University of Virginia Library

COLLECTING DANTE FROM TUSCANY: THE FORMATION OF
THE FISKE DANTE COLLECTION AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY

by
Christian Y. Dupont [*]

Daniel Willard Fiske (1831–1904) was a man of assorted ambitions and odd
occupations. Indeed, the disparate facts that might constitute a biograph-
ical sketch would hardly seem to concern the same man: he was a nationally
ranked chess player and the founder of American Chess Monthly; he worked as a
clerk in a post office in Syracuse, New York, where he also wrote for the local
newspaper; during his sophomore year at Hamilton College he was suspended
for stealing firewood from the chapel supply; in the space of an hour after hear-
ing the news of Lincoln's assassination, he crafted a stirring editorial that was
reprinted for years afterwards in dozens of newspapers and magazines; for the
space of a year, he was married to a woman who died of tuberculosis and made
him rich; he spent several years promoting the Romanization of modern Egyp-
tian Arabic; he mastered perhaps forty languages; his favorite country was Ice-
land, though he visited only once; he spent almost a third of his life living in
splendid villas around Tuscany.

Yet this series of facts—remarkable though it might seem—communicates
little of Fiske's actual biography and principal pursuits, which comprised serving
as a professor of northern European languages at Cornell University and its first
librarian, and distinguishing himself above all as a collector of books pertain-
ing to his eclectic passions, including, notably, the subject of this essay: Dante.

I became interested in Fiske in 2000, when curiosity led me to research the
origins of a collection of Dante books gathered by Rev. John Augustine Zahm,

C.S.C., at the University of Notre Dame, where I was then curator for special
collections. I soon discovered that the little-known historic Dante library was
third in size and completeness after the Dante collections at Harvard and Cor-
nell.[1] Interested as to how and why these collections were formed at such diverse
institutions all during the final decades of the nineteenth century, I embarked on
an investigation of the surviving clues, whether they lay in library catalogs and re-
ports, files of bookseller receipts and correspondence, or in the books themselves.

Thus, I initially encountered Fiske as a rival to Zahm, though I quickly
learned how much greater a collector he was and how prominent in Cornell's
institutional history. Over the course of several extended visits to Cornell, I ex-
amined carefully most of the evidence that pertains to Fiske's Dante collecting.
There was much to sort through: nearly four hundred items of correspondence
alone. From this investigation, I have tried to piece together not only the "how"
of Fiske's collecting, but also the "why" of it: why Dante, why Cornell—why
then, why at all? What did it matter at the time that Fiske managed to assemble
the largest collection of works in America by and about the author of the Divine
Comedy, and what did his actions gain for those who came after?

To understand how and why Fiske assembled his Dante library, it will be
helpful first to retrace the rough outlines of his biography in order to bring the
sundry particulars cited above into a more coherent picture of his multifaceted
character and career.[2]

Fiske was born in Ellisburg, a small town in northern New York, on 11 No-
vember 1831. When he was sixteen, the family moved slightly south to Cazenovia
and later to Syracuse. On his father's side, he was related to General Clinton B.
Fisk (1828–90), for whom Fisk University was named, and Harvard historian

FIGURE 1. Portrait of Willard Fiske, ca. 1900. Platinum print photograph by Michele Schem-
boche. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University
Library (Daniel Willard Fiske Papers 13/1/348, Box 19; image ID: REX007_0006).

and philosopher John Fiske (1842–1901).[3] From his mother's side, he could claim
two Harvard presidents and two Harvard librarians as ancestors. Nevertheless,
his immediate family being of humble station (his mother had to supplement
the income of his semi-invalid father with her dressmaking), Fiske was educated
locally, first at Cazenovia Seminary and then at Hamilton College. He left the
latter without graduating, though presumably not on account of his impious
theft. Rather, he appears to have been seized with Wanderlust: having reached
his eighteenth year, Fiske trekked abroad to study the Old Norse sagas and
Scandinavian languages. He sojourned briefly in Copenhagen and then ventured
to Sweden, were he enrolled for two years at the University of Uppsala. A testi-
mony to his unusual capacity for learning languages, he delivered there a series
of lectures in Swedish on American literature. He otherwise supported himself
by working as a correspondent for various American periodicals.

During his journey homeward, Fiske passed through Germany, where he
allowed himself to make a detour to the medieval town of Wolffenbüttel. The
twenty-one-year-old self-fashioned scholar described his visit thus in a diary vi-
gnette later published in the Syracuse Daily Star:

Upon returning to the United States in 1852, Fiske took a position as as-
sistant librarian to Joseph Cogswell at the Astor Library in New York City. This
was undoubtedly a formative experience for Fiske, one that would confirm his
future as a librarian, book collector and ultimately bibliographer. The Astor
Library, created through a foundation bequest of fur merchant and real estate
tycoon John Jacob Astor in 1849, was one of the first publicly-accessible reference
libraries in the country, and, consequently, one of the first to introduce modern
methods of cataloging books and to provide assistance to readers who wished to
consult them. Fiske's own notions of a library, his ideals and values, meshed with
Cogswell's and flourished under his guidance. Frank Norton, an associate on the
Astor Library staff, confirmed that Fiske fit well the new persona of a librarian
that Cogswell aimed at cultivating:

Fiske's perspicacity evidently also served him well in one of his chief pastimes,
chess—which he discovered, incidentally, while studying Persian. He was a top
player, who more famously founded American Chess Monthly in January 1857
and organized the first American Chess Congress, held in New York later the
same year.

Fiske left the Astor Library in 1859 to serve as general secretary and librar-
ian of the American Geographical Society. The following year, he was engaged
as an attaché to the United States Legation in Vienna, after which he returned
to live with his parents in Syracuse, and entered what may be described as an
incubatory phase of his life. He worked for a time as a postal clerk and part-
ner in a bookstore while writing articles for Appleton's New American Cyclopaedia
and resuming his journalistic career as a writer and editor for the Syracuse Daily
Journal (for which he composed his emotive and oft-reprinted editorial on the
assassination of Lincoln). He frequently commented on civil service issues, urging
reforms based on his observations of foreign governments.

A few years later, Fiske joined the staff of the Hartford Courant, whose editor,
Charles Dudley Warner, had been his Hamilton College roommate. While on
assignment in Egypt in 1868 to report on the opening of the Suez Canal (where
he also developed his interest in the Romanization of the Egyptian alphabet[6] ),
Fiske received and accepted an invitation from the fledging Cornell University
to serve as professor of northern European languages and librarian.

In the latter role, Fiske applied the modern methods of library management
and ideals of scholarly service that he practiced at the Astor Library, model-
ing Cornell's new library as a non-circulating reference collection, open nine
hours a day. By contrast, most university libraries at the time, especially those
in urban areas, operated according to an opposite scheme. On the assumption
that students had access to other area libraries, they offered few open hours but
permitted borrowing. Because Ithaca was a relatively isolated and rural town,
with no nearby libraries able to serve academic needs, Fiske strove hard to build
Cornell's collections from a modest budget, and even returned a portion of his
own salary each year to help pay binding expenses. Through his difficult labors,
and perhaps more on their account than in spite of them, he developed a deep
and lasting love for Cornell, one that would endure beyond the severe personal
tensions that lay ahead.

Surely another source of Fiske's devotion to Cornell, and reason for accepting
his appointments in the first place, was the intimate friendship he shared with its
president, Andrew Dickson White. Fiske and White were boyhood companions,
and they renewed their acquaintance during Fiske's years in Syracuse. The two
men were drawn together, no doubt, by their love for books and their interest in
European affairs and history. Fiske seems to have been the only member of the
Cornell faculty to address White by his first name.

When Fiske took a leave of absence in 1879 for reasons of health, White
loaned him money so that he could travel to Iceland and visit several cities in

Europe. White then advanced him additional funds to buy an engagement ring to
present to Miss Jennie McGraw, the only child of Cornell trustee John McGraw,
who had recently passed away, leaving his daughter most of his considerable es-
tate. Yet Jennie herself was suffering from tuberculosis and at best reckoning had
only a few months to live. Thus, as the various facts came to be known, Ithacans
began to suspect a plot whereby Fiske's marriage to Miss Jennie was contrived
to guarantee that her father's money would be safely harbored with Cornell and
not some other suitor, of whom there were several. If, however, there was such
a plot (the surviving evidence is unclear), all did not go as precisely as planned.
Fiske did marry Jennie in Berlin in July 1880, and she did die very soon after
their return to Ithaca in the fall of 1881. Yet when it came time to settle her will,
the interested parties became sharply divided, with Cornell trustees Henry Sage
(McGraw's former business partner) and Judge Douglass Boardman (an influen-
tial district court justice who served as executor) on one side, Fiske and Jennie's
next-of-kin on the other, and A. D. White caught in the middle trying to mediate
reconciliation or compromise.[7]

The conflict erupted when Fiske discovered that Sage and Boardman had
become aware of a limiting clause in the land-grant university's charter that pre-
vented it from holding real and personal property in excess of an aggregate of
three million dollars, thus making it ineligible to receive most of Jennie's generous
bequests, which were estimated to include at least a million dollars for Cornell,
including two hundred thousand dollars for a new library. Fiske, meanwhile,
apparently received and invested all or most of the three hundred thousand
dollars she had left to him. All probably would have gone well had the trustees
informed Fiske directly of their intention to request the state legislature to amend
the charter, just as Boardman had been direct in asking Fiske to sign a pre-nup-
tial agreement nullifying any claims to Jennie's wealth. Nonetheless the trustees
acted underhandedly according to Fiske, even scheduling the final settlement of
the estate at a time when they knew he would be out of the country. Instead of
cooperating with their plans, Fiske, at the suggestion of a local apprentice lawyer,
decided to file suit and break the provisions of his wife's will that profited the
university on grounds that they could be construed to violate laws designed to
protect the interests of surviving heirs (according to state law, a decedent with
surviving heirs was prohibited from giving more than half his estate to charity).
Fiske lost the first round of court battles, but won on appeals right up to the
Supreme Court of the United States, which issued its ruling in May 1890. Prior
to this last appeal, Sage had offered to build a library for Cornell that would
receive Jennie's endowment if his side should win; if not, the library would be
his gift. At an expense of half a million dollars, the library and the iconic clock
tower erected beside it in 1891 in tribute to Jennie ended up costing Sage nearly
what Fiske finally inherited as Jennie's widower after McGraw family members
and the lawyers claimed their share.[8]

Fiske's disillusionment over the convoluted and painful affair, in which most
Ithacans regarded him as the villain, led him to resign his Cornell posts in 1883.
Fiske then established residence in Florence, Italy, renting at first the Villa Fo-
rini, formerly occupied by American minister George P. Marsh, and taking his
seventy-eight-year-old widowed mother with him. As part of the large Anglo-
American expatriate community, the Fiskes entertained fellow Americans on
their travels, including Mark Twain and Henry James. With his characteristi-
cally acerbic wit, James once remarked that he found Fiske, "though friendly and
hospitable, an absolutely colourless little personage."[9] Fiske's mother fared better
in his estimate, earning praise, however ironic, for being "the most self-possessed
American he ever knew."[10]

Apart from such punchy and more pleasant social interludes, Fiske settled
into a life of scholarly leisure, devoting most of his time and energy, if not money,
to collecting books. In addition to expanding the impressively comprehensive
Icelandic collection that he had begun assembling as a student, and occasion-
ally purchasing books on chess, he added to the Petrarch collection that he had
started while honeymooning in Europe. After his aging mother returned to the
aid and company of other family members in New York in 1888, Fiske rented a
studio apartment in Florence proper, in Via Lungo il Mugnone.

In 1892, following the settlement of the "Great Will Case," as it had come
to be known, and the subsequent freeing-up of financial as well as emotional re-
sources, Fiske purchased a spacious villa built around an old medieval tower near
the town of San Domenico, in the hills overlooking Florence. Formerly occupied
by English poet Walter Savage Landor, it had been left vacant and in disrepair,
and Fiske invested a tidy sum to expand and modernize it.[11] It was from this
bucolic retreat overlooking Florence and a branch of the Africo, where the pro-

tagonists of Boccaccio's Decameron had gathered centuries before to tell their tales,
that Fiske pursued his bibliographic labors—preparing a catalog of the fruits
of his most recent book-hunting quest for works printed in Rhaeto-Romanic
dialects,[12] corresponding with booksellers and scholars about his Icelandic and
Petrarch collections,[13] and occasionally venturing out on buying expeditions to
various European cities.

On one of these acquisition tours, in late April 1892, Fiske purchased a copy
of the Divina Commedia that was destined to become the first volume in the mas-
sive Dante collection that he would assemble for Cornell University Library. In
a postcard to George William Harris, who had ably succeeded him as librarian,
Fiske wrote: "I send you a copy of Dante—(Giolito) Stagnino edition of 1536.
It is, I believe, complete, but in a sad binding. No special value attached to the
edition so far as I know. Should the library already possess a copy of it, please
forward this to the library at Dryden."[14] With these few lines, Fiske meant sim-
ply to dispose of an odd volume that he came across while browsing through a
bookseller's stock in hopes of enriching his Petrarch collection. He only bought
the Dante, he later confessed, because he thought it unusual, and—probably
just as relevant—inexpensive. With good reason: it proved to be infected! In
a reply to Fiske, Harris wrote: "The Dante of 1536 was duly received. It was
not in the Library, so we keep it with thanks. On examination of the binding,
we found it contained some live bookworms, and the binding was handed over
to Professor Comstock who was delighted to get the little pests, and is carefully
nursing them in confinement."[15] Bookworms, common in earlier centuries, had
become something of an endangered species in modern libraries. According to
an article that later appeared in the popular New York Sunday World, it was only
the third time in recent history that live bookworm larvae had been discovered
and raised to maturity.[16]

Another year went by before Fiske's letters reported any further acquisitions
of Dante material, but thereafter the references became more frequent. While on

one of his buying expeditions in Palermo and southern Italy in February 1893,
Fiske wrote to Harris to tell him to expect a package of Dante books that he had
posted to him. Again in May, he sent another such report, concluding it with a
modest yet anticipatory proposal: "I have been a good deal ill and a good deal
busy," he began, referring to his continued bouts with the pneumonia he had
contracted in Palermo, "or I should have written earlier to say that I am sending
the library some packages of Dante books—partly the spoils of my own shelves,
partly taken from the antiquarians here and elsewhere. I don't stop to bind them
because of the lack of time and strength."[17] He then went on: "My idea is—if
it seems good to you—that the Dante books you already have and those now
sent you should be entered in one of your early bulletins, so as to form a basis
on which to build." Fiske thus referred to the practice that he had encouraged
Harris as his successor to follow of publishing periodic lists of recent acquisitions,
typically grouped around some common subject as a way of featuring an emerg-
ing area of collecting interest. In another letter a week later, Fiske elaborated his
suggestion: "Reflecting on the matter, perhaps you may deem it wise to add to
the next Bulletin a supplement of two-line titles under some such title as: Hand-
list of Dante Books in the University Library. This will be much cheaper and
will show equally well what the Library has and indicate what it wants. It would
occupy only a very few pages. Of Dante bibliographies—with full titles—there
are already many. What do you think of this?"[18]

Harris replied, "I think your suggestion of a list of two-line titles would be
better than the printing of a list of full titles, which could add nothing of im-
portance to the full bibliographies already printed."[19] Harris was cordial and
deferent in echoing the unpretentious musings of his mentor, yet just a year later
both Fiske and Harris would raise their sights and embark upon one of the most
ambitious bibliographical projects up to that time, Dante-related or otherwise.
"Meantime," Harris continued in the same reply to Fiske, "I have sent for two
copies of the catalogue of the Dante works in the Harvard and Boston Libraries
and will have it checked up and ready for you when you arrive."[20]

