If you have ascended the floors of Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library and explored beyond the dusty stacks of books, you may have stumbled upon a library within a library.
In contrast to the uniform texts that line Mugar’s walls, paintings, Oscar awards, photographs and original manuscripts adorn the great vaults in the department of Special Collections. More than seven miles of shelving store the original and personal belongings of more than 2,000 prominent 20th century figures.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s original speeches and BU report card, Fred Astaire’s dance shoes, letters Bette Davis wrote to her mother from Hollywood, Robert Frost’s unpublished poems and Alistair Cooke’s hand written notes on Robert Kennedy’s assassination are among the one of a kind mementos encapsulated in the Special Collections vaults.
Seated in his office, below portraits of actress Davis and American “aristocrat” Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., is the great collector behind these collections, Dr. Howard Gotlieb. An acclaimed archivist, Gotlieb has been the director of BU’s Special Collections for the past 40 years.
He decides who to collect and subsequently undertakes the challenge of reeling in their most valued belongings. So how does Gotlieb convince scholars, celebrities and artists to give up the very items that define their lives and accomplishments? He uses personality, and if that doesn’t work he bothers them until they agree.
“I have done an awful lot of begging, massaging, wheedling in order to get collections,” Gotlieb said. “Once I may have even threatened suicide, but I can’t remember. I think I almost did.”
Over the years, Gotlieb has received widespread attention for his success in netting valued belongings from some of the world’s most prestigious and accomplished artists, musicians, scholars, journalists, actors, writers and orators. In 1996, The Boston Globe called him “Collector of the Century.”
However, Gotlieb’s acquisitions haven’t come cheap.
“We now have something like 2,225 collections here and so that means a lot of talking over a lot of years,” Gotlieb said.
Refined yet charismatic, it is not difficult to understand how Gotlieb has wooed some of the most powerful people of the last half-century. However, Gotlieb admits his most elusive task has been getting students to view the collections.
According to Gotlieb most BU students are unaware of the breadth of resources and valuables Special Collections houses.
“So many of them do not get up to the fifth floor,” Gotlieb said. “That bothers me. That’s why we have major exhibits on the first floor as to entice them to come up. We put the tip of the iceberg on the first floor, hoping they will come up here to see the other part of the collection or of an exhibit.”
Some BU professors require their students to use Special Collections’s resources for class projects to teach them how to conduct original research. Gotlieb said the experience of viewing primary documents is unparalleled.
“Once an undergraduate engages in original research out of unpublished material, it is a feeling and a sense of discovery that can never be duplicated and it will stand that student in good stead the rest of his or her life,” Gotlieb said. “There is a vast difference [between] reading about Thomas Jefferson and holding a Thomas Jefferson letter in your hand, seeing president Jefferson’s writings and saying to yourself, ‘This is his actual letter and I’m holding it.'”
For the past 29 years, Special Collections has held the annual Lawrence G. Blackmon Student Book Collecting Contest to make students aware of their collections and encourage students to take an interest in collecting.
Students are encouraged to enter the contest by submitting their own private collections.
“We want to make book collectors out of our students,” Gotlieb said. “Over the years some of the collections that have [been] presented to us for judging have been so good that I’ve wished they were mine. It’s amazing the ingenuity and ability of some students to put a collection of books together.”
The judges recognize that students often don’t have a lot of money to purchase rare books.
However, Gotlieb said students have been shrewd and thrifty over the years, producing impressive collections.
“A year or two ago, one of the collections that won was a James Joyce collection that was worth a fortune,” Gotlieb said. “That student was so clever in going to second-hand book stores and finding gems that the book seller himself did not know was worth a great deal of money that he put together a better Joyce collection than we have here.”
Over the years, Special Collections has received a variety of unique collections from students; one student entered a collection of railroad timetables and another collected any book in which a trumpet appears.
Gotlieb said his all time favorite student collection was of Port Manteau catalogs, rare 19th century catalogs that traveling salesmen brought to farms to sell products.
“I suppose it’s the equivalent of Sears Roebuck catalogs,” Gotlieb said. “They are called Port Manteau because you carry them through the door by hand. This young man — he was a sophomore — had put together an extraordinary collection, including the first Sears and Roebuck catalog … You’d have to pay about $200,000 now for the first Sears and Roebuck catalog.”
The winner of the contest, which will be announced on May 1, receives a $500 prize, which Gotlieb said he hopes the student will use to add to the collection.
Gotlieb said the library would never purchase a winning student collection.
“We want to encourage them to keep their collections, to continue collecting, not to get rid of them,” Gotlieb said.
As an archivist for 48 years, Gotlieb knows the value of saving. Gotlieb first gained experience collecting vast bodies of papers when he was assigned to transfer seized German documents to the United States during World War II.
Years later, while doing research for his doctorate at Oxford University, Gotlieb began to notice that some archivists gathered bodies of papers recklessly and had left many of Oxford’s collections incomplete.
“Whoever had curated them or been the archivist had not gathered everything that they should have,” Gotlieb said.
After graduating with a doctorate from Oxford, Gotlieb began working for a press association, where he was asked by Yale University to take charge of their manuscript collection.
“[I] had the experience with these vast bodies of papers during the Nazi regime; they wanted someone who had the ability to work with materials of that nature,” Gotlieb said.
He spent eight years at Yale before being recruited by BU in 1963, where he began to amass materials to form a special collections library.
“It was thrust upon me,” said Gotlieb, smiling.
Gotlieb nurtured the newborn program, transforming it into a lucrative treasure chest now filled with original manuscripts, private diaries, correspondences, awards, trophies, paintings and other memorabilia from some of the world’s most famous people.
BU Provost Dennis Berkey said Special Collections is a rich and impressive library because of Dr. Gotlieb’s diligence over the years.
“Howard Gotlieb is one of the master collectors of our time,” Berkey said.
To honor the openings of some of the exhibits, Gotlieb said Special Collections holds ceremonies and throws parties that serve as great opportunities for him to network and get others to donate their papers.
Gotlieb admits he says and does almost anything to get someone’s papers. Sometimes, he literally shows up at someone’s doorstep.
“Dan Rather loves to tell the story,” Gotlieb said. “I appeared unannounced in his office one day and said ‘I want to collect you,’ and he looked at me shocked. He didn’t know what I was talking about. This was of course 35 years ago. Bit by bit he was persuaded and we’ve been gathering his material ever since, it’s one of our largest collections. It has everything: his correspondence his scripts, his notes, his notebooks, his audio tapes, letters that people send him, inter-office memos. It’s a history of his career.”
Rather, who still sends special collections a box of materials a week, was amazed when he visited his exhibit for the first time when it opened in October 2000. Clementine Brown, the director of media relations for Special Collections remembers the extensive collection brought tears to Rather’s eyes.
“He teared up at that moment; he really did tear up,” Brown said. “It was a very moving moment.”
“‘Oh, I remember that, and I remember this,’ he says and then he came upstairs and from the vault we had taken all the boxes of the Dan Rather collection and built a big wall,” Gotlieb said. “I said ‘Here is your collection,’ and he could not believe that he had produced so much paper.”
Unlike Rather, Gotlieb said some people don’t agree to donate their papers right away and need to be persuaded; this is when Gotlieb’s persistence and finesse are most apