Happy Returns

It was an extended celebration, Baker Library's 50th birthday party. The festivities went on for two weeks and, had they been commemorating the origins of less awesomely decorous an institution, might have constituted a "bash."

A lot of nice things happened to, as well as at, the Fisher Ames Baker Memorial Library, and a lot of nice things were said about the place and the people who run it.

The Earl of Dartmouth sent greetings, and so did Daniel Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, "an institution," he remarked, "junior by some years to Dartmouth College." For the "visiting scholars," John Kenneth Galbraith recalled the sentiments he had recorded 24 years ago in the introduction to his book The Great Crash:

I never enjoyed writing a book more. ... I did the research in the Baker Library ... , working under the Orosco murals on the ground floor. They somehow supported the mood of un- reality, gargantuan excess and hovering disaster of the months before the crash. And, as might happen toward the end of the morning or at the end of the afternoon if this mood became too overpowering, one could walk out into the sunshine, across the most exquisite village common in all New England, and have a martini and a good meal at the Hanover Inn. ...

"The reference to the martini," Professor Galbraith added, "is nostalgic. I gave them up years ago, long before President Carter made them the symbol of business decadence."

The party started on June 16th, the actual anniversary of the library's dedication, with a ceremony marking the signing out of what was officially declared to be the 12 millionth volume. Looking on was Mrs. John Sloan Dickey, who as staff member Christine Gillespie had made the first loan transaction after Baker opened. Then, appropriately, library personnel went outside for a family picture - an even 100 men and women ranked on the west steps of the building in the bright spring sun.

The penultimate affair was a gala dinner in the Tower Room, preceded by champagne in the main corridor and a string-quartet recital in the 1902 Room. After dinner there were speeches, greetings from far afield, and talk of birthday presents. Friends of the Library Chairman Roderick Stinehour '50 announced that an anonymous donor had given a copy of John Eliot's "Indian Bible," printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1661-63 and declared to be "probably the most significant single volume yet to be acquired by the Library." (The acquisition of what had once been characterized as "the finest Shakespeare collection in private hands in the world" - gifts of the collectors, the late Allerton C. Hickmott '17 and Mrs. Hickmott - had been announced a few days earlier.) The Friends made a gift of $50,000 for purchases over the next decade, and the Kenneth Montgomerys '25 have set up "a very substantial endowment" for a fund to be used for the purchase of books and established in honor of retiring Librarian Edward Connery Lathem '51. A Baker seminar room is also to be named for Lathem, who completed ten years as College Librarian on June 30, the date that had been announced for his retirement.

The final event of the semi-centennial was a day-long "Convocation on American Libraries as Centers of Scholarship." President Emeritus Dickey presided over the morning session, which featured the presidents of the Guggenheim Foundation and of the Council on Library Resources; President Kemeny chaired the afternoon panel, which included Professor Emeritus Arthur Wilson, Professors Blanche Gelfant and Walter Stockmayer, and the librarians of Harvard, the University of Connecticut, Yale, and Williams.

The President closed the celebration by reading a resolution passed by the Trustees in June, an accolade richly laudatory of Lathem's past service to the College and warmly anticipatory of his continued association as a Woodward Fellow.