//literary and arts//
Spring 2019
Spring 2019
Butler’s Hidden Gem:
An Interview with RBML Librarian Jane Siegel
Yaira Kobrin
Butler Library is an iconic part of Columbia’s campus. Many Columbia students have a favorite floor, room, or nook within the library where they prefer to study, while others have regaled their friends with tales (true or false) of late night escapades on Butler’s roof. But few students know about the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, or the RBML, which sits on the sixth floor of Butler and houses the creme de la creme of Butler’s collections. Here, in a gorgeous, sun-lit space, sit bronze busts and ancient printing presses, a model of the original King’s College, and a staff of more than thirty librarians, dedicated solely to the more than 500,000 printed books and seventeen miles of manuscripts, personal letters, and records (among other things) which make up Columbia’s RBML. We sat down with Jane Siegel, an RBML librarian, to learn more about her story, the history of Butler, the RBML, her favorite pieces in the collection, and what role libraries and librarians play, at Columbia and beyond, in the age of technology.
The Current: Tell me a little bit about your background. What did you do before coming to work at Columbia?
Jane Siegel: I did an undergraduate degree in archaeology at Yale and...then ended up working in DC for a couple years. My mother starting asking me when I was going to go to library school, which was not really what I was thinking about, but seemed plausible. So I came to the library school at Columbia.[1] When I went, computers were just coming in. We kind of learned about these new things, but today the whole course would be online. It was really about structure, and about mindset, and about controlled vocabularies and the tools that we used to describe things and make them available.
TC: When did you start working in the RBML, and what’s your specific role here?
JS: I started working here in 1985. I cover a really broad territory. My particular interests are in the history of printing, especially book illustration. What I mostly collect for the library nowadays are our artist books, and fine press books. So that's kind of different—different and related.
TC: Being here for so long must give you a fascinating perspective on the library. How has the RBML changed since 1985?
JS: When I started, we were still in this tradition of rare book libraries as being these kind of elite places [where] we let some people in and not others. We have two parts to our job: we have the “we want you to come in” part, and we have the “we have to protect this material” part. So we live in this gray area, trying to balance those two things, because if we really wanted to protect the stuff we just wouldn't let you in at all and would just leave it on the shelf and it would be nice and safe...So the more use we encourage, the more wear-and-tear we’re engendering. Back in 1985…we were not encouraging people to come in so much. As the years have gone by, we’ve become much more open—we’re waving people down to bring them in to use stuff in the collection. In 1985, there were maybe ten people in the department, and now I think it's more like thirty. And we’re still pressed!
TC: You’ve definitely seen a lot of really interesting books and manuscripts in your time here. Do you have a favorite collection within the RBML?
JS: There are many really wonderful things, but my favorite is a part of the Plimpton collection. Mr. Plimpton collected history of education, and one of the areas that he was particularly interested in were handwriting manuals, which are books that teach you how to write in cursive script. When I arrived in 1985 there were still large parts of his collection that hadn’t been catalogued yet, and a large chunk of that were the handwriting manuals. I was looking at each one before I passed it to the cataloguer, and I just became really intrigued by them. So in 1999, I did an exhibition on American handwriting manuals. Sadly, a lot of the purchasing that we do is based on endowments, and the handwriting manuals are not endowed...but as it has been possible I have been adding to that collection, because I have this fondness for it. We have the first printed handwriting manual, from Italy in 1522, our American collection is really good, and the Dutch collection is the best outside of Holland. The big expert in Holland has written a couple of times about books in our collection.
The manuals are really interesting in and of themselves, I think, because of the differences in the way handwriting was taught in the 18th century as opposed to the 17th or 20th. In the 18th century, the people who were the target for these books were young men who wanted to get a desk job. In the 18th century, if you have a business, you need somebody with good handwriting to write letters, to write the account books, all that stuff. So, when they teach handwriting in the 18th century, they teach handwriting and basic accountancy. There are all these really interesting people involved with them. But it’s also, you know, they're not regular books. They’re not novels. They’re this, like, crazy genre of books that you would just wouldn't think of unless you ran into one; otherwise you wouldn’t even know that these things even exist. So I think they were just really fascinating to me, and I was fascinated that there were whole shelves and shelves of these books that you would just never imagine existed, and then somebody went to the trouble to collect them all together. And this is a wonderful thing about collectors, because if you have one [book] it's mildly interesting, and if you have thirty it's kind of a problem. But if you have a thousand, it's really interesting to compare them. So God bless Mr. Plimpton!
