19th and 20th Century Rarities on Display in the Donohue
The Donohue Rare Book Room, on the third floor of the Gleeson Library/Geschke Center, is a small, rarified world. In this room, limited editions and illustrated books are treasures, finely printed pages and bound books the currency. Now through Dec. 13, the library is inviting the campus community to read the fine print in more than 30 books representing the golden age of the book arts.
Those who find Gill Sans type speaks to them more than actual words, or who know a lithograph is not a medical procedure, can commune with a rare edition of Dante Alghieri’s Works or a beautifully illustrated collection of Chaucer, as well as other books printed and bound by some of the most well respected printers in Europe and the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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An illustration from the collected works of Geoffrey Chaucer printed by the Kelmscott Press in 1896.
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“The books on display represent many of the high points of the book arts and of the British private press movement. They are truly beautiful books,” said John Hawk, head librarian of the Donohue Rare Book Room.
The Chaucer edition is but a single example of the masterpieces in the Donohue’s entire collection. There is also a fragment of the Gutenberg Bible dating back to the 1450s, a hand-painted religious manuscript called The Chertsey Breviary made in the early 1300s, even a 4,000-year-old carved pottery bead from ancient Assyria made for printing figures on clay. But the Donohue's current display of book arts from the 19th and 20th centuries is outstanding, Hawk said. The presses that existed then, many of which were located in San Francisco, produced letterpress books for people in love with beautiful writing, both textual and contextual.
“It didn’t take me long…to discover that I wanted to collect books for their beauty,” wrote Stephen Gale Herrick in a 1988 Gleeson Library Associates newsletter. Herrick, with his wife Marion, donated the bulk of the books on display. “The great presses of England and the U.S. are well known. (They defined) the goal in making a collection of fine printing.”
Started in 1951 with a gift of hundreds of rare editions by and about Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), the Donohue collection has grown to nearly 18,000 volumes and thousands of additional prints, illustrations, correspondence, and other ephemera, through library acquisitions and donations. From the accounting books and legal documents of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, to margin notations by the famous poet John Donne, to lecture copies carried by Anais Nin, the print collection spans more than 500 years and features the work of nearly as many print makers and other artists.
The Donohue Rare Book Room is open to the public. Hours are Monday-Wednesday, and Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Thursday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
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