By Michael F. Carmichael
July 15, 2010

Many wealthy industrialists and merchant princes set up charitable foundations to give back to their community. You probably know many of them: Ford, Rockefeller, Kresge and W.T. Grant (who made their fortunes by nickels and dimes,) Bill and Melinda Gates. Their foundations provide grant money to good works here and across the globe.

William Lawrence Clements

If you learned anything about American history in school or afterward the chances are good that you can thank a unique group of wealthy businessmen including William L. Clements, Walter Newberry, Henry Huntington, and John Carter Brown for obsessing about books. Each of them, along with the much earlier members of the American Antiquarian Society, not only collected books and other documents about the founding of the country, but built libraries to house them and left the libraries to future generations.

The Visit
Corp! recently visited the Clements Library at University of Michigan and spoke with its director, J, Kevin Graffagnino. William Lawrence Clements was born during the Civil War in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He graduated from the University there in 1882 and joined one of his father’s firms in Bay City, Michigan – this is the firm that made the steam shovels and other heavy equipment that dug the Panama Canal among other major projects during America’s expansionist period.

The Great Room at the Clements Library.

As his personal fortune increased the younger Clements began to develop an interest in early American history. According to Graffagnino, “This was an exciting time to become a collector as many private collections, both British and American, were coming on the market.” Clements’ acquisitions began to grow to the point where he wanted to create a library – at his alma mater. He hired Albert Kahn and built next door to the home of the president of the University in 1923.

J. Kevin Graffagnino, director of the Clements Library.

“We’ve only had four directors,” says current director Graffagnino. “Dr. Adams was here for 28 years, Dr. Peckham for 24, John Dann was here for 30 years. I came in 2008. It’s a terminal job – you either retire, or die,” he laughs.

It’s a much more open library than it was when Mr. Clements founded it to serve as a place for the five or ten greatest scholars of American history to visit once a year – for a week, only. Graffagnino credits his predecessor John Dann for opening the Library to much more of the public. “The first director probably published more than the rest of us combined. He didn’t have any users, so he had all that time on his hands and all that material to work from.”

The original director wasn’t the only one to publish based on material in the collection. “We have more than 500 books, important scholarly works, that have used our materials extensively, not just an illustration,” says Graffagnino.

Show and Tell
We pass through his office to a room with a locked door. “Much of the stuff in the rest of the Library is rare, scarce, hard-to-find – whatever adjective you like – but in this room the rarity is spectacular,” says Graffagnino, who sits next to a common library book trolley. This one, however, is filled with very uncommon materials.

The Rare Book room at the Clements Library.

“For any Americana collector Columbus is the start. In 1493 he returns from the New World and writes a letter. He says ‘I’ve found the Indies’ and reports that he didn’t find as many monsters as he had expected. His letter is published in various cities in Europe in 1493. This one was published in Rome, in Latin, and it’s the first piece of our history, and Mr. Clements bought it in the Nineteen-teens.”

“Clements had started collecting late, he was 42 in 1903. When he bought the Columbus letter he paid $15,000 and thought he’d been taken and that it wouldn’t hold its value. Not long after I’d gotten here in 2008,” says Graffagnino, “a dealer offered us a copy for $1.4 million. Even taking inflation into account $15,000 then is worth about $300,000 today – so I guess you could say it has held its value.”

Graffagnino says that he’s never met a collector who could answer the hypothetical question “what is the one thing you’d save if your house caught fire?” “Of course they never say they’d save their husband or wife,” he laughs heartily. “But, if I were to ask that of Mr. Clements, he’d probably tell me it was this next piece.” In 1588 a man named James Herriot publishes an account in London of his journey with Sir Walter Raleigh to Virginia. It’s the first publication of the settlement of America by an Englishman, in English. There are six known copies of this book. The rest are in the other great libraries.”

There’s a Difference Between the Original and a Copy
To emphasize his premise that the visionaries who collected the thousands of books and manuscripts  that make up the collections of the pantheon of Americana research libraries, Graffagnino says “If Bill Gates got excited about American history, he couldn’t have a copy of this book.” Gates might be able to have a digitized copy, but, Graffagnino points out, “holding the real thing is just not the same. We all go to Washington to see the ‘real’ Star Spangled Banner. We go to Fort McHenry to see where it flew. We all go to see the ‘real’ Declaration of Independence. It matters to us as Americans. If it were a reproduction we would go in much smaller numbers. The information is exactly the same but the original is what matters.”

Graffagnino again reaches for the book trolley and pulls out another slim volume. It’s a 1632 edition of the voyages of French explorer Champlain through North America and Graffagnino opens it to show maps and drawings, all handsomely executed and bound in vellum. It is noticed that he isn’t wearing the customary white gloves. “We joke with students that they have to leave their Mountain Dew at the door. But, these have been around for centuries and I look at them as living things that will be around for centuries more. If your hands are clean and you handle them carefully, there should be no problem.” An advantage of working with early American history is that the materials are written or printed on rag paper, “not tree paper,” Graffagnino reminds us. “Wood pulp paper falls apart on you and since most of what we have stops before 1900 we’re in pretty good shape.”

In 1635 a Dutch author wrote of the settlement, and state of affairs, in the Dutch colony of Newe Amsterdam. It was published back home in Holland and written in old Dutch. “We have 40,000 students on the Michigan campus and perhaps two of them can read Dutch and that’s most likely the modern version. So, this volume might get read perhaps once a decade. For that once-in-a-decade person we have a library where they have to come to read it. Even in English people have trouble because the spellings are just so archaic.”