TC: Beyond developing a passion for handwriting manuals—how has your work at the RBML shaped other aspects of your life or interests?
JS: Well, it’s kind of become my life. I’m a member of the Grolier Club, which is a club of bibliophiles in New York City; I go to a lot of lectures; I collect these artist books, and I hang out with book artists, so my personal life is all this stuff. There's also just the library in general. I've become really interested in the history of this collection, and of the library. I’ve become quite obsessed with all of these women who worked in Butler Library. Melville Dewey[2] himself came to Columbia in 1883 to reform the library, and he famously hired six Wellesley graduates from the class of 1883. And everybody talks about them. But it turns out that most of what you read about them is kind of wrong. I started by trying to figure out more about “the Wellesley Six,” who were so young when they came to work here, and then they went off and had lives, and they’re all quite interesting. And there were all these women who worked in the cataloguing department, and I’ve become quite obsessed with a number of them. There aren't many female librarians until the second half of the 19th century, when they needed cheap people to run the libraries.[3] So what happens is that ninety percent of the people working in libraries are now female, but of course ninety percent of the people running libraries are male. Librarianship is similar to nursing and social work, [in that] all the foot soldiers are female and all of the people in charge are male. So when I started looking into this, I really felt that all these women were oppressed... but on the other hand, this is the very beginning of women getting college degrees, and the women who are getting college degrees are all middle class women who wanted to work. In libraries, even though women are being really badly paid, and they’re getting no respect, they have a place to work and support themselves, and the idea of working instead of getting married and having somebody else support you is just this powerful movement. All these women working in the libraries, yeah, they're being oppressed, but they're also being given the opportunity to support themselves. It’s nice to think of these women, living their lives, getting things done.
TC: It seems like libraries, then, and Butler Library in particular, has long been a place for somewhat more subversive movements (like, as you mentioned, employing women). How do you think that plays out today? Have any of the political movements on Columbia’s campus over the years made their impact felt inside the library?
JS: I mean librarians tend to be, I don't know what the word is anymore, but progressive or liberal people. So I think there has always been a lot of sympathy in the library for the students, whatever they're up to.
TC: Why do you think librarians tend to be more progressive?
JS: I don’t know! It just seems to be true across the country. I mean, it's not one hundred percent true, but librarians tend to be like an NPR listening, liberal leaning group of people. I mean, we’re working for nonprofits, we’re bringing education to the masses—there's a lot of agenda there. Well actually—I just had this realization that of course, around a hundred years ago, librarians were very aware of their role as the protectors of culture against [the masses]. I think that now libraries are much more responding to needs rather than having such cultural agendas, although I know we're living in it, so I wouldn’t see the cultural agenda if it existed, perhaps. But when you go to the public libraries today, they all have collections in the languages of the people who live around them.
TC: Clearly, the role of libraries and librarians is shifting, especially in the age of the internet. How would you define that role today?
JS: Libraries, [they’re] not just the books. Now it's internet access for people, and there are also the story hours, and [librarians who can help people fill out their] tax forms, and the English-as-a-second-language classes . I mean, there's just a lot going on. And libraries are these powerful places because there are these people, the librarians, who think about what they're doing. The internet, on the other hand—part of the point of the internet is not really thinking very hard, and there's just all this aggregation without so much curation.
TC: Is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap up here?
JS: Well, you should be sure to include that being at Columbia gives you the opportunity to easily come in and look at real things, and it would be silly to not take advantage of that. Why not look at the first edition of the book that you're writing your paper on? Why not see what books looked like to Shakespeare? You know, it's all sitting right here. [The RBML] is this resource that’s here, we're ready to help people come in and use it. If you're not going to use the rare book library, or have lunch with a professor, then what's the point in going to Columbia?