In 1890, William Coolidge Lane, an acquisitions librarian at Harvard, had
published an inventory of works by and about Dante held by the Harvard Col-
lege and Boston Public libraries. As the title page of the volume announced,
"for a large part of its Dante Collection Harvard College Library is indebted
to Professor Charles Eliot Norton and the Dante Society."[21] Norton was one of

the founders of the Dante Society, which had been established in Cambridge
in 1881 "for the encouragement and promotion of the study of Dante's life and
works" among the growing numbers of readers of Dante in the United States.[22]
The society provided its members with documentary studies and short articles
about Dante in its annual reports, and furnished Harvard College Library with a
rich array of Dante-related titles, which members of the society could request to
borrow for personal study. Boston Public Library also held a number of volumes
on Dante, several unique to its collection with respect to Harvard's. Additional
copies and editions held in the personal libraries of Norton and George Ticknor,
one of the earliest proponents of Dante in America and a founder of Boston
Public Library, were likewise noted in Lane's catalog.[23] Plans for the publication
of the catalog were first announced in the Fourth Annual Report of the Dante Society
in 1885, and its content began appearing that year in preliminary form in the
Harvard University Bulletin and separately.[24] In many subsequent annual reports of
the society through 1916, Lane included a listing of additions to the Dante Col-
lection in Harvard College Library that came through purchases funded by the
Dante Society or direct donation.[25] He also published a comprehensive annual
Dante bibliography in the Dante Society reports from 1887 until 1890, when the
regular publication of a more thorough bibliography in the Bullettino of the Ital-
ian Dante Society obviated the need to continue.[26]

Lane's catalogs and bibliographical supplements, in their various editions
and additions, thus served not only as inventories of regional collections of
Dante material but also as bibliographical guides to their subject. The main
1890 catalog was organized into several sections, reflecting a library classifica-
tion scheme that Lane had developed based on models supplied by Italian Dante
bibliographies.[27]

In June 1893, Fiske wrote to Harris from Paris, where he was stopping to
buy books on his way to London and then the United States: "I have purposely
refrained from consulting Lane's (Harvard) lists until now, when I have had
my copies of the main list (1890) and of one later (May 1892) sent on here. My
secretary didn't succeed in finding the other."[28] That Fiske started using Lane's
catalog and one of his supplemental lists in the summer of 1893 indicates that
his interest in acquiring Dante material had passed from casual to intentional
and systematic. He used the listings both as a guide for what to seek out and
purchase as well as means of recording of what he had found; he later mentions
that he wore out several copies of Lane's catalog in this manner.[29] Fiske went on
in this same letter, "I retain with me most of the bibliogr[aphy] books. I take it for
granted that the Library has Colomb de Batines (1845–6) so I have bought only
the Indice by Bacchi della lega (1883) and the supplement by Biagi (1883). The
most useful Dante book I know of is Scartazzini's Dante Handbuch (1892)—bib-
liographically as otherwise."[30] In retrospect, Fiske should have bought Colomb

de Batines's bibliography when he had the chance, as the Cornell Library in fact
lacked the two-volume guide and it would be months before Fiske could find
another set to make up the deficit.

In this same letter, Fiske related more details about his means of pursuing
Dante books and securing them for shipment to Cornell: "Galignani's Bookshop
will send from here a small case of Dante books by the French steamer leaving
next Saturday, June 24. It will be addressed c/o Tice + Lynch [a customs clear-
ing agent]. Allen, I hope, will send another small case next week. I leave for
London to-morrow."[31] Edward G. Allen was an American agent in London who
would search for foreign books upon request. Fiske used his services frequently
in building his Dante collection, as London would prove to be the best market
for supplying Dante material during those years. Fiske went on: "I trust that
mail packages from Harrassowitz, Trübner (Strasbourg), Bare, Hoepli, Clausen
(Turin), Loescher + Seeber, and from Geneva and Lausanne are coming in
rapidly."[32] This last line showed that Fiske was receiving and reviewing catalogs
from booksellers all across Europe, having thrown the whole network of rela-
tionships he had developed over many years into action to aid him in what was
heating up to be a mad pursuit of anything published in any language at any
time about Dante. By the time Fiske embarked on his Dante collecting, he had
more than four decades of book-buying experience behind him, the last of which
had been almost constantly devoted to the activity. He knew how to work intel-
ligently and quickly, and at this point in his life, he had more cash at his disposal
to apply to the objects of his collecting aims than ever before, thanks to the final
settlement of the "Great Will Case."

