Education: Up from the Stacks

Thomas Hollis, the London merchant-philanthropist, had nothing but good will for the struggling little colonial college in Cambridge, Mass., but he decided something would have to be done about Harvard College's library. The collection, he found in 1725, was "ill managed . . . You let your books be taken at pleasure home to Mens houses, and many are lost, your (boyish) Students take them to their chambers, and teare out pictures & maps to adorne their Walls." It was really a wonder that the library had managed to survive at all. "Such things," warned Mr. Hollis, "are not good."

In spite of these early bunglings, the library did manage to survive. But it did not achieve its present position as the foremost university library in the U.S. without its share of crises. No man knows this better than 66-year-old Keyes (rhymes with skies) DeWitt Metcalf, who for 18 years has been-Harvard's chief librarian. Last week, as he got set to retire, Metcalf could report with as much authority as any man alive just what it means to run a great empire of books.

No Room. From Harvard history, he found ample precedent for trouble. On a stormy night in 1764, all but 404 volumes of the 125-year-old library were destroyed by fire. In 1831, Librarian Benjamin Peirce complained that the library was so crowded that "many of the books . . . have been excluded from their proper places by the want of room." For years, the lament was the same, and even after Mrs. George D. Widener gave Harvard a vast new building in memory of her son, who went down on the Titanic, the space problem loomed again.

Keyes Metcalf took over in 1937 and soon realized that the Widener building would overflow within three years. What the university needed, he decided, was 1) a special library for undergraduates, 2) a new building for rare books and manuscripts, and 3) some sort of cooperative plan with other campuses for the storage of little-used books and the acquisition of new ones. As he steps out, Metcalf can reflect proudly that every one of these goals has been achieved.

In 1942, the Houghton Library for rare books was opened, complete with temperature and humidity control. In 1945, in response to a hint that Metcalf had dropped at a dinner some years before, Manhattan Financier Thomas W. Lamont (1892) gave Harvard $1,500,000 for a new open-stack undergraduate library. Meanwhile, Metcalf helped to set up the New England Deposit Library, in which colleges and universities in the Greater Boston area store their little-used books, and the Farmington Plan by which colleges and universities buy foreign publications in common, thus covering the foreign field thoroughly while avoiding wasteful duplications.

No Catching Up. Today, Metcalf's musty, dusty empire includes 86 different collections scattered throughout Harvard's various schools: in all, nearly 6,000,000 volumes worth at least $60 million. It has a regular staff of 350, spends $2,400,000 a year. Some 15,000 students and scholars a day pass through some library door. Metcalf's life has been to see that they get the books they want as quickly as possible. Among the headaches this involves: