The Boston Athenaeum

The collection it solved

It is a general collection that became a research library by outliving its own moment.

The nineteenth-century core is what an educated Bostonian read: literature, history, biography, travel, theology, and the periodicals. It served as the city's principal library before the free public system, and it collected for readers rather than for scholars.

The distinctive holdings emerged from that. New England history and genealogy in depth. The Confederate imprints collection — some 12,000 items printed in the South during the Civil War, assembled deliberately and now among the best anywhere. Washington's Mount Vernon library. Early American printing, and a substantial holding of nineteenth-century American art.

The art is not incidental. The Athenaeum ran the city's principal art exhibitions before the Museum of Fine Arts existed, and it holds paintings, sculpture and prints, including Gilbert Stuart's unfinished portraits of George and Martha Washington — the image on the dollar bill — which it owned jointly with the MFA for a century.

Around 600,000 volumes.

The `figures` field says evidenced. A proprietary institution with shareholders keeps accounts, and the Athenaeum's records run continuously from 1807.

The Confederate imprints also record a deliberate collecting decision made against the grain. A Boston institution assembling the printed output of the Confederacy, during and immediately after the war, was gathering the enemy's paper because somebody understood it would otherwise vanish.

The art holdings also had a founding logic. Before the Museum of Fine Arts existed the Athenaeum ran Boston's exhibitions, so paintings and sculpture entered a library because there was nowhere else for them to go.

The New England genealogy holding also has a social explanation. A proprietary library owned by families interested in their own descent will accumulate genealogy, and the result is a research collection built out of self-regard.

The Athenaeum also collected periodicals heavily, which is what a reading room does. Runs of nineteenth-century American and British magazines survive here that public libraries discarded when they stopped being current.

The room and the rules

A five-storey building at 10½ Beacon Street, next to the State House and above the Granary Burying Ground, occupied since 1849.

The fifth-floor reading room is the one people describe: a long space with a barrel vault, busts on plinths, leather chairs, and windows overlooking the graveyard where Paul Revere and Samuel Adams are buried.

Access is `subscribers` and the structure is proprietary rather than membership. Shares were originally $300, are owned rather than rented, and pass by inheritance and sale — so a nineteenth-century Boston family could hold a stake in the library across generations.

That structure produced a specific social character. The Athenaeum was the library of a class, and it knew it. Membership overlapped almost exactly with the group later called the Boston Brahmins.

Non-shareholders can now buy annual memberships, and the first-floor gallery is open to the public without charge.

The building has been extended and renovated repeatedly, most recently in a major project completed in 2002, and the reading rooms survive.

Its collections were not dispersed when the Boston Public Library opened in 1854 — which is the interesting part, because most subscription libraries in this section closed or folded when a free alternative appeared. The Athenaeum's shareholders simply kept paying.

The graveyard view is not incidental to the atmosphere. Readers on the fifth floor look down on the Granary Burying Ground, which is the sort of thing an institution founded in 1807 acquires without planning it.

The shares also produced a distinctive kind of continuity. A proprietary library whose stakes pass by inheritance accumulates families rather than members, and some current shareholders descend from the founders.

The 1849 building was also enlarged upward rather than outward, adding floors as the collection grew — which is why the reading rooms sit at the top and the visitor climbs to them.

What followed

It is the American counterpart to the New York Society Library and the two survived for the same reason: their members wanted something the public system did not provide.

That something was partly the collection and mostly the room. Open stacks, quiet, chairs, and the assumption that a reader belongs there rather than is being accommodated — which a busy free public library, then and now, cannot supply.

Its scholarly value now rests on the specialised collections. The Confederate imprints are a primary resource for the Civil War South; the New England material for regional history; and the early American holdings for the print culture of the republic.

The Washington library purchase of 1848 deserves its own note as an act of preservation. The collection was to be auctioned and dispersed, and a group of Bostonians raised the money to buy it whole. That is the same operation Enriqueta Rylands performed on the Spencer library and Huntington performed repeatedly — a private group intervening to stop a collection being broken up.

Its position in American literary history is documented rather than claimed. Hawthorne wrote about it; Emerson used it constantly; the Transcendentalists met near it.

For this section the Athenaeum shows `access: subscribers` surviving alongside `access: anyone` rather than being replaced by it. Boston built the first great free public library in 1848 and the Athenaeum did not close, because the two were never doing quite the same job.

The Stuart portraits also had a long joint life. The Athenaeum and the Museum of Fine Arts shared ownership of the unfinished Washington portraits for a century, alternating custody, until the arrangement was settled in the 1980s.

For the `access` field the entry also shows `subscribers` as a chosen identity rather than a stage. The Athenaeum could have become a public institution in 1854 and declined, and its members have gone on declining for a hundred and seventy years.