“That’s our job,” Graffagnino explains. “We’re a rare book library. We don’t have the latest copy of Twilight. For someone who just wants to get the information there are translations and copies but we have the originals.”

A native American Bible, in the language of the Natick (who had no written language before this) published by Harvard in 1660. It’s the first Bible published in the United States and it’s the first book printed in a native American language. Many hundreds were published on what was essentially a Gutenberg press and hand bound, but most were destroyed in King Philip’s War. The great source for the few copies that survived had been sent to England as samples of what the missionaries were doing – and why they needed more money.

Computers vs. Books: A Student Opinion
For the most part, according to Graffagnino, today’s students think that if information isn’t on a computer it can’t be trusted. “It’s remarkable to me that the students that I run into so believe in the computer,” says Graffagnino “If it’s on the computer, it’s true. If it’s in a book they’ll be skeptical.”

“How can you make an argument for or against something if you can’t look up the facts supporting you on the Net?” is something Graffagnino hears a great deal. “With pamphlets,” he counters, as he shows an example of the thousands of simple, oft-times hurriedly printed, pamphlets that are housed in the Clements’ collection that were printed between the French and Indian wars (1754-63) and the American Revolution (1775-1783). “Everybody on both sides of the Atlantic is reading these little pamphlets during that period,” says Graffagnino. “This is Anthony Bacon’s Considerations on the Present State of North American Colonies, London, 1769. It is the only known copy. We are superb on the American Revolution and have virtually everything written in book or pamphlet form by the participants.”

Graffagnino shows more examples, most acquired after the death of Clements who focused on materials produced before 1800. There’s the first account of the explorations of Lewis and Clark, written by a sergeant in the party and published seven years before they got around to their own version.

There’s a ‘travel guide’ by William Clayton. It’s the way to get from the East to California after the discovery of gold in 1849. “Travelers believed in them implicitly,” explains Graffagnino . “The Donner party is about to go up in the mountains and a mountain man comes down, runs into them, and says ‘you don’t want to go up there, it’s winter and you’ll all die.’ ‘But it’s a shortcut. We have a map.’ and they take out one of these travel pamphlets and it says ‘shortcut, right up through there.’ The mountain man is right and they end up as cannibals, stranded in what is now Donner Pass. A lot of these pamphlets were written by people who’d never been on the routes they were describing. The Donner party found out you can’t always rely on something just because it’s in print.”

A word of caution to the students who rely so heavily on the Net for information: the lesson learned by the Donner party also applies to what’s available electronically.

Graffagnino shows a small pamphlet on the race riots that occurred in Detroit – in 1863. The Clements bought their copy, one of two in existence, in the 1940s for $35. Recently a dealer sold the other one to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale for $25,000. He shows a letter, written April 16, 1865. The writer, a wounded Civil War veteran, had been given training as a court reporter, and was called to the bedside of a dying Abraham Lincoln to record the scene. He recounted his experience the next day to a fellow stenographer “in Pittman shorthand, I believe,” explains Graffagnino “This is an eyewitness to one of the great events in American history. It’s an example of someone you wouldn’t ever have heard of if he hadn’t written this letter. And we have it.”

Peer Libraries

The Houghton Library at Harvard.

There are six ‘peer libraries’ in the collection of American history in addition to the Clements according to Graffagnino. The Houghton at Harvard, the Beinecke at Yale, the John Carter Brown at Brown University, the American Antiquarian Society, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Huntington Library in California. “That’s it, for American history. And we each have about 90 percent of what each other has for printed books. pamphlets, maps. What makes each of us uniquely strong in something is the manuscripts – the handwritten stuff, of which there’s only one copy. For us, that’s the American Revolution. We have tens of thousands of hand-written documents from that period.”

The Huntington Library in California.

The Clements is the only one of the group that is at a public university. “The others are either at the Ivies – which are private, or they’re independent institutions. Except for the Antiquarian Society, which was founded in 1818, the others were founded or funded by ‘Victorian gentlemen’ doing the collecting and donating. Some of them were Clements’ contemporaries. There were no income taxes and prices were low. Extractive industries and transportation were the basis of those great fortunes.”

“We may not have a good football team here at Michigan, but the University of Michigan leads the nation in early American history,” he laughs. Graffagnino, who graduated from the only state university in America, Vermont, that has no football team, thus can keep things more in perspective.

Brown University John Carter Brown Library.

Continuing on that theme, Graffagnino says that he has heard that it’s much harder to raise funds when the football team is losing. “The alums get really upset,” he laughs again.

The Collecting Continues
The acquisition program of the Clements is funded by endowments from individuals, private donations to the collections and the Associates, essentially a “friends of the library” organization, which provides about $100,000 in dues annually. “They really like to buy stuff. But, they also help us with special situations,” Graffagnino says. “There’s a series of auctions coming up this fall of thousands of early American manuscripts and one of the Associates gave us a check for $150,000 as a challenge. When we match this we’ll have $300,000 to bid with.”

What’s the biggest challenge for Graffagnino and the Clements? “A new building,” he responds quickly. “We’ve been in this building since 1923. The collections are five times as large, the staff is five times as large – it’s eighteen now. We’d like to build in the space behind us – below ground for collection storage and above ground for reading rooms and people space.”