University of Virginia Library

7. PHASES OF THE LIBRARY SERVICE

In an earlier statement of the intent underlying the
University Library's manuscript project, the expression
was used, “to do the spade work for historical scholarship.”
Therein was both humility and aspiration. Thomas Jefferson
recognized that there was range in library service. We
have seen that to his mind the duties of a Librarian were
simple, but that the possibilities of service mounted toward
those of his own ministry as a counsellor to readers. As
the Librarians of the first hundred years acquired age and
experience, they increasingly enjoyed the privileges of contact
with youth in a period of widening horizons. The gratifications
of college librarianship carried over into the second
hundred years; but to those had now been added new
opportunities arising from the developing research functions
of the University Library. There was evidence of the

quality of the Library Staff of the second century in its
desire to discover and extend those new opportunities.

A good spirit in the normal service performed by a
Library Staff is readily recognized. But there is no exact
formula for its inculcation. Indeed there had been patent
difficulties in the situation that prevailed in the University
of Virginia Libraries, especially during the last decade of
this 1925–1950 period. The open hours of the General Library
and of the Engineering, Law, and Medical Libraries
had been liberally extended. The Alderman Library
was regularly open on weekdays for fifteen hours, from
eight in the morning until eleven at night, except for a ten
o'clock closing on Saturday nights; and the Sunday opening
was from two in the afternoon until eleven at night—a
weekly total of ninety-eight hours. Since the full time work
week for a staff member was forty hours, this necessitated
the selection of many assistants and the delegation to them
of the responsibility for a willing and helpful service. It is
a trite saying that a chain is as strong as its weakest link.
The application to library service is obvious. The heads of
the Divisions of the Library Staff had doubtless made such
use of precept as might prove palatable. But it had obviously
been their own examples that had been most potent;
and in this matter of example, many other members of
the Staff who have not been mentioned in this history had
made notable contributions.

Other elements had affected the normal service of the
University Library. In a period notorious for rapid changes
in the personnel of American libraries, this Staff had benefited
by a remarkable degree of continuity. Knowledge of
the Library's resources that can be gained only by experience
tends to expedite and expand the aid to students and
scholars. Moreover encouragement had been given to staff
members who showed a desire to keep in touch with the
intellectual life of the University. One form that such

encouragement had taken was an action by the Faculty
Library Committee in 1944. The resolution read:

Several members of the Staff, notably Miss Savage and Mr.
Dalton, had volunteered assistance, outside of library hours,
to non-professional members who wished to prepare for
the State's library certification examinations; and for a
considerable period Mr. Dalton had conducted an evening
reading course for interested members of the Staff, the
excitements of which had been readily carried over into the
daytime routine contacts with books and readers.

The net result had been a responsive library service
which had elicited much approbation. Commendation had
been specific on the willingness—to use the Biblical phrase—
to go the second mile, to take the initiative in the effort to
be helpful. In the newly extended use of the Library for
research endeavors there had been increased opportunities
for thus giving positive force to the library service. To this
end there had been experimentation in various ways. The
ways were perhaps not novel. But there was some degree of
novelty in their application to a Library, particularly to a
rare book section of a Library. One element the experiments
all seemed to have in common; namely, that there
was much labor involved. The story of the phases of this
library service might therefore be briefly described as compounded
of some imagination, considerable courage, and
very much hard work.

With the opening in 1949 of the exhibition gallery on
the second floor of the Alderman Library, there had come

into use in that building four centers for display purposes—
an unusually abundant equipment for such uses. The
policy had been definitely away from permanent exhibits;
and the frequent changes, which the local press had been
encouraged to regard as newsworthy, had been steadily suggestive
both of current interests and of the resources of the
Library. The range had been wide—from the works of a
local author or artist and from specimens from a student's
rare book gleanings or from a locally owned stamp collection
to incunabula, illustrations of bookmaking, and editions
and translations of the Bible; from material appropriate
to Garden Week, the Music Festival, Founder's Day,
and Christmas to displays of French art, Japanese prints,
and Russian ikons; from homes and characters and events of
University and Virginia history to presidential campaigns
and the United Nations. Under Mr. Wyllie's supervision,
Miss Ruth Evelyn Byrd had made such exhibits her special
province; and Miss Land and her associates in the Circulation
Division had steadily maintained in the entrance hall,
as temptations to borrowers, displays of books of current
interest.

