There are no diamond tiaras in the Charles and Frances Field Room at Green Library, no ruby-studded chests or pots of gold. But this spacious reading room, home of the department of special collections and University archives, is undeniably full of treasures. During the past 70 years, special collections curators have built up an enviable catalog of antique maps, manuscripts, prints, photographs and musical scores—and some 250,000 modern and antiquarian books. It has particularly strong collections in British and American literature, the history of printing and the history of science.
The rare books include early printed editions by Newton, Galileo and Darwin, are highly prized by collectors and would be worth a small fortune in today’s market. But as Field curator and head of special collections Roberto G. Trujillo explains, “Their value is in research and teaching.” Trujillo and his staff work closely with Stanford students and professors who wish to study the items or present them to their classes.
Books and manuscripts routed to special collections for safekeeping are chosen because of their value and fragility. Some come from the open stacks; others are bequeathed from collectors. Most are purchased from catalogs, either to fill gaps in the collection or to satisfy a faculty research need. Once the items are locked in the climate-controlled Field Room or basement vault, staff members take strict precautions to make sure nobody damages or walks off with them. Although the department is open to any scholar with a legitimate research interest, all visitors must register and leave their personal belongings (except laptops) in lockers. Visitors must wear white cotton gloves to handle some items. Pens are forbidden in the reading room.
Trujillo eventually would like to produce a color plate book that will spotlight more than 100 of the collection’s greatest treasures. Among them are these 10 gems.
Naturalis Historia
by Pliny the Elder (1469)
“Elephants are wise and just, remember their duties, enjoy affection and respect religion. They know that their tusks are valuable, so when a tusk falls off they bury it.” That’s just one quirky entry out of hundreds in this hugely influential book—the world’s first encyclopedia of natural science, written by Pliny the Elder in the first century A.D. Stanford’s illustrated Latin version contains the Roman naturalist’s amusing (and often suspect) observations on everything from medicinal plants and mollusks to earthquakes and sea monsters. The hefty volume is one of the few surviving early printed editions. “I think if there were a fire, this is one of the first books I would try to rescue,” says rare book librarian and classics bibliographer John Mustain, gently turning its newspaper-size pages. Of special note is Pliny’s entry on Mount Vesuvius. The ever-curious naturalist went to check out the volcano himself—only to be killed when it erupted in A.D. 79.
Map of Africa
by Nicolaus Germanus (1486)
In recent years, Stanford has acquired one of the largest and most diverse collections of antique African maps in the world. This woodcut, taken from the second edition of a German atlas based on Ptolemy’s Cosmographia, was created two years before Portuguese Bartholomeu Diaz led the first European voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. Printed in Ulm, it features particularly vivid colors. “Libia” and “Etiopia” are marked to the west and east, while the subcontinent is labeled simply “Terra Incognita.” The map is one of 316 originally collected by the late Oscar I. Norwich, a South African surgeon whose widow sold the lot to Stanford in 2001.
Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis
(late 1400s)
Books of hours were user-friendly volumes that helped devout medieval European Catholics recite particular prayers for the hour of the day and time of the year, according to the ecclesiastical calendar. Stanford’s copy was produced in Ghent, Belgium, probably for a wealthy or royal patron. Its handwritten Latin text, painstakingly lettered on vellum, is decorated with jewel-like initial capitals and miniature paintings that complement the Latin prayers and stimulate contemplation. Among its most striking illustrations are the Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem, and Jesus’ raising of Lazarus from the tomb.
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies,
Histories and Tragedies.
This second folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays was printed in London only 16 years after the Bard’s death. It opens with an engraved portrait of the playwright and a droll accompanying note by his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson: “O could [the engraver] but have drawn his wit as well in brass as he hath hit.” Stephen Orgel, the J.E. Reynolds Professor in Humanities, regularly brings students to see it at Green Library “so they can get a sense of how different reading Shakespeare as his contemporaries read him is from reading him in our modernized, annotated editions, and to show them that books in 17th-century culture were beautiful as well as functional.” As he explains, “I want them to have a sense that literature has a history.”
Principia Mathematica
by Isaac Newton (1686)
This rare first edition, printed in London, introduced the world to Newton’s three Laws of Motion as well as the calculus, universal tool of the natural and social sciences. “If you had to choose one volume that was the most important science book ever done, most people would vote for this,” Mustain says. The last time he saw one for sale, it went for more than $300,000. This edition of the Principia is among more than 5,000 volumes in the Samuel I. and Cecile M. Barchas Collection of the History of Science and Ideas. The techie treasure trove, which Stanford acquired in 1982, also includes early editions of works by Ptolemy, Aristarchus, Euclid, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle and Darwin.
