of some C 82 ^ THE INSTITUTION of the purchases are given in the reports which the Committee has made at the meeting of the Corpo- ration of the University held in June of each year. These reports for the years 1906 to 1910 were printed as a part of the Annual Report of the Presi- dent of the University. Beginning with the year 191 1 they have been issued in pamphlet form by the Library. C 83 1 THE PUBLICATIONS THE list of Rhode Island Imprints is one of several contributions which the Library has made toward the publication of a catalogue of its own collections. A complete printed catalogue would be highly desirable, but the rapid growth of the collection during the past decade, and uncer- tainty regarding the best form in which to prepare it, as well as the cost, have prevented the start of this undertaking. The ideal catalogue would follow closely the plan of the volumes issued by Mr. Bart- lett. Such a catalogue, accurately compiled with adequate notes, would be a contribution to histori- cal scholarship of the greatest value. John Nicho- las Brown realized this, and it had a large place in his plans for the future work of the Library. It will be several years before his ideal can be accom- plished. In the meantime, the Library expefts to issue, as occasion warrants, check -lists of titles and bibliographies of subjects, which will inform stu- dents of its resources. Three "title a line'' lists were printed in 1908. These named the Library's" Booksprinted in Lima, 1585-1800," "Books printed in South America elsewhere than at Lima before 1 801 ■". and " Books printed in Lima and elsewhere in South America C 8 5 1 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY after 1800." Partly as a result of the publication of these lists, the number of titles for a new edition of the first two was nearly doubled a few months later by the acquisition of the seventeenth and eighteenth century books from the library of Don Luis Montt of Santiago de Chile. A lucky find soon afterwards gave the Library a piece of Lima print- ing that is older than the work which has long ranked as the earliest South American imprint. This latter important " First " was still lacking when this history of the Library began to be written, but it has arrived at last, in October, 1914. " A List of Books printed in the Fifteenth Cen- tury in the John Carter Brown Library and the General Library of Brown University/' printed at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1910, is the begin- ning of a short-title catalogue of the Library. This was appended to the catalogue of early printed books collected by Rush C.Hawkins, which are ex- hibited at the Annmary Brown Memorial in Provi- dence. It was also published separately, with two plates of the Library's Richenbach binding dated 1470. This list contains sixty-six titles. Twenty- four additional entries have already been made in the Library copy for a new edition. The short-title lists, of which the Rhode Island Imprints is another example, are intended to make C 86 J THE PUBLICATIONS known the contents of the Library. Similar lists were included in the Annual Reports of the Li- brary for June, 1912, and June, 1913. The first described some "Printed Business Papers, 1766- 1788/' Among these were a number of circular letters sent out by European commission houses asking for the resumption of trade at the close of the American Revolution. The manuscript maps and atlases were listed in the Report for 1913. The short-title is merely suggestive. A very dif- ferent sort of cataloguing aims to provide every- thing that a student is likely to want to know about each individual volume. The Library published this information about one of its titles in 1 907, as its con- tribution to the celebration of the anniversary of the settlement at Jamestown in Virginia. A handsome folio volume was printed describing "Three Procla- mations concerning the Lottery for Virginia, 161 3- 1621 Two of these proclamations which did not belong to the Library were reproduced in full-size facsimile from the originals in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries at London. These three were the only Virginia Lottery broadsides that were then known to be in existence. A fourth has recently been secured by the Library, and a facsimile of this will be added to the volume. A companion to the Virginia volume was issued C 87 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY in 1911, containing "Three Maps, with outline sketches reproduced in facsimile from the origi- nal manuscript drawn by Pedro Font, Chaplain and Cartographer to the Expedition led by Juan Bautista de Ansa which made the overland jour- ney from Northern Mexico to the California Coast during the winter of 1775-1 776." The introduc- tion to this publication was contributed by the his- torian of California, Irving Berdine Richman. A single entry in the South American lists of 1908 was made the subject of a separate publica- tion, issued at the same time. This contained a fac- simile of the first issue of the "Gazeta de