There had been encouragement also to Professors giving
graduate courses, in which book materials were essential, to
hold occasional class meetings in the McGregor Room,
where rare editions pertaining to the subject matter of the
course could be examined and discussed. This had carried
into the humanities something of the value for science of
laboratory work and had helped to give meaning to such
vague terms as research and original sources. A development
on a larger scale had been the occasional seminars in
modern prose and poetry which had been sponsored jointly
by the Schools of English and the Alderman Library. These
had been addressed by prominent literary figures and, with
admission by cards of invitation, had regularly attracted
audiences limited only by the capacity of the McGregor

Room. These had been called the McGregor Room Seminars.
But beginning with 1951 they were to be known as
the Peters Rushton Seminars, in memory of the young
teacher and scholar who had taken a prominent part in their
beginnings. For each of those meetings appropriate library
exhibits had been prepared. Similar preparations had been
made for the meetings in the McGregor Room of the University
of Virginia Bibliographical Society, that society
being a development from bibliographical interests which
had found a congenial center in the Library's Rare Book
and Manuscript Division. Another organization which had
had its origin in a pooling of interests in local historical
matters had been the Albemarle County Historical Society.
Both the Bibliographical Society and the Historical Society
had had their birthplaces in this Library, but the
resulting membership had in each case extended well
beyond the immediate university community. Thus, in
addition to its primary function of affording intensive aid
to research scholars, the Library had found indirect means
for stimulating and extending literary and historical interests.

Moreover, both the Bibliographical and the Historical
Societies had produced publications, the editorial work in
each case centering in the Alderman Library. By 1950 there
had appeared the first two volumes of Studies in Bibliography,
the papers of the University of Virginia Bibliographical
Society edited by Professor Fredson Bowers—a
series which from its beginning was recognized as of marked
distinction. By 1950 there had also been issued ten volumes
of the Papers of the Albemarle County Historical Society,
the first five edited by Archivist Cappon, the sixth to eighth
by Dr. William Edwin Hemphill, and the last two by Mr.
William Munford Ellis Rachal, Messrs. Hemphill and
Rachal being members of the staff of the Virginia World
War II History Commission, which then had its headquarters

McGregor Room and two McGregor publications

Jefferson Inscription to Lafayette in a Presentation Copy of the
First Edition of the Notes on the State of Virginia

in the Alderman Library. At least two of the values
of publications of a superior grade were illustrated by these
series: they not only widened the recognition of the services
being rendered by these organizations, but they also
proved an incentive to sustained effort by the organizations
themselves.

The value of publications as an active force in public
relations had already been recognized at the University
of Virginia Libraries, and in this 1925–1950 period there
had been started three series emanating from the General
Library, one series of unique character from the Law
Library, and a number of special publications and of
contributions to cooperative undertakings.

The Law Library publication, The Reading Guide, had
student editors and student and faculty contributors and
consisted of signed reviews of new books and of interesting
old books that could be found in the library stacks, each
issue containing also a selected bibliography on a subject
of contemporary importance.

Of the Alderman Library group, the first in point of
time had been the Annual Reports of the Archivist, later
entitled Reports on Historical Collections. Of these, twenty
had been issued by 1950. Two cumulative indexes, covering
years one to fifteen and years sixteen to twenty, formed a
ready guide to what could be found in the extensive manuscript
collection. The second was the University of Virginia
Bibliographical Series, which began in 1941 and had reached
its ninth number in 1950. The eighth number was an
especially impressive publication, The Jefferson Papers of
the University of Virginia, this being a calendar compiled
by Constance E. Thurlow and Francis L. Berkeley, Jr. As
for the third series, the publications of the Tracy W. McGregor
Library, that had been a direct attempt to create a
wider stimulus service for the rare books of the McGregor
collection. The eight publications which had been issued

by 1950 had each presented the text of a rare item of source
material found in the McGregor Library, with critical
introductions and bibliographical apparatus prepared by
authorities from this or other Universities. The McGregor
publications had been designed and printed with care and
had been distributed widely, especially among members of
the Southern Historical Association.

Among the special publications were a folder descriptive
of the McGregor Library and a McGregor Reading
List in American History, the latter being an experiment
in widening the possibilities for a more exact knowledge of
national history. This reading list had been issued during
the last session of this period, and a widespread demand
for it had led to several reprintings.

Emphasis on the principle of cooperation, the principle
which had been adopted at the outset of the endeavor to
make historical materials available for scholarly research,
had led to opportunities not a few. One was the arrangement
with the Virginia State Library and with other Virginia
libraries to divide the responsibility for preserving
files of local newspapers. Towards this effort the newspaper
publishers and editors had proved generously responsive.
Archivist Cappon's Virginia Newspapers: A Bibliography
with Historical Introduction and Notes, a volume of some
300 pages which was issued in 1936 as a monograph of the
University's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences,
and which recorded the files held in various libraries, was
among the first fruits of the effort to add availability to
preservation.

