A Brill Calendar: February 27

The Origins of the Huntingdon Library

Few great libraries didn’t originate in worldly power.

Power is expressed through many ways: regular or secular, princely or entrepreneurial, economical or cultural. And the association is not coincidental. Wherever human societies developed conventions for writing & reading – leaving visible signs on durable materials - assertions on property and power were crucial.

It is seldom stressed that literacy is a by-product of an urge to own and exercise rights individually. The great epics – Gilgamesh, Genesis, Iliad – did not launch the Written Word; rather it was accounting systems for transferring herds of live-stock between faraway places and lists recording ancestors, decisions and deeds of mighty monarchs.

These mortals have gone and are largely forgotten, except by scholarly specialists. Their libraries, however, last: book-collections of Abbots in Sankt Gallen, Popes in the Vatican, Emperors in Vienna, Cardinals in Paris, next to the personal treasures of Lorenzo de Medici, Thomas Bodley, Samuel Pepys, Pieter Teyler and Thomas Jefferson.

Not all these riches were created a long time ago, during pre-industrial economical conditions. During the savage spring of capitalism in the United States of America and after its Civil War, many a ‘tycoon’, a new entrepreneurial type, developed a desire to eternalize his name as soon as he could live beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.

The surname ‘Huntington’ is representative. The city in West Virginia of that name was built because of the business acumen of Collis Potter Huntington (1821 – 1900), Moses of the transcontinental railroad system of his country. Another specimen of the breed, Henry Edwards Huntington (February 27 1850 – May 23, 1927) rediscovered - rather suddenly, after turning fifty and amassing a fortune himself – his childhood delight in books. Making up for this unforgivable procrastination and sloth, Henry started to buy books passionately & in the manner befitting his peers; by buying entire libraries. Name & location, Anno Domini 2009: The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.