University of Virginia Library

Foreword

BY
DUMAS MALONE

THE FIRST CHAPTER of this book contains a
moving description of the last visit ever made by
Thomas Jefferson to the University of Virginia. It
was in the April before he died that he watched, from the
balcony of what is now the Colonnade Club, the raising of
a capital on top of one of the pillars of the Rotunda, where
for more than a century the books of the University were to
have their home. Then this man of eighty-three years rode
slowly back to his little mountain. Never was he privileged
to see on the shelves within these walls the books that were
collected according to his plans, but he was the architect
and founder of the library, just as he was of the University
at whose heart it lies today. For his centennial history of
this University, Philip Alexander Bruce drew a theme
from the saying of Emerson: “An institution is the lengthened
shadow of one man.” By means of an educational
creation Jefferson may be said to have “institutionalized”
his enthusiasm for enlightenment and his undying faith
in the power of knowledge, and, as nearly as may be, to have
endowed these with immortality. Likewise, in this library
and its elder sister the Library of Congress, he “institutionalized”
his love for books, which contain the accumulated
learning and wisdom of the ages. Thus did his mortality
again put on the semblance of immortality.

There is always the possibility, however, that any institution
may fail of the founder's hopes, that it may become
a pallid likeness of the creative personality, even that it

may degenerate into a mechanism: If these dangers are to
be avoided it must be perpetually revivified by other personalities,
it must meet and overcome the hazards of circumstance,
it must adjust itself to the conditions of changing
times. As Mr. Jefferson said, the earth belongs to the
living, not the dead.

Much of the present book is a story of hopes disappointed
and long deferred. Following the Founder's death
the library passed through a period of torpor. Nobody else
seemed able to impart the same life-giving spirit, and the
initial impetus was not maintained. The institution was
beginning to forge forward impressively in the eighteen-fifties,
but the terrible civil conflict then imposed a pause
which seemed almost like death itself. The slow process of
recovery was abruptly halted toward the end of the century
by the fire of 1895 in the Rotunda. Most of the original
books were destroyed in that catastrophe, and in the strict
sense this marked the end of Jefferson's library, but there
is significance in the fact that his statue was saved. The
fruit of his labors might perish, but as a symbol and body of
ideas he was shown to be imperishable.

The heroism and wisdom of the faculty just after the
great fire of 1895 are clearly shown in the appropriate
chapter of this carefully written history, and the genuine
achievements of the library in the thirty years after that
are generously described. But not until the first quarter
of the library's second century was the Jeffersonian hope
fully revived and the institution adjusted to the conditions
of another age. External conditions were an important
factor from 1925 to 1950, for there was extraordinary
growth in the country and the University during the
period; but this was also a time of depression and world
war, and the graph of library progress showed a consistent
upward trend even during years of adversity. The precise
form that this development took is shown in the latter half

of the present volume. But this is no matter of mere statistics,
nor of buildings and organization. In an era of unparalleled
growth again we can see the life-giving power of
personality. The present institution is the lengthened
shadow of another man besides the Founder. That man
was the tenth librarian.

No one is so well qualified to tell the story of this
quarter of a century as Harry Clemons, whose term of office
began in 1927 and lasted until 1950. He fears that he may
have written a subjective report instead of an objective
history, and beyond a doubt this is an inside story. But to
everybody who is intimately familiar with the actual developments
it is obvious that he has reduced his own part in
them to the absolute minimum.

The members of the present staff want to give honor
where honor is most richly due, and they have drawn me
into a friendly conspiracy against the historian. We hail
him here as the living embodiment of the Jeffersonian
tradition. In Jefferson's own country he brought that tradition
to life in the twentieth century and gave it an institutional
scope which not even the far-seeing Founder could
have anticipated.

In view of the fact that this book contains sketches of
the nine librarians of the first hundred years, an extended
account of the life and career of the tenth librarian would
be abundantly warranted, but it is not my purpose to give
one here. It would occasion him too much embarrassment.
Something should be done, however, to supplement a story
that is admirable in all respects but one. As an associate of
Mr. Clemons said, he did an astounding job in raising
the library by its own bootstraps, while subtly arranging
matters so that somebody else got the credit. Nobody can
possibly read the account of the years 1925–1950 without
noting the author's scrupulous effort to give full credit to
everybody: the successive Presidents of the University, the

Library Committee, the staff, the major donors. Because
of their number, donors stumped him somewhat in his
official days, but he did everything in his power to cause
every one of them to be remembered. Gift bookplates were
used, so that even the casual reader would be reminded
of the former owner or donor of the book. Thus, as the
writer says, the library became “a storehouse of associations
of affection and gratitude.” One of his major fears as
historian was that somebody who deserved mention and
recognition would be overlooked. If anybody has been, it
was certainly not his fault.