Another comprehensive cooperative project in which
the University of Virginia Library was associated with the
Library of Congress, the Virginia State Library, the William
and Mary College Library, and the Library of the
Virginia Historical Society, and for which Mr. Wyllie was
General Editor, was the compilation and publication of

localized sections of a Virginia Imprint Series. Preliminary
checklists for three centers had been issued by 1950. This
plan of procedure had proved of interest to several other
States; and reports of University of Virginia Library holdings
of their imprints were at the close of this period being
supplied to somewhat similar projects in Maryland, Pennsylvania,
and New Jersey.

Other cooperative undertakings in which this Library
had a share may be listed briefly. Most of these were being
handled in the office of the Rare Book and Manuscript
Division, and several were just beginning in 1950. One,
which has already been mentioned, was the complete representation
in the Union Catalogue at the Library of Congress
of cards for University of Virginia book holdings. Cards for
this Library's holdings in Confederate imprints had begun
to go to an extensive project being sponsored by the Athenaeum
Library in Boston; cards for unofficial Confederate
publications had been sent for an undertaking at the University
of North Carolina; and a listing of this Library's collection
of Confederate music had been included in an index
in preparation by Mr. Richard Barksdale Harwell, Curator
of Special Collections at Emory University in Georgia. The
University of Virginia Library had been contributing to the
continuation in process at Worcester, Massachusetts, of the
great Evans American Bibliography; to a film inventory at
Philadelphia; to the Florida Catalogue at Winter Park; to
the inventory of seventeenth century English books in process
at Yale University, under the editorship of Dr. Donald
Goddard Wing; to the union list of American literary
manuscripts to be edited by Dr. Joseph J. Jones of the University
of Texas; to the supplement to the De Ricci-Wilson
Census of Mediaeval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the
United States and Canada, which is to be edited by Professor
Christopher Urdahl Faye of the University of Illinois; and
to the compilation of American holdings of entries in the

Pollard and Redgrave Short Title Catalogue, this last being
an undertaking by Dr. William Warner Bishop of the University
of Michigan. The University of Virginia was of
course contributing whenever opportunity offered to the
Princeton edition of the writings of Thomas Jefferson.
Checklists which had been or were being compiled at the
University of Virginia Library of material connected with
John Randolph of Roanoke, James Madison, James Monroe,
and John C. Calhoun were, at the close of this period,
being considered as the possible bases for extensive future
publication projects by the National Historical Publications
Commission.

Mention of the Princeton edition of Jefferson's Works
and of the Thurlow-Berkeley calendar of Jefferson Papers
of the University of Virginia brings us to the special attention
that had been given in this period to this Library's
Founder. The Library had become an active collector of
books by and about Thomas Jefferson, of the many editions
of the Notes on the State of Virginia and of the Manual of
Parliamentary Practice, of manuscript letters, of material
of all sorts. One huge undertaking had been conceived
early in this 1925–1950 period and had been steadily and
resolutely carried out: a checklist arranged chronologically
of all reported Jeffersonian texts, either in print or in
manuscript, including letters to him as well as those written
by him, the entries giving date, description, location, and
ownership, and information concerning printed form. It
was realized that this Jefferson checklist would be of impressive
size—and eventually it reached an accumulation of well
over 75,000 record slips. Mr. Wyllie, who had started this
while he was Curator of the Virginia Collection, had made
work on it a continuous order of the day; and though others
assisted, this was essentially his creation. When he obtained
leave of absence for war service in the month before the
attack on Pearl Harbor, the results had become so extensive

and so visibly a record of Thomas Jefferson's daily interests
that the Library of Congress proposed that this checklist
be published under the joint imprint of the two Libraries
—thus once more linking the major and the minor institutional
collections which owed their origin to the same distinguished
Founder. The impact of the second world war
compelled postponement of any such project, however
desirable. When, following the Jefferson Bicentennial of
1943, the generous and patriotic proposals from the New
York Times and the Princeton University Press and the
availability as Editor of the superbly equipped Dr. Julian
Parks Boyd presented the possibility of as complete an
edition of the Jeffersonian writings as seemed humanly
possible, the need for the publication of the checklist was,
for the time at least, transferred into its immediate value
as the effective means for a rapid but comprehensive survey
of what would be involved in the proposed undertaking.
Had there been any serious question about value in “spade
work for historical scholarship,” that doubt could at that
point have been gratifyingly dismissed.

The Bicentennial had also been a harvest time for books
and articles about Jefferson. The following list is by way
of illustration. This is, however, a list of books only; and
of the many books written about Thomas Jefferson during
this period only those have been included to whose authors
or editors the University of Virginia Library is known to
have been able to render some assistance. What this list
really illustrates is, therefore, one more benefit conferred
on this Library by its Founder. For he was now, in his
own person as it were, endowing this Library with the
subject matter for an especially fruitful and rewarding
phase of its service.