While one might expect that this last advantage would overrule all others,
and lead Fiske to give free rein to his feverish ambitions, it did not. Fiske's long
experience as a collector taught him much about the book market and the pricing
of books, and he would rarely allow himself to purchase a volume at a price he
considered exorbitant, no matter how much he may have desired the particular
prize or how rare it might be. On the other hand, he was certainly motivated
by what he considered bargains. For example, he wrote to Harris from London
in that same June of 1893, "At Quaritch's I found, to my surprise, quite a stock
of Dante. He was good enough to mark all the ordinary books down about
20 percent, so that I bought quite a number…. Quaritch likewise has a copy of
the first edition of Dante (Foligno), but his price is stupendous, and I am reflecting
on it. I think Harvard hasn't got it."[33]

In this instance, Fiske did break with his tendency toward thrift and bought
the editio princeps from Quaritch after some negotiation. One factor that may have
motivated his decision is that the particular copy included extensive marginal an-
notations attributed at the time to the fifteenth-century Italian poet Luca Pulci.[34]
Fiske delighted in acquiring volumes that he thought might hold special interest
to scholars. Another factor might simply have been the fact that Harvard lacked a
copy. Harris commented in a letter from the end of July, after Fiske had reported
the purchase, "I hardly ventured to hope that you would add it to the collection
after what you said about Quaritch's price. But you are evidently determined to
give us the best Dante collection in the country. Crane is really overwhelmed by
the extent of the collection."[35] T. F. ("Teefy") Crane was Cornell's professor of
Italian at the time, and a good friend of Fiske's.

Did Harris's remark betray a hint of rivalry? Was Fiske out to out-do Harvard
at one of its best bibliographical games? By all accounts, the Dante Society had
been remarkably successful in achieving one of its chief aims, namely "establish-
ing a library of Dantesque literature" for the benefit of its members and the
university.[36] Could it have been that an otherwise mild-mannered Fiske saw an
opportunity to assert his collecting might and bibliographical prowess on a stage
where it would finally get noticed? Hardly anyone in America was interested
in Petrarch at the time, much less his Icelandic or Rhaeto-Romance material,
while Dante, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly popular and widely
read, as evidenced by the number of publishers who issued both cheap and more
upscale editions of Henry Francis Cary's blank-verse translation of the Commedia
paired with Gustave Doré's sensational Gothic engravings, not to mention the
success that Longfellow's translation had enjoyed, at least initially. Or could it
have been that Fiske wanted to prove to his rivals in the "Great Will Case"—
Sage and Boardman—that it was he who cared the most about Jennie McGraw's
intentions to provide support for Cornell's library? Is that why he began directing
the yields from his Dante collecting immediately to the shelves of the new library
that Sage had built for the university in memory of Jennie, instead of retaining

those precious volumes for his own enjoyment in Florence, as he did with his
beloved Petrarch and Icelandic collections?

Although competition was a primary motivator for other collectors, it seems
less likely an explanation in Fiske's case. For Fiske, competing in an intellectual
game like chess was one thing, but it was against his complacent nature to engage
in competition on a personal, emotional level. By all contemporary reports, and
from what one can surmise of his character by reading his letters, he likewise
shunned situations that could provoke conflict, except when some moral cause
was at stake. Fiske's behavior in the affair of his wife's estate epitomized this trait:
he became indignant when he learned that the Cornell trustees had been with-
holding information from him, but then removed himself from the immediacy
of the resulting strife by resigning his posts and transferring his domicile across
the ocean. More probably, Fiske's Dante collecting was prompted by his gradual
recognition of Dante's centrality to Italian literature, his prime importance on
the scale of literary authors from all nationalities and ages, and the sheer mass
of literature that called out for expert bibliographers to master.

In his "Introductory" to the eventual collection catalog, Fiske confessed that
he initially approached Dante through the lens of Petrarch, which is to say as an
important predecessor to the latter.[37] Yet he also remarked that his residence in
Italy brought him daily reminders of the greatness of the first of the tre corone.[38]
Dante's fame in Italy, especially in Florence, was never greater than in 1865, the
sixth centenary of his birth, which came at a time when liberal-minded Italians
were trying to form a unified political entity from the fractured kingdoms on
their shared peninsula. Dante and his literary genius emerged as a potent symbol
around which the proponents of the Risorgimento could rally and establish a na-
tion, an achievement that came finally in 1870 with the annexation of Rome dur-
ing the Franco-Prussian War.[39] Post unification, the Dante standard was usurped
by a resurgent Catholic right.[40] Leading clergy, such as Dante commentator Gia-
como Poletto, and even Pope Leo XIII, who appointed Poletto to a special chair
in Dante studies in his newly established college of St. Apollinare, found in the
Commedia a providential confluence of the streams of scholastic theology.[41] It was
this latter current that swept up Zahm while he served as procurator general for
his religious order in Rome and convinced him that his aspirations for making

Notre Dame a great Catholic university could be manifestly advanced by creating
for its library a great collection of works by and about the great Catholic poet.[42]

Fiske, on the other hand, does not appear to have been impelled either by
an ideological purpose, like Zahm, or even by an immediately academic one, as
in the case of Harvard. Instead, it seems that, true to his word, Fiske's interest in
Dante was awakened by passive observation. He could not have failed to notice
the various public monuments and works of art dedicated to Dante that appeared
in Italy during the latter part of the nineteenth century, culminating in the tow-
ering statue erected in Trent in 1896. Symbolizing the irredentist movement
that sought to recover the city and the Italian-speaking portion of the Tyrolean
province from the Austrian empire, sculptor Cesare Zocchi portrayed Dante
as an exalted figure, standing with his arm stretched out in seeming defiance
toward the Alps and the German-speaking lands to the north.[43] Another factor
contributing to his awareness was likely the reappearance of Dante material on
the antiquarian market following its release from the generation of collectors who
had grabbed it up during the height of Dante's popularity around celebrations of
the sixth centenary of his birth in 1865.[44] Surely the simple and easy availability
of Dante-related works must have stimulated Fiske's collecting appetite.