To tell the full story of a librarian who fused himself
so completely with the institution he was directing would
obviously require the rewriting of half of this history. It is
practically impossible to distribute credit equitably in any
organization, and the better the members of the staff work
together the more difficult it is to determine the precise
origin of policies and ideas. In this instance, however, it is
safe to say that the spirit of the librarian infused the organization
from top to bottom; and every reader of this story
is advised to read between the lines.

Farsighted though Thomas Jefferson was, he thought of
a librarian as merely a guardian of books who ought to
know enough about them to give wise guidance to immature
readers. By the year 1927, however, it was obvious
that besides being a guard and guide the librarian of a
university must be an administrator, and the persons
charged with filling the vacant post in the University of
Virginia concluded that professional training and experience
were desirable. It was to be expected, according to
Mr. Clemons, that they would, as in all previous cases,
seek an alumnus. “But,” as he added with a chuckle,
“librarianship as a vocation appeared to have been singularly
lacking in appeal to the University's graduates.”
Therefore, as he continues, they looked elsewhere and

in their final choice they “went amusingly far afield.”

They found a man in his forty-eighth year who had
just been driven by the Chinese bandits from Nanking
University, where he had been librarian and professor of
English. He afterwards said that he had never been able to
choose between these two callings and that the bandits
made up his mind for him by destroying his notes. He was
the first librarian of the University of Virginia to have the
rank and status of a professor, nevertheless, and nobody
ever doubted his fitness to move in high academic circles.
He brought no notes with him out of China but he spoke
the language of scholarship. He had once been reference
librarian at Princeton, and it was his own idea, not that of
the authorities in Virginia, that he take a refresher course
in the library school of Columbia University.

If they were well informed about certain services he
had rendered the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia
at the end of the first World War they could not have failed
to be impressed. As the representative of the American
Library Association this one man in a period of a few
months handled 10,000 books (plus 10 boxes, 194 parcels,
75 mail sacks, and not counting discarded magazines); he
saw these through the customs (a stupendous task of
disentangling red tape); he unpacked, sorted, catalogued,
and repacked them. He organized more than fifty branch
libraries and found time to write a series of fascinating
letters in longhand, despite such minor obstacles as frozen
ink. The American Library Association had the wisdom
to publish these letters and one of them contained a pun
which afterwards circulated in Virginia and became justly
famous. While unpacking books and magazines in the
frozen North the indefatigable representative of the American
Library Association thought of putting this banner
over the chaos: “All is not literature that litters.” Harry
Clemons brought the punning habit with him to a sunnier

clime, and he also brought a discriminating mind.

Some have believed that he acquired in the Orient the
courtly manners which so delighted the visitors to his
office in later years and caused so many of them to describe
him as a perfect Virginia gentleman. These comments
must have tickled his funny bone whenever he heard
echoes of them, for this native of Pennsylvania who had
been educated in New England and New Jersey and had
served heroically as a Presbyterian missionary was endowed
by his Creator with an irrepressible sense of humor. When
he took over his new post he looked like a rather frail
man; he was clean-shaven then, and his thin face often broke
into a tremendous grin. He turned out to be a delightfully
humorous saint, a scholar without trace of pedantry, a
courtly gentleman without tinge of pomposity, and an
administrator who managed to be highly efficient and practically
noiseless at the same time. Out of the wreckage of
war and revolution the University of Virginia had picked
up a most extraordinary bargain. He was never much of
bargainer on his own account, however, and his eye was not
looking for greener pastures. He had found a new home in
a lovely place, he was confronting a fresh task that greatly
needed to be done, and here he meant to stay.

I have always regretted that I was not present when the
new librarian entered upon the service which was to engage
him for a quarter of a century. Though then a member of
the faculty of the University and of the Library Committee,
I was on leave. When I returned, in the midst of
his first academic year, I soon saw in him that unusual combination
of industry and patience with statesmanlike vision
which marked his entire course as an administrator. The
first impression he gave was that of a man who made the
best of what was available, without complaining that there
was no more. For a University of high standing and distinguished
history, the library was manifestly inadequate.

The collection of books was far smaller than it should have
been, but it was already far too large for the quarters
which had been provided by Jefferson a century before,
and with necessary growth these quarters became more
cramped day by day. There seemed very slight prospect
of a proper building, but the librarian began to dream of
one immediately and after a decade his dreams came true.
Meanwhile, despising not the day of small things, he had
put his house in order, consciously preparing for the great
things he was sure would come. Gradually he built up a
staff until at length he had one that was practically his own
creation. He sent the younger members off to study methods
elsewhere, but they were all infused with his own
spirit of invincible friendliness and tireless service. Somehow
he made even the humblest members feel that in their
own places they were fully as important as he was, and that
the library itself was far more important than anybody.
These co-laborers were building an enduring institution.

One policy deserves special mention here, because it
illustrates both the emphasis on technical effectiveness and
the bold imagination of the major planner. I am referring
to the adoption of the system of classification of the Library
of Congress and the complete recataloguing of the existing
collection of books. As a member of a subcommittee I
approved the librarian's recommendation, but my predominant
thought at the time was that this was a policy which
I should have had neither the audacity to propose nor the
patience to carry out. The story of the recataloguing enterprise
is told in this book, with generous reference to everybody
connected with the arduous project except the man
who initiated it. Jefferson himself said, “A library in confusion
loses much of its utility.” There was a minimum
of confusion as this supremely useful institution developed,
and there appears to have been none whatever in the orderly
mind that directed it.