Abernethy, Thomas Perkins, editor. A Summary View of the Rights
of British America, by Thomas Jefferson. New York, Scholars'
Facsimiles & Reprints, 1943.

Betts, Edwin Morris, editor. Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book,
1766–1824. Philadelphia. American Philosophical Society, 1944.

Betts, Edwin Morris, and Perkins, Hazelhurst Bolton. Thomas
Jefferson's Flower Garden at Monticello. Richmond, The
Dietz Press, 1941.

Bullock, Helen Duprey. My Head and My Heart: A Little History
of Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway. New York, Putnam,
c1945.

Cometti, Elizabeth, editor. Jefferson's Ideas on a University
Library: Letters from the Founder of the University of Virginia
to a Boston Bookseller. Charlottesville, Tracy W. McGregor
Library, 1950.

Davis, Richard Beale, editor. Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
and Francis Walker Gilmer, 1814–1826. Columbia, University
of South Carolina Press, 1946.

Davis, Richard Beale. Francis Walker Gilmer: Life and Learning
in Jefferson's Virginia. Richmond, The Dietz Press, 1939.

Foote, Henry Wilder, editor. The Life and Morals of Jesus of
Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John, by Thomas Jefferson. Boston, The
Beacon Press, 1951.

Foote, Henry Wilder. Thomas Jefferson, Champion of Religious
Freedom, Advocate of Christian Morals. Boston, The Beacon
Press, 1947.

Kimball, Marie. Jefferson, the Road to Glory, 1743 to 1776. New
York, Coward-McCann, c1943.

Kimball, Marie. Jefferson, War and Peace, 1776 to 1784. New York,
Coward-McCann, c1947.

Kimball, Marie. Jefferson: The Scene of Europe, 1784 to 1789.
New York, Coward-McCann, c1950.

Koch, Adrienne, and Peden, William, editors. The Life and
Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. New York, The Modern
Library, c1944.

Logan, Rayford W., editor. Memoirs of a Monticello Slave ...
Charlottesville, The Tracy W. McGregor Library, 1951.

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson the Virginian. Boston, Little, Brown
and Company, 1948.

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and the Rights of Man. Boston, Little,
Brown and Company, 1951.

Mayo, Bernard, editor. Jefferson Himself: The Personal Narrative

of a Many-Sided American. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company,
1942.

Mayo, Bernard, editor. Thomas Jefferson and his Unknown Brother
Randolph ... Charlottesville, The Tracy W. McGregor
Library, 1942.

Shepperson, Archibald Bolling. John Paradise and Lucy Ludwell
of London and Williamsburg. Richmond, The Dietz Press,
1942.

So this attempt at a history of the University of Virginia
Library has ended where it began—with Thomas Jefferson;
and its first paragraph might now profitably be reread along
with these concluding sentences. Many long years, sundry
visible changes, and a few exciting moments have separated
the beginning and the end. In essence, however, there are
a similarity and a difference between the situation in 1825
and the situation in 1950 which afford present cause for
encouragement and for sober thought.

The Founder's estimate of the importance for the
University of the service of its Library had been notably
high. The more recent advances had in a measure restored
to the Library the place which Jefferson had envisioned for
it. That restoration had helped to renew the forward urge
which was implicit in Jefferson's intent. The year 1950 was
therefore not an end, but merely a link in the annals of a
fresh beginning. Herein was the stimulus for new hope.

There was reason also for sober thought. At its beginning
in 1825 the books so carefully selected by Jefferson in
his eighty-second year formed a solid and essential core for
a well rounded university library. The additions to 1895
had been built on that firm foundation. Both foundation
and superstructure had been in large part destroyed by the
burning of the Rotunda. Since 1895 there had been
assembled a vastly larger collection. But the order of the
building process had been reversed. There was now much
superstructure, but the firm foundation was still to be
settled in. Attempts had been made from time to time to

strengthen the edifice at its base. But this had been largely
a process subjected to chance—to good fortune in gifts, to
casual market offerings, to the moment's possession or lack
of available general funds. It was at the end, not at the
beginning, of the fifty-five years since 1895 of the University's
new collection that the group of faculty representatives
chosen as experts by the various Departments and
Schools, for liaison with the Library's efforts at collection
building, was settling down to create a want list of the
significant works and monumental sets for each branch of
learning. It is true that in the years that had elapsed since
Jefferson's day more and broader fields of learning had
been opened and surveyed, and that to establish what would
now be a solid and essential core of university library materials
would necessarily be a much larger undertaking. Yet
in concept this purpose was identical with that performed
by Jefferson when he compiled his list for the Boston bookseller.
It was therefore a sobering thought as well as a
stimulus to forward action that in 1950 some thirty experts,
with a considerable degree of diffidence, had become
engaged in a fundamental library undertaking which had
in 1825 been achieved single-handed by the Sage of Monticello.