Granting that possibility, the menu consisted of more courses than he might
have imagined. In July 1893, Harris wrote to Fiske: "As the books arrive they
are checked on a copy of the Harvard list (1890), and slips are made for any not
in that list, and the number of these is surprisingly large."[45] This is when the
"charm of the chase," as Fiske would later describe it,[46] got a hold of him, and

when he determined to assemble as comprehensive a collection of Dante material
as possible—not out of some prideful need to compete with Harvard, much less
bolster a partisan ambition, but because he was coming to recognize that none of
the Dante bibliographies he was working with, no matter how recent, adequately
represented the enormous literature that existed and continued to flourish. Ulti-
mately, the main reason that Fiske became passionate about Dante collecting was
so that he could contribute to the advancement of Dante bibliography.

In this light, what one might find surprising, as Fiske himself probably did
in retrospect, is that he showed signs of thinking he was nearing completion of
his collecting task by the early part of 1894, less than a year after he began. In a
letter dated 13 February 1894, Fiske included a drawing of a book label that he
proposed to Harris to identify the Dante books he had been giving to the Cornell
library.[47] Interestingly, he used the Italian phrase "Biblioteca Dantesca," mean-
ing "Dante library," rather than "raccolta" or "collezione," which would have
been the more natural linguistic choices, especially given that his collection was
to be incorporated into the university's library.[48] The choice of wording suggested
that Fiske was striving for and thought he would soon achieve a certain complete-
ness with respect to the physical gathering of the editions of Dante works that
were known then to him to exist. Also noteworthy in this same regard was his
inclusion of a date span on the label, 1893–1894, as if to announce that he would
have completed the collection, or library, by the end of the year. The second
page of the letter included another sketch showing how Fiske intended the label
to be placed on the upper-left corner of the inside cover of the Dante volumes
in conjunction with his standard "W. F." bookplate, to be pasted in the center.
Although the labels were made up and the placement scheme followed for awhile,
it was eventually abandoned, and a full-scale bookplate was created for the Dante
collection—still called, and more properly so, a "Biblioteca Dantesca"—with
the "W. F." initials spread across the pages of an open book surrounded by a
floriated border in a manner that complemented the design of the bookplates for
his Icelandic and Petrarch collections. The date span was dropped but the word

"bequest" was added, perhaps signaling Fiske's intention to fund an endowment
for future acquisitions through his estate, which he in fact did. Indeed, he ulti-
mately left more to Cornell for "the use and purposes of the Library" than he
was apportioned through the settlement of the will suit.[49]

Further evidence that Fiske thought he was getting close to completing his col-
lecting of Dante in 1894 may be discerned in the summary lists that he included
in some of his letters. For example, while book-hunting in Rome in March, he
appended to one of his letters to Harris a list of the Renaissance editions of the
Commedia that he had acquired, which, in fact, included all except for certain
extremely rare incunabula and two reprint editions that he was not sure whether
he had secured and wanted Harris to verify (see figure 2).[50]

Another such list appeared in a letter to Harris from May 1894 (see figure 3):
"I copy from my Harv. Cat. the numbered titles lacking…. Do you find any oth-
ers on your copy of the Cat. that are still wanting?"[51] There were about seventy-
five titles from Lane's catalog that Fiske had by that point not yet secured—these
in proportion to the 1,381 titles Harvard claimed to own by 1892 and the more
than 1,250 titles that Harris in a letter from 3 March had reported were among
the Fiske Dante library but not recorded by Lane. No wonder Fiske must have
thought that he was nearing the end of his collecting labors: there were com-
paratively few volumes left to chase down, at least according to the standard
of the Harvard Catalog, which Fiske had by then far outstripped. Around this
time, Harris placed the running volume tally for the collection at 2,865, slightly
more than double the last published count of Harvard's collection, which stood
at 1,381 (in fairness, however, Harvard's collection continued to grow, and dif-
ferences in the ways pamphlets were counted skewed the respective tallies).[52]

Around this time, we find Harris and Fiske reconsidering the matter of the
collection catalog. They had previously settled on the notion of publishing merely
a simple two-line title listing since, according to their own reasoning, other bib-
liographies could be consulted for imprint and other information. At the end of
April 1894, however, Harris wrote to Fiske: "The collection has now grown so
large that it almost seems to deserve to have something better than a brief title
finding list. What would you think of a combined Cornell + Harvard Dante

FIGURE 2. List of editions of the Divina Commedia acquired by Fiske as of March, 1894. The
penciled numbers to the right of each entry are the library classification numbers Harris as-
signed to them according to his unique system. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manu-
script Collections, Cornell University Library (Daniel Willard Fiske, letter to George William
Harris, 8 March 1894, Daniel Willard Fiske Papers 13/1/1165, Dante Scrapbook IV [21]).

FIGURE 3. A list, in Fiske's hand, with penciled annotations by Harris, indicating the works
the Fiske Dante collection lacked as of May 1894 with respect to the 1890 joint catalog of the
Dante collections in Harvard College and Boston Public libraries. Courtesy of the Division
of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library (Daniel Willard Fiske, let-
ter to George William Harris, 30 May 1894, Daniel Willard Fiske Papers 13/1/1165, Dante
Scrapbook IV [39]).

Catalogue? Or would you prefer to have the catalogue of the Cornell Collec-
tion entirely independent?"[53] Fiske replied, "I think it will be better to try +
do something better than a short title catalog—including perhaps careful cor-
rections of all preceding Dante bibliographies + a very complete list of Dante
bibliographical works. I can furnish some considerable matter, as for instance,
a pretty complete list of Polish books + articles on Dante, + c And I might give
dates of death of Dante writers, whose lives have not reached the biographical
lexicon + encyclopedia. Perhaps I can compile a list of books + articles not yet
in the collection to serve as an appendix. But all this depends on my health."[54]

Fiske was suffering from a heart and circulatory ailment that caused his over-
all condition to deteriorate over the next several months, gradually limiting and

restricting his collecting activities under doctor's orders. In late October he wrote
to Harris, "I have been waiting here in the hope that my heart's action would
grow a little stronger so that I might venture across the ocean. For six weeks now
my Italian servant and myself have been living alone in a quiet street following
out the directions given me carefully—walking so much, at just such a time,
dieting strictly etc…. I am told too that I musn't for the present buy any more
Dante books—and even not to write or read over half an hour a day. Think what
a year I am to have."[55]

As 1894 neared its end, Fiske was worn out from his Dante collecting but
was anxious to pursue it further. He had come to realize that the material to
be sought out was much greater than he had anticipated when the year started,
especially since in the course of it he had expanded the scope of his collection
to include all of foreign translations of Dante and Dante criticism in every lan-
guage. To continue, and especially to produce a catalog, he would need consid-
erable help.

Already by March of 1894, not quite a year after Fiske had begun earnest
work on the collection, the American newspaper in Florence carried a story
about it that was picked up on the other side of the Atlantic.[56] The May issue
of Cornell Magazine from the same year offered an overview of the collection by
T. F. Crane.[57] These stories, or perhaps reports of them in academic circles, must
have caught the attention of Theodore Koch, a recent Harvard graduate who
had studied Dante under Charles Eliot Norton and who was busy at the time
compiling, under the supervision of William Lane, a bibliography of all works on
Dante that had been published in America.[58] During the fall of 1895, Koch trav-
eled to Cornell to see what further references he might find for his bibliography
in the Fiske Dante Library. In a letter to Arthur Richmond Marsh, the secretary
of the Dante Society in Cambridge who was waiting to publish Koch's work in a
future volume of the Society's annual reports, Koch related his impressions of the
collection. "It is very rich along certain lines, early editions of Dante, translations
and out-of-the-way Danteiana," he admitted, but quickly turned to criticize its
deficiencies: "I have pointed out to Mr. Harris, the librarian, the omissions in
my own special fields of bibliographical interest, American Danteiana, and what
has been called the iconography of the D.C. [i.e., Divine Comedy], as well as in

the matter of Dante portraits."[59] He also went a step further and lamented the
manner used to arrange and describe the materials, citing, among other faults,
the neglect of related material in periodicals and other literature beyond those
volumes donated by Fiske. "I wish I could convince the staff of the inadequacy
of their method of cataloging the collection," he continued. "As I am to meet
Mr. Fiske this week I may try my powers of persuasion on him. I prove my point
(to my satisfaction at least) by taking the two sonnets of Michael Angelo on
Dante, mentioned in their card catalogue, and making out a list of translations
into English, French, German and Spanish. I find but five references in their
catalogue, while there are as many as eighteen translations that ought to be in
their list; every one is in the Cornell Library, some it is true are not on the Dante
shelves, but I trust they are not going to forget the needs of the student so much
as to issue a mere catalogue of the books brought together by Mr. Fiske."[60]

With these words, Koch inscribed his destiny and the future of one of the
century's greatest bibliographical projects. Koch did have the opportunity to
meet Fiske (who, having recovered a measure of health and stamina, was mak-
ing a short visit to New York at the time) and did persuade him that he needed
more expert help to catalog his Dante collection (in truth, Fiske had already been
aware of the limitations of Harris's regular cataloging assistants[61] ), and further-
more convinced the collector to hire him to do the job himself. Producing a letter
of introduction and recommendation from Charles Eliot Norton, Koch negoti-
ated a salary of $125 per month, about the equivalent of a full librarian's salary.[62]
Fiske agreed to pay half, and Harris paid the remainder from his library budget.[63]

In addition to a good salary, Koch, on the basis of his expert bibliographical
knowledge of the subject, also negotiated the unprecedented privilege at Cornell
of having his name appear on the title page of the printed catalog that would
issue from the collaborative and cumulative effort.[64] Koch probably hoped to
establish his reputation and future career as a librarian on the basis of his experi-
ence at Cornell. If so, his bid paid off well: within a decade, at the youthful age
of thirty-four, he would advance to the post of chief librarian at the University
of Michigan.[65]