Manuscript from The Marriage of Figaro, Act IV
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1786)
These three pages, showing 23 bars of an aria from Mozart’s supreme comic opera, are part of a nearly complete original manuscript housed in the Berlin State Library. The delicate sepia notes dancing along its pages were inked by Mozart himself, making it the ultimate resource for students who want to perform the piece just as the maestro intended. In addition to Figaro, the Memorial Library of Music includes a long letter from Wagner and handwritten scores by Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy and Stravinksy.
Tasayac, The Half Dome, 5000 feet
by Carleton Watkins (circa 1860-65)
Like Leland Stanford, Carleton Watkins was a Gold Rusher who left New York in the early 1850s, moved to Sacramento and wound up in San Francisco. After a brief apprenticeship, he started his own photography business specializing in landscape images for land-dispute cases and mining interests. Watkins’s crystalline images of the then-little-known Yosemite Valley—shot with a mammoth wet-plate camera and developed on the spot in a darkroom tent—created a sensation when they first were exhibited back East: they prompted the Yosemite protection legislation of 1864. Today, Stanford photography professor Joel Leivick brings his students by at least once a quarter to examine the pictures with a magnifying glass. “These photographs really have never been surpassed in terms of technique,” he says. “The clarity and scale are jaw-dropping.” Stanford received more than 150 Watkins Yosemite prints as a gift from Timothy Hopkins, heir to transcontinental railroad magnate Mark Hopkins and an early member of the University’s Board of Trustees. Today, a single Watkins photograph can fetch anywhere from $75,000 to more than $300,000.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
by Beatrix Potter (1902)
A gifted amateur naturalist and watercolorist, Beatrix Potter invented her beloved story about four little rabbits, Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter, to amuse the children of a former governess. Seven years later she timidly approached several London firms about printing it. When all turned her down, she decided to publish the stout little book herself, selling it to friends and relations at one and two pence a copy. This lovingly worn volume, which Potter inscribed “To Josephine,” is unusual for its black-and-white illustrations; its only color picture is the frontispiece showing Mrs. Rabbit administering a dose of chamomile tea to her naughty son: “One table-spoonful to be taken at bed-time.” Peter Rabbit hopped to Stanford in 1981 as part of a collection of children’s books put together by Mary L. Schofield, MA ’30, a longtime Stanford library employee. Other gems in the 8,400-volume collection include early editions by L. Frank Baum and Dr. Seuss.
Manuscript for Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck (1945)
In manuscripts for his early works, John Steinbeck labors over each paragraph, painstakingly working and reworking phrases to get them just right. But by the time he starts scribbling this manuscript for Cannery Row in 1944, two things are clear: the quintessential California storyteller has mastered his craft, and he’s in a hurry. This pencil manuscript, on 143 sheets of yellow legal-size paper, is thought to be the only draft to the final published volume. Writing furiously in neat small script, Steinbeck makes very few deletions. At one point he’s too hurried even to check an atlas to see which states border which, so he leaves himself the instruction, “leave three lines.” As he writes to friends, “I have been working madly at a book. . . . But it is a kind of a fun book that never mentions the war and it is a relief to work on.”
Allen Ginsberg’s Tennis Shoes
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” So begins “Howl,” the antiestablishment masterwork by Allen Ginsberg, first Beat Generation writer of the 1950s to gain popular notice—and notoriety. (The explicit poem was conveniently publicized by a San Francisco obscenity trial.) Stanford English professor emerita Marjorie Perloff, who knew the late poet well, was instrumental in acquiring the typescript of “Howl,” which has annotations in Ginsberg’s hand. “When I was teaching contemporary poetry, I sent the class to the library to consult the manuscript of ‘Howl,’ and it made a big difference to see the real thing and study the changes of this pivotal 20th-century poem,” Perloff recalls. In all, Stanford houses some 1,130 linear feet of Ginsberg memorabilia. Other items in the collection include letters to fellow Beat poets, beard clippings, bumper stickers and buttons with political slogans, and the pair of sneakers Ginsberg wore trekking across Eastern Europe. He kept them, he said, to illustrate the shoddy workmanship of Communist factories.
THERESA JOHNSTON, ’83, is a frequent contributor to Stanford.
