Education: Open House

• Share

When Historian Louis Booker Wright took over as director of Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library in July 1948, he found the entrance to the reading room barred by a red silken rope and two guards. He promptly ordered the rope sent to the attic, cut the guard force by a third, put the remaining guards to work as janitors. Said Wright: "I came here to make an institution come alive, not to preside over a mausoleum."

Before Wright, Folger was sometimes known as a literary Fort Knox, with its invaluable treasures buried in regulations. Built and endowed (with $11.5 million) in 1930 by Oil Tycoon Henry Clay Folger to house his vast, scattered hoard of Shakespeariana, the library was run almost like an exclusive club. Only scholars known to its staffers could gain access to its books and manuscripts—after writing in advance. Even the favored few were stopped by the silken rope, had to sit on a bench until a staff member came to escort them to the books. As a result, days went by without a single visitor gracing the reading room. Virtually untouched were its great prizes: 79 Shakespeare First Folios (no other library has more than four), the Rev.

John Ward's diaries ("Shakespear, Drayton and Ben Jhonson had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted"), and the world's second largest&* collection of early English (1475-1640) books.

New Roofs, Old Books. Today, thanks to 56-year-old Louis Wright, the Folger reading room is well known as one of the world's great research centers, wide open to all serious scholars. (Casual visitors are tactfully shunted across the street to the Library of Congress, or to the Folger's own exhibition hall and theater.) Working 18 hours a .day, Wright has improved the library's physical plant (with air conditioning, better lighting), reorganized the 300,000-item collection. He also publishes a lighthearted Report which has delighted jaded librarians round the world.

Sample Wright whimsy: "During the latest [D.A.R.] gathering, a [visiting] Daughter . . . was overheard to say to her fellow travelers: 'I always feel so safe here. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get people to read Shakespeare instead of all those Red modern writers!' The lady little knows that the Folger Library also harbors the works of John Milton, who counselled rebellion, commended the cutting off of the King's head, and had other dangerous thoughts."