The Race to Save the Rare Books

No one—not Susan Glover, the acting head of the rare books department; not Beth Prindle; not Stuart Walker himself—can be sure of what will happen when lame-duck director Bernard Margolis leaves his post in June. A search is now under way for a replacement, one who will no doubt, by mayoral dictate, be expected to pay more attention to the library's branch locations. That means the task of bolstering Walker's efforts is likely to continue to fall to a cadre of private library devotees. David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of John Adams, is one such booster. "I take pride in the fact that the BPL is one of the five greatest libraries in America," he says. "You have the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Harvard, Yale, and the BPL, the only one that's truly public." But, he adds, "time is destroying who we are in that library every day." A former library trustee, McCullough has partnered with the Associates of the Boston Public Library in a fundraising effort that has so far collected nearly a million dollars. He's also "adopted" a book, contributing $4,000 for the restoration of John Adams's boyhood volume of Cicero, a project Walker has recently begun.

On the open market, says McCullough, such a book could fetch a quarter of a million dollars. He's not alone in fearing that figures like that might tempt cash-strapped bureaucrats to plan a used book sale: On occasion, Margolis says, city officials have asked him, "Why don't you sell something?" In effect, get a windfall for some of the most valuable books and then use the money to restore the rest. But Margolis feels that all of the BPL's rare books were gifts to the public. "We owe an allegiance to those donors, and if we want to attract additional donors, we must show that we will be good stewards of donated material," he says.

Still, the staggering size of such an effort has even supporters like McCullough talking about a backup plan. Though it would be far better, he says, "to find some generous person who wants to give the money to keep them all in Boston," the author has floated the idea that the BPL donate the Adams collection to a national institution, like the Library of Congress, if the money to conserve it here can't be raised. You don't sell your treasures, but you may have to sacrifice them to protect them, just as the city of Quincy did when it handed over the president's books to the BPL a century ago. While the notion has few fans in Copley Square, to McCullough, it's a realistic last resort. In the meantime, Walker is due to get a little added help in the form of donated funds for an intern and a new conservation study. It's not much, but it's a start.

One afternoon, Stuart Walker sits in the half-light of the rare books reading room. Nearby, a student is exploring some distant corner of the human story. Walker looks down at an ancient ledger and considers his work. "You take something that's dead and bring it back to life," he says. "It's a great occupation." Still, the fight for staffing, money, and public support is taking its toll on his department. "People like us are crazy enough to be devoted to this place. But God, it gets exhausting."