The day William H. Bond first arrived at Harvard as a graduate student in English literature, he had but one thing on this mind find Arber's edition of the Registers of the Stationer's Company of London.
Long familiar with the book from his undergraduate research at Haverford College Bond wanted to hold the 17th century equivalent of a copyright registry in his own hands and examine the first official reference to a playwright named William Shakespeare. "I had run across so many notations mentioning the volume," he recalls, "and then to actually have it in front of me-that was the wonderful thing about Widener and about Harvard."
Perhaps more than any other scholar at the University, William Bond appreciates the significance of an extraordinary book-not just for the ideas it contains, but also for the way it appeared to those who first read it, for its significance as a specific and tangible piece of history. It will thus be some what difficult for him to pass on his vast and prestigious collection when he retires tomorrow as librarian of Houghton Library after 36 years of service to the Harvard Library system.
But the dignified, genial patriarch of the University's rate book depository plans merely to shift his attention from administration to personal studies and teaching, both of which naturally focus on explaining books to others. After spending next term doing research on a Guggenheim Fellowship, he will resume his duties as Professor of Bibliography for three final years-until he reaches mandatory retirement at age 70.
For decades, Bond says, he has spent no more than 40 uninterrupted minutes at a time working on his own projects. "It is the curse of the librarian's life doing other people's research, never spending a very long time on any one thing," he explains, smiling. "It leaves you scatterbrained as a result."
He will begin pulling his thoughts together next month, striving to complete a 10-year excursion into the life and times of Thomas Hollis V. A member of the family for whom the yard dormitory is named, Hollis led a campaign to restock the Harvard Library after it was entirely destroyed in the famous Massachusetts Hall fire of 1764. Bond decided to track down as many books as possible from the Holliscollection, which over the centuries have become lost amidst the millions of volumes Harvard owns.
Another View of Books
To fully understand a subject, "you must see the object, the book,itself," insists Bond. "Some things you can only learn from the actual object that cannot be conveyed by printed descriptions orphotographs." Of the elusive Hollis gifts, many of which are on displayin Houghton's main lobby, Bond adds: "I keep pulling them out ofWidener stack all the time: they are specially bound, and at this point I can sight a Hollis at 50 paces."
"A kind of tingling feeling" is how Bond describes the pleasure of finding a rate treasure hidden on a dusty shelf. He felt it the firsttime he leafed through the Stationer's Company Register, and it drewhim away from a conventional academic career and into library work whenlegendary Houghton Librarian William A. Jackson offered him a job in 1946.
"The quality that makes a library great is that even if a book is neededonly one in a century, it will be there, "he says, gesturing towardthe small collection of rare volumes which line the walls of his comfortable basement office in Houghton. "There is a tremendous sense of continuity," he adds "Departments change, professors come and go, and the library is a constant"
Great Achievement
Forty years old this year, Houghton contains about 450,000 printed books and enough manuscripts to fill three and a half miles ofshelving if the papers were all removed at once. The subterranean stacksextend south to Mass Ave and east to Quincy St Before 1942, the entire rare book collection resided in a single room in Widener.
Says Herman W Liebert librarian emeritus of Yale's Binecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. "He [Bond] inherited a wonderful resource and had a very, very difficult act to follow, but he has lived up to the challenge[Houghton] is one of the finest collections in the world because ofWilliam Bond.
You will not find anyone in the field who has anything but praise forBond. who himself struggles valiantly for modesty when describing the institution he is leaving. He readily accepts a request for a tour,describing the series of upper floor display rooms which even diehard scholars reading downstairs rarely see.
"You won't find a collection like this anywhere else, "he says of the keats room, where more than two-thirds of the poet's letters and manuscripts are kept "That sounds like boasting, but you hit that a lot talking about Houghton or the Harvard Library."
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