Library set on expedition for basement's treasure
You couldn't judge the huge book by its cover: Its leather spine was flaking off.
It sat on a shelf in the Somerville Library basement, next to a fake Christmas tree and a storage box marked "Xmas." Wearing cotton gloves, Somerville reference and cataloging librarian Kevin O'Kelly unstacked the books, setting aside a detached cover. Two dehumidifiers whirred nearby.
As O'Kelly opened the book, more bits of the spine fell to the floor. "The Commentaries of Caesar," the title page read, "MDCCLIII." That's 1753.
The basement, two floors below teenagers clustered around computers, stores not only 25-year-old issues of "National Geographic" but 250-year-old books.
Half-forgotten for years, they will finally get some attention this fall. The library got a $2,500 federal grant through the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners to hire a conservation specialist who will examine the collection and recommend improvements.
According to Deb Wender, director of book conservation at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, it's not uncommon for a library to have such old books in storage.
The library was established in 1873, so "naturally we would have old books," said library director Nancy Milnor.
Still, "most people have no idea this stuff is here," said O'Kelly, who occasionally reviews books for The Boston Globe.
The collection includes stuff like "Magnalia Christi Americana" by Cotton Mather, the 17th century Boston Puritan leader, with a publication date of 1702. O'Kelly ran his finger over its thick pages. "This might be a facsimile but I'm pretty sure it's a first edition because if you touch this you can feel the impressions made by the printing press," he said.
You won't find the 1803 translation of Josephus's history of the Jews (signed by its early owners Charles and Gilman Lewis) in the computerized Minuteman Library Network catalog. It "would've been in the library's 19th-century card catalog," O'Kelly said.
(Also on a shelf: "A Study of Rare Books.")
Clearly, 19th-century Somerville library users were a cultured lot. O'Kelly pointed to "Catalogue of the Paris Salon, 1880-81" (call numbers Art 708 P23s). The first stand-alone Somerville library building had an art room. Civil War-era local readers also took pride in the city's role in the Revolutionary War. O'Kelly picked up the memoirs of "Light Horse Harry" Lee, a cavalry commander and father of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
It's not all that unusual for books to survive this long, O'Kelly said: Books published before 1850 "really do last because the paper is cloth-based." Many of the books in the basement boasted marbleized endpaper and tooled-leather bindings.
O'Kelly didn't know their value but hoped to prevail upon an appraiser from the Brattle Book Shop who is scheduled to give a workshop this fall.
How did these old tomes end up in the basement? Because libraries constantly buy new books, they constantly have to shed old ones. Milnor, who has held the director position for less than a year, thought previous generations "moved the older things that they thought were no longer of much interest."
"It's tough for public libraries," Wender said. "Space is always an issue [and] it's hard to have appropriate storage."
Not that the current conditions are ideal.
"A shelf collapsed today, and Sparks's 'Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution' collapsed with it," O'Kelly said wryly, later clarifying that the shelf just dropped off its track a bit.
"No, they're not ideal," Milnor agreed, "but at least we're making an attempt."
The basement of the 1913-built building has dehumidifiers in the summer and humidifiers in the winter. The entire building is air-conditioned.
Milnor hopes to hire the consultant, probably from the Northeast Document Conservation Center, in October.
Getting money to actually conserve anything will require more grant-writing, Milnor said. "We will not have any money in our regular library budget" to cover treatments.
"You could easily spend thousands of dollars on a book," Wender said.
They're also starting to catalog the books that seem most pertinent to the 21st-century library patron, such as art books for the city's artists.
O'Kelly has taken a few relevant volumes upstairs to the local history room. Asked if anyone reads them there, he answered, "rarely, but occasionally." 