The Current: Tell me a little bit about your background. What did you do before coming to work at Columbia?
Jane Siegel: I did an undergraduate degree in archaeology at Yale and...then ended up working in DC for a couple years. My mother starting asking me when I was going to go to library school, which was not really what I was thinking about, but seemed plausible. So I came to the library school at Columbia.[1] When I went, computers were just coming in. We kind of learned about these new things, but today the whole course would be online. It was really about structure, and about mindset, and about controlled vocabularies and the tools that we used to describe things and make them available.
TC: When did you start working in the RBML, and what’s your specific role here?
JS: I started working here in 1985. I cover a really broad territory. My particular interests are in the history of printing, especially book illustration. What I mostly collect for the library nowadays are our artist books, and fine press books. So that's kind of different—different and related.
TC: Being here for so long must give you a fascinating perspective on the library. How has the RBML changed since 1985?
JS: When I started, we were still in this tradition of rare book libraries as being these kind of elite places [where] we let some people in and not others. We have two parts to our job: we have the “we want you to come in” part, and we have the “we have to protect this material” part. So we live in this gray area, trying to balance those two things, because if we really wanted to protect the stuff we just wouldn't let you in at all and would just leave it on the shelf and it would be nice and safe...So the more use we encourage, the more wear-and-tear we’re engendering. Back in 1985…we were not encouraging people to come in so much. As the years have gone by, we’ve become much more open—we’re waving people down to bring them in to use stuff in the collection. In 1985, there were maybe ten people in the department, and now I think it's more like thirty. And we’re still pressed!
TC: You’ve definitely seen a lot of really interesting books and manuscripts in your time here. Do you have a favorite collection within the RBML?
JS: There are many really wonderful things, but my favorite is a part of the Plimpton collection. Mr. Plimpton collected history of education, and one of the areas that he was particularly interested in were handwriting manuals, which are books that teach you how to write in cursive script. When I arrived in 1985 there were still large parts of his collection that hadn’t been catalogued yet, and a large chunk of that were the handwriting manuals. I was looking at each one before I passed it to the cataloguer, and I just became really intrigued by them. So in 1999, I did an exhibition on American handwriting manuals. Sadly, a lot of the purchasing that we do is based on endowments, and the handwriting manuals are not endowed...but as it has been possible I have been adding to that collection, because I have this fondness for it. We have the first printed handwriting manual, from Italy in 1522, our American collection is really good, and the Dutch collection is the best outside of Holland. The big expert in Holland has written a couple of times about books in our collection.
The manuals are really interesting in and of themselves, I think, because of the differences in the way handwriting was taught in the 18th century as opposed to the 17th or 20th. In the 18th century, the people who were the target for these books were young men who wanted to get a desk job. In the 18th century, if you have a business, you need somebody with good handwriting to write letters, to write the account books, all that stuff. So, when they teach handwriting in the 18th century, they teach handwriting and basic accountancy. There are all these really interesting people involved with them. But it’s also, you know, they're not regular books. They’re not novels. They’re this, like, crazy genre of books that you would just wouldn't think of unless you ran into one; otherwise you wouldn’t even know that these things even exist. So I think they were just really fascinating to me, and I was fascinated that there were whole shelves and shelves of these books that you would just never imagine existed, and then somebody went to the trouble to collect them all together. And this is a wonderful thing about collectors, because if you have one [book] it's mildly interesting, and if you have thirty it's kind of a problem. But if you have a thousand, it's really interesting to compare them. So God bless Mr. Plimpton!
TC: Beyond developing a passion for handwriting manuals—how has your work at the RBML shaped other aspects of your life or interests?