Koch initially estimated that completing a Dante catalog for Cornell along
the lines he proposed would require the remainder of the academic year 1895-
1896, or about six months from his date of hire in December 1895.[66] In fact,
it would take about four years to carry the last entries to press. The continual
delays became a matter of much consternation and some embarrassment to Har-
ris, who had to appeal on several occasions both to Fiske and Cornell's board
of trustees to extend Koch's salary. Koch excused himself by explaining that the
project had grown both in size and scope. Fiske continued to buy and ship more
volumes, and Koch, on Fiske's authority, filled certain gaps by placing orders
of his own and even directed the sale of duplicates to supply additional funds
for binding.[67] Koch also reshaped the project to include reviews of books and
periodical literature on Dante, thus making the catalog in some respects more
of a comprehensive bibliographical guide to Dante literature than the inventory
of a single collection.[68]

Koch closely modeled his catalog upon Lane's, both in terms of the biblio-
graphical elements contained in the entries and their typographical presenta-
tions. Indeed, setting a page from each catalog side-by-side, it would be difficult
to tell the difference a first glance, especially since the same printer, John Wilson

FIGURE 4. Comparison of the entries for the 1515 Aldine edition of the Divina Commedia from
William Coolidge Lane, The Dante Collections in the Harvard College and Boston Public Librar-
ies (Cambridge, MA: Issued by the Library of Harvard University, 1890), 5 (on the left),
and Theodore Wesley Koch, Catalogue of the Dante Collection Presented by Willard Fiske, 2 vols.
(Ithaca, NY: printed for Cornell University Library by John Wilson and Son, University
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1898–1900), 1:7. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript
Collections, Cornell University Library.

and Son, who operated the University Press at Harvard, executed both works.
Yet upon closer inspection, certain improvements in the Cornell catalog come
to light. First, errors were corrected: the 1515 Aldine, for instance, is no longer
described as a reprint of the undated Paganino edition, as the Harvard catalog
had suggested. Next, the Cornell catalog generally included more detailed bib-
liographical information as well as citations pertaining to the edition from other
sources. Also, the entries in the Cornell catalog were organized and identified
by date, rather than by ordinal series numbering, making it easier to find par-
ticular works. Of course, the more obvious difference between the two catalogs
was their extent. The Harvard and Boston Public Library catalog contained ap-
proximately 1,400 entries in 116 pages; the Cornell catalog, some 7,000 entries in
606 pages divided between two large and heavy tomes, which appeared respec-
tively in 1898 and 1900. Koch also went on to publish a supplemental bibliog-
raphy of Dante titles and articles that he had identified in the catalogs of other
American libraries in the course of his researches for Fiske.[69]

Yet what was the perceived impact of such a colossal collection, let alone
its massive apparatus? Already in 1897, an article in the London Bookman
observed:

Meanwhile, a less flattering interpretation of this notice appeared in the pages of
the New York World under the heading "We are Doers":
The argument is as surprising as it is inelegant, but it appears that Koch, who
conscientiously pasted these clippings into the series of scrapbooks he had begun
assembling to document the formation of the Fiske Dante Collection, was not
merely amused but also somewhat disturbed by the imputed futility of his long
labors.

In an essay for Cornell Magazine titled "The Growth and Importance of the
Cornell Dante Collection," Koch directly confronted the inference underlying
such criticism. "Some students of Dante," he wrote,

Koch went on, acknowledging that,
He then concluded:

Certainly Fiske knew how to sift and sort through an abundant accumulation
of sources, and how to help others appreciate and learn the needed skills. In the
"Introductory" he provided Koch for the catalog of his Dante collection, Fiske
devoted the last two-thirds of the sixteen-page essay to a species of bibliographi-
cal analysis that approached what modern library and information science has
termed "bibliometrics."[75] For example, he observed: "Worldwide fame—la fama
mondiale—is decided by a man's standing outside of his own country, or what in
the case of the writer, is the same thing, beyond the limits of his own speech.
Renderings of his productions measure the breadth of his renown. Only one lan-
guage, so far as I know, possessing translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, is with-
out a complete translation of the Divine Comedy."[76] He likewise invoked other
statistical measures that were enabled only by the compilation of the collection
catalog: "If we make use of another test we shall learn that, since the year 1800,
the average annual number of editions of the Divine Comedy, in the original,
has been considerably more than four. Can the century now passing show four
hundred and forty editions, let us say, of the English Shakespeare?"[77]

The passionate collector was just as passionate a bibliographer, and it was
the combination of these two passions together with a third, namely sharing his
knowledge with interested readers, that made him also a passionate librarian—a
profession with which it seems Fiske continued to identify himself even after he
had exchanged the campus on the hillsides of Ithaca for his villas on the hillsides
of Tuscany.

The story of the Fiske Dante Library at Cornell indeed illustrates how serious
book collecting, bibliography and librarianship go hand in hand. The collector
relies on bibliographies as an explorer relies on maps, and to the extent that
maps may indicate uncharted territories, the collector provides the coordinate

data necessary to sketch in their features. The librarian meanwhile, like a good
first mate, oversees the deck crew and ensures that ship's cargo is brought safely
to port. Charting the course as captain, Fiske displayed his talents in each role as
he skillfully led his book-collecting voyage and coordinated the duties performed
by Harris and Koch in organizing and cataloging their prizes. In the end, they
jointly succeeded in mastering a huge tract of bibliographical ocean, sounding
the very depths of Dantean literature from both sides of the Atlantic.[78]