Lima/' and a description of the Library's file of that paper, which extends from 1744 to 1763. All the refer- ences to other publications, to the distribution of news, and to routes of communication with Europe were reprinted. These facsimile publications continue a policy established by John Carter Brown. His first re- print had a timely interest. When he was notified that he was to be elected President of the New England Emigrant Aid Society, Mr. Brown de- clined the honour. Almost immediately afterwards came the news of the raid on Harper's Ferry, and he recalled his declination, with the remark that "This is no time for a man with the name of John C 88 1 THE PUBLICATIONS Brown to draw back." Shortly afterward he had a copy made of a tra6l written by St. George Tucker, Judge of the Superior Court of Virginia, and printed in 1 796 with the title, " A Dissertation on Slavery: with a proposal for the gradual abolition of it. " This was reprinted in New York, but events had already passed beyond the reach of eighteenth-century arguments. In April, 1867, Mr. Brown issued a type-fac- simile of John Smith's "New England's Trials," of 1622. The next year he sent to his book-loving friends at Christmas a copy of Dionyse Settle's "A True Reporte of the laste voyage into the West and Northwest regions, &c, 1577- worthily atchieved by Capteine Frobisher." Fifty copies of this were reprinted from the tiny original, which he had se- cured in the autumn of 1868. In 1874, twenty-five copies were printed from facsimile plates of the "Dutch Vespuccius." The John Carter Brown Library has been con- cerned in a number of publications, in addition to those issued by Mr. Brown or with the Library imprint. The Narragansett Club of Providence, which existed from 1867 to 1874 for the purpose of reprinting the writings of Roger Williams, de- pended largely upon Mr. Brown's friendly assist- ance. The moving spirit in that club, George Tay- [ 89 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY lor Paine, was responsible for the organization of the Club for Colonial Reprints. This club began its career in 1903 by issuing a facsimile from the Library copy of "Major Butler's Fourth Paper" of 1652, edited by Clarence Saunders Brigham. This was the only one of Roger Williams's pub- lications that had not been reprinted since its original appearance. The club's fifth publication contained Richard Fry's "Scheme for a Paper Currency" of 1739- This was reprinted from the Library copy, which, although imperfeft, was the only one known to the editor, Andrew McFarland Davis. It has since been replaced by a perfecl copy. Other reprints to which the Library has contrib- uted are the "News from New-England," 1676, issued by Samuel G. Drake in 1850 and by W. Elliott Woodward in 1865; "A Letter from Doc- tor More," 1687, by the Historical Society of Penn- sylvania in 1881; "Antinomians and Familists," 1 644, by the Prince Society in 1 894; Wyeth's "An- swer to Dr. Bray," 1 700, by the Maryland Histori- cal Society in 1901 ; "The Swamp Fight Traft" of 1676, by the Rhode Island Society of Colonial Wars in 1912; and "The Puritan's Farewell to England, April 7, 1630," which was the souvenir of the New England Society of New York upon c 90 n THE PUBLICATIONS the two hundred and ninety-second anniversary of Forefathers Day. The Library has a more direct responsibility for a facsimile reprint of the first Rhode Island Alma- nack, printed at Newport for the year 1728. This was reproduced in 1911 from the only recorded copy, which belongs to the Library of Congress. A description of the early " Brown University Broad- sides" was prepared at the Library, which con- tributed to this pamphlet a facsimile of a circular announcement of 1 790 that is not in the University archives. c 91 3 THE WORK OF THE LIBRARY THE regular work of the Library staff includes the editing of facsimile reprints and the prep- aration of bibliographical lists of books on such sub- jects as the Peace of 1 763. This work is frequently interrupted by calls from investigators who desire to examine volumes that they have been unable to consult elsewhere. These visitors come on most divergent quests. The linguistic peculiarities of an edition of Vespuccius' Letters provided a college professor with the material for a communication to the " Jahrbuch des Vereins fiir niederdeutsche Sprachforschung" for 1907. One of his colleagues sought a treatise on the cultivation of hemp pub- lished in 1 766. Curiosity regarding the Indian trade routes from the Maine coast to Canada reflected a summer's holiday, and a winter's sojourn in the West Indies led to a prolonged inquiry into the vicissitudes of the Jamaica sugar trade in the eight- eenth century. Notes were taken by one student on the watermarks in the paper on which pam- phlets were printed contemporaneous with Shake- speare. The year's work of another bore fruit in a volume on " L'Exotisme Americain dans la Litera- ture Francaise au XVI 6 Siecle." The pleasure of assisting personal researches in I 93 ^ JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY the Library is supplemented by that of answering the questions that come by post. One correspond- ent is tracing the changes in the meaning of words through four centuries, and another, with the same natural bent,is reconstructing the Maya language. Both ask for data found on the Library shelves. From Santiago de Chile came a request for a book which had been sought in vain elsewhere since its title was noticed in a Paris bookseller's cata- logue of 1862. The Charleston earthquake, the visit of Halley's comet, and the siege of Namur each.started requests for accounts of historical ante- cedents which the Library was able to answer. The business of the Library is to promote schol- arship. It assists investigators engaged upon seri- ous work in every way it can. Few of those who would like to use its resources can take time and money to visit Providence. The questions which can be answered in this Library and nowhere else are not many, and rarely are they fundamen- tal to the prosecution of a piece of work. These, however, and many others that can be answered here more readily than elsewhere, are usually the questions which distinguish the slipshod from the creditable production. The aim of the Library is to supply every earnest student, wherever he may be, with any information in its possession which is C 94 ] THE WORK OF THE LIBRARY beyond his immediate reach. In return it expefts that the information it furnishes will be used in ac- cordance with the highest standards of scholarship. The fostering of historical studies has not been found inconsistent with the cultivation of a friendly interest among those who enter the Library be- cause it is a pleasant place to visit. The building stands on the University Campus, open to visitors every week day from nine to five o'clock. It offers strangers passing by a comfortable seat to rest in, and something to look at in the exhibition cases. The books, autographs, and engravings which are shown are usually sele6led to illustrate a subject of interest at the moment to the Library or to the public. The interests of the Library are usually con- cerned with matters remote from contemporary life. Business and professional men, and members of the academic circle, ordinarily know little about the things that make the work of the Library staff enjoyable. None the less these are things that most well-informed persons are very glad to hear about. It has therefore become a part of the regular win- ter programme to invite the friends of the Library who are occupied with the more aftive life of the city to make it a social visit. When a pamphlet advertising an early experiment in woollen manu- t 95 3 JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY fa6ture, or some old fire insurance regulations, or a fifteenth-century illuminated initial was acquired, two or three people for whom it had an especial interest were asked to look at it at tea time. Larger groups have assembled in response to other invitations. The local clergy came to look at Bibles and Prayer Books. School-children make an annual pilgrimage to see the signatures writ- ten by Paul Revere, Peregrine White, and Myan- tonomey. The members of the Club of Odd Vol- umes were permitted to handle Richard Mather's copy of the Bay Psalm Book. The Society of Print- ers compared the work of Plantin and Elzevir, Baskerville and Whittingham. Formal invitations are issued from time to time for a private view of the books or manuscripts which are about to be placed on public exhibition. On these occasions a score or two of men gather around the long table to hear about the Library's latest acquisition or its newest discovery. On one evening a neighbouring collector brought his set of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence for comparison with one that had recently been given to the Library. On another the New York architect of a local skyscraper told how the me- tropolis had evolved from the Dutch trading-post portrayed in the engravings printed in 1 65 1 . On the 1 96 ] THE WORK OF THE LIBRARY one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the appear- ance of the first newspaper printed in Providence, some of the men who contribute to its daily con- tinuance were keenly interested in seeing the stages of its early development. These social occasions are very pleasant, and they benefit the Library in many ways. The most important advantage is that they put the institu- tion, which is mediaeval in its contents and renais- sance in its purpose, in contafh with the aftive men of every-day affairs. The assurance that these men understand what the Library is doing, and approve of it, is the strongest safeguard against temptations to depart from its ideals. The aim of the John Carter Brown Library is to answer every question asked of it concerning anything printed before 1801, which in any way relates to America. Only as it approaches to this ideal can it justify its permanent independent ex- istence. Within this field, the Library means to be preeminent.