Erica Obey
My reconstruction of the Byrdcliffe library is admittedly a singular, if not entirely quixotic, project. What is the purpose of reconstructing a library from its card catalogue? Does the act of simply cataloguing the books qualify as studying them – especially if one has never read them?
The Byrdcliffe Arts Colony was born when Bolton Brown, Hervey White and Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead chose Woodstock, NY, as the location for their utopian Arts and Crafts community. Construction began in the winter of 1902, and by 1903, 30 buildings had been completed in order to create a rural community-based ideal of a brotherhood of artistic collaboration. Of course, when dealing with this notion of ‘brotherhood’, one must cast a wide net, especially when it comes to the Whiteheads, whose fortune depended on the very industries the colony was meant to eschew. If you are going to understand Byrdcliffe, you must accustom yourself to the notion of an egalitarian community with a servants’ wing.
However, the Whiteheads also assembled a library of nearly 3,000 books, which ranged from practical items like catalogues of ceramic glazes to volumes of rare aesthetic value, including several Kelmscott editions. Byrdcliffe’s library no longer exists. Its catalogue, however, does, which means that it can be reconstructed both in terms of its intellectual content, as well as by tracking down the actual volumes that once belonged to its collection.
My interest in the Byrdcliffe collection began when I moved into a historic house in the colony, and it continued when I found a leather-bound set of Dryden offered on the web, complete with Byrdcliffe bookplate. I was immediately intrigued by the mystery of how a set whose title page stated that it was published in 1821 might find itself in the collection of a collector who was not even born until 1854. The pencilled inscription on Vol. 1, which seems to read ‘1039 Gosford 1884’, suggested that Ralph Whitehead had bought these volumes second-hand, and that seemed to be confirmed by the fact that Whitehead was then a student at Balliol College, Oxford, which had a thriving industry in used books during that period. Another bookplate found in the second volume of the set, which read E Libris Comitis Gosford, or ‘From the Library of the Earl of Gosford’, seemed to support the same idea. I applied to the librarians at Oxfordshire Libraries and Balliol College, where Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead earned an MA in 1880. Both replied immediately, with Kate Robinson at Oxfordshire Libraries informing me that there seems little doubt that the set was originally from the library of the Earl of Gosford, which was bought in 1878 by a bookseller named James Toovey, whose business in West Sussex is still going today.
My inquiries after the set’s bookplate were followed by a delightful and unexpected coda, in the form of an email from Lauren Dolman of the Balliol College Library at Oxford. An edition of A. C. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon had been donated to Balliol College Library by Jeremy Mitchell, a noted Swinburne scholar, and at least one volume bore the Byrdcliffe bookplate. Lauren set herself to research that, and once she had overcome her surprise at finding herself cited in my blog when she Googled the bookplate, she wrote to enquire after any further information I might have on the volume. I immediately sent her photographs of all the entries from the Byrdcliffe card catalogue for Swinburne, along with my Excel transcription of the lot. How satisfying to see the circle close once more, and this Balliol-related volume returned to the college that may well have inspired it.
The tale of the travelling bookplates is not just of interest to specialists in that area. It also provides a map of the transformation of a standard ‘gentleman’s library’ assembled by an affluent Oxford undergraduate into a working resource for a community of artists and intellectuals that included such luminaries as John Dewey, Isadora Duncan, Helen Hayes, Sara Teasdale, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Will and Ariel Durant. The reassembled catalogue should also prove useful to students of the broader American Arts and Crafts movements, as well as those interested in the history of Woodstock and the greater Hudson Valley.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Lauren Dolman of Balliol College Library and Kate Robinson of Oxfordshire Libraries who both kindly responded to my queries. Especial thanks to Jeanne Solensky, Andrew W. Mellon Librarian for the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, for access to the original card catalogue, as well as for answering my many questions.
Notes on Contributor
Erica Obey pursued an academic career specialising in nineteenth-century women folklorists before she decided she would rather be writing the stories herself. In addition to scholarly publications, she is the author of five novels – including the award-winning The Curse of the Braddock Brides and Dazzlepaint, which is set in the Byrdcliffe Colony. She is a dedicated, if impecunious, book collector.
Article Information
Title: What They Read at Byrdcliffe
Author: Erica Obey
Publisher: UCL Press
Publication date (Electronic): 2021
DOI: 10.14324/111.444.9781787359253.06
Copyright statement: © 2021 The Author.
Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.