Education: Where the Borrower Is King

The well-bred Boston Athenaeum marks its 175th year

It began in 1807 as a reading room for Boston merchants who wanted to keep up with American and European literature and periodicals. In a city that considered itself to be the Athens of America, the Boston Athenaeum soon became a privately supported repository of culture, buying the best books published in the U.S. and Europe and collecting works of art as well. The imposing sandstone building at 10½ Beacon Street, designed by Edward Clarke Cabot in 1846, provided sunny halls where Brahmins could read (or snooze) and scholars could work. The Athenaeum's roster of readers over the years is a Who's Who of American writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Francis Parkman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Eliot Morison, Robert Lowell.

Last week the Boston Athenaeum, just down Beacon Hill from the gold-domed statehouse, celebrated its 175th anniversary. Trustees today include descendants of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Yet for all its Oriental carpets, marble busts and Victorian antiques, the Athenaeum is no stuffy club of Yankee bluebloods. The trustees include four women, as well as an Irish American Roman Catholic monsignor, and the library's magnificent collection of 750,000 volumes is available to the scholars of the world. One of the finest independent libraries in the country, the Boston Athenaeum truly lives up to its entrance plaque: "Here remains a retreat for those who would enjoy the humanity of books."

David McCullough, who won an American Book Award this year for his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Mornings on Horseback, has researched all his books at the Athenaeum. He calls the library "a marvelous example of what a great city ought to provide." Writes Poet David McCord: "The high-ceilinged rooms, the little balconies, alcoves, nooks and angles all suggest sanctuary, escape, creature comfort. The reader, the scholar, the browser, the borrower is king."

The library is actually owned by 1,049 proprietors, or shareholders. Many of them have inherited then-holdings as valued heirlooms since the last share was sold by the library in the late 1850s. (Daniel Webster, the eloquent Senator from Massachusetts, was shareholder 296; his plaster bust stares out over a young librarian using a computer.) Most shareholders contribute at least $50 a year to the upkeep of the institution, as do "life members" of the library, who achieve their status by applying with references and paying $500. Both proprietors and life members are allotted four tickets a year for "guests" who pay the library $35. But thousands of writers and scholars use the Athenaeum every year at no charge whatever. About 90% of the $1.2 million cost of running the Athenaeum is met by earnings of the library's $16 million endowment, much of it donated by proprietors past and present. Even the fresh flowers that light up the library every day are financed by a private fund.