In those days of small things, statesmanlike policies
with respect to the collections themselves were worked out,
and these proved important when the library became increasingly
the custodian of rare books and unique manuscripts.
At the modest beginnings of the collection of Virginiana,
first housed in a wing of the Rotunda which was
darkened by the sacred and untouchable magnolia trees,
two policies emerged: (1) Such materials as the library
already had were to be made accessible—not stored away in
a hiding place. (2) Materials were to be collected, not in
the spirit of competition with other agencies with a view
to institutional advertising, but in the spirit of co-operation.
This now seems a matter of common sense, since no
institution can possibly maintain a monopoly of rare and
unique materials and every one of them must adopt some
sort of self-denying ordinance, but the collector's urge often
becomes a form of madness. The library began in its own
logical field, and as time went on it cultivated that intensively.
Here the vision of the librarian was evident from
the outset, as a single illustration will show. Even in days
of exceedingly modest resources he picked up copies of the
various and numerous editions of Jefferson's Notes on
Virginia, and in the end he got them all.

It is a far cry from the old days when the Rotunda was
bursting with imperfectly catalogued books, which still
were far too few, to the present era of the Alderman Library,
with its spacious reading rooms and its special collections
of Jeffersoniana, Virginiana, and Americana which
are sought out by scholars from everywhere. The collections
are still inadequate for research purposes in certain
areas, but in the fields which it has most emphasized, the
library has become a pace-setter; and from the technical
point of view it commands the admiration of all competent
observers.

As one who used it in the old days and as a frequent

visitor has used it in the new, I am most disposed, however,
to speak of its spirit. Long years ago Jefferson said that the
main objects of all science are the freedom and happiness
of man. If in the middle of the twentieth century he were
to visit the library he founded, he would be enormously
impressed by the card catalogues in the entrance hall and
fascinated by the projectors downstairs where he could
read his own letters from microfilm. But he would be most
pleased, I believe, to find that the institution is no mere
matter of appliances and guides and indexes, not merely
an aggregation of books and manuscripts, but a living
organism dedicated to the enlightenment of free human
beings. He would find the Alderman Library, as thousands
of students and hundreds of scholars have found it, a free
and happy place. In it the riches of human knowledge are
not jealously guarded by suspicious custodians, but they
are gladly made available to all who seek truth and wisdom,
and at every official desk there are helping hands.

The same may be said of other libraries, but there is
more sunlight in this one, more warmth and courtesy and
sheer human kindness, than is commonly encountered.
Many have contributed to this spirit, of course, but the
person most responsible for it is Harry Clemons, who with
unerring instinct seized upon the best traditions of Virginia
and of Jefferson and reincarnated them in an institution.

To say that is to say much, but it is to do less than
justice to his distinctiveness. In his systematic labors he
may have emulated the Father of the University, who
always rose at dawn, but he followed a different schedule.
For a number of years his twelve-hour day has been divided
into two six-hour stretches. He works steadily but unhurriedly
from eight till two in the daytime and from eight
till two at night, varying his regimen only on Sundays,
when he takes the morning off and and goes to church. I

use the present tense, for his hours did not change when
he retired as librarian; he has maintained them as an historian
with the continued cooperation of his extraordinarily
patient and understanding wife. Though the library is
filled with gadgets which would delight the Founder, the
tenth librarian himself clung to many old-fashioned practices.
He never would dictate letters and always writes his
in longhand, to be copied by a secretary or to go to friends
just as they are. They are beautifully legible and his
friendly correspondence has been extensive. His correspondents
must be left to speak for themselves, but it can
at least be said here that all his letters, and indeed all his
official reports, have a literary quality, besides being spiced
with wit.

In his humor he goes far beyond Thomas Jefferson and
is, in fact, quite inimitable. His wit is of the ad hoc variety;
it arises from the occasion and loses its flavor when
detached from its time and place. To quote him effectively,
therefore, one must reconstruct the particular circumstances.
Years ago he dubbed the library department heads,
who meet monthly, the Board of Aldermen and the members
of it have chuckled with him over many an outrageous
pun. He is a sympathetic listener to the stories of others
and has an even rarer gift than wit; he makes others feel
witty in his presence.

Most of all, his career and life have been marked by
wisdom. In part it may be the wisdom of the immemorial
East, but in the fullest and best sense it is Christian. Long
ago he learned from the greatest of teachers that he who
would gain his life must lose it. Selflessly losing himself in
an institution which he rededicated to light and truth, he
gained life and richly gave it. He transmitted a living
heritage to his successors, and only those who lack faith in
the values of our historic civilization can doubt that the
work of his hands and their hands will be enduring.