JS: Well, it’s kind of become my life. I’m a member of the Grolier Club, which is a club of bibliophiles in New York City; I go to a lot of lectures; I collect these artist books, and I hang out with book artists, so my personal life is all this stuff. There's also just the library in general. I've become really interested in the history of this collection, and of the library. I’ve become quite obsessed with all of these women who worked in Butler Library. Melville Dewey[2] himself came to Columbia in 1883 to reform the library, and he famously hired six Wellesley graduates from the class of 1883. And everybody talks about them. But it turns out that most of what you read about them is kind of wrong. I started by trying to figure out more about “the Wellesley Six,” who were so young when they came to work here, and then they went off and had lives, and they’re all quite interesting. And there were all these women who worked in the cataloguing department, and I’ve become quite obsessed with a number of them. There aren't many female librarians until the second half of the 19th century, when they needed cheap people to run the libraries.[3] So what happens is that ninety percent of the people working in libraries are now female, but of course ninety percent of the people running libraries are male. Librarianship is similar to nursing and social work, [in that] all the foot soldiers are female and all of the people in charge are male. So when I started looking into this, I really felt that all these women were oppressed... but on the other hand, this is the very beginning of women getting college degrees, and the women who are getting college degrees are all middle class women who wanted to work. In libraries, even though women are being really badly paid, and they’re getting no respect, they have a place to work and support themselves, and the idea of working instead of getting married and having somebody else support you is just this powerful movement. All these women working in the libraries, yeah, they're being oppressed, but they're also being given the opportunity to support themselves. It’s nice to think of these women, living their lives, getting things done.
TC: It seems like libraries, then, and Butler Library in particular, has long been a place for somewhat more subversive movements (like, as you mentioned, employing women). How do you think that plays out today? Have any of the political movements on Columbia’s campus over the years made their impact felt inside the library?
JS: I mean librarians tend to be, I don't know what the word is anymore, but progressive or liberal people. So I think there has always been a lot of sympathy in the library for the students, whatever they're up to.
TC: Why do you think librarians tend to be more progressive?
JS: I don’t know! It just seems to be true across the country. I mean, it's not one hundred percent true, but librarians tend to be like an NPR listening, liberal leaning group of people. I mean, we’re working for nonprofits, we’re bringing education to the masses—there's a lot of agenda there. Well actually—I just had this realization that of course, around a hundred years ago, librarians were very aware of their role as the protectors of culture against [the masses]. I think that now libraries are much more responding to needs rather than having such cultural agendas, although I know we're living in it, so I wouldn’t see the cultural agenda if it existed, perhaps. But when you go to the public libraries today, they all have collections in the languages of the people who live around them.
TC: Clearly, the role of libraries and librarians is shifting, especially in the age of the internet. How would you define that role today?
JS: Libraries, [they’re] not just the books. Now it's internet access for people, and there are also the story hours, and [librarians who can help people fill out their] tax forms, and the English-as-a-second-language classes . I mean, there's just a lot going on. And libraries are these powerful places because there are these people, the librarians, who think about what they're doing. The internet, on the other hand—part of the point of the internet is not really thinking very hard, and there's just all this aggregation without so much curation.
TC: Is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap up here?
JS: Well, you should be sure to include that being at Columbia gives you the opportunity to easily come in and look at real things, and it would be silly to not take advantage of that. Why not look at the first edition of the book that you're writing your paper on? Why not see what books looked like to Shakespeare? You know, it's all sitting right here. [The RBML] is this resource that’s here, we're ready to help people come in and use it. If you're not going to use the rare book library, or have lunch with a professor, then what's the point in going to Columbia?
[1] Columbia’s library school was shut down in 1991.
[2] Of Dewey Decimal System fame!
[3] When the national public library movement started, there was a sudden need for many more cheap librarians.
[2] Of Dewey Decimal System fame!
[3] When the national public library movement started, there was a sudden need for many more cheap librarians.
//YAIRA KOBRIN is sophomore in Columbia College and Deputy Literary & Arts Editor of The Current. She can be reached at yk2761@columbia.edu.
Photo courtesy of https://library.columbia.edu/locations/rbml.html.
Photo courtesy of https://library.columbia.edu/locations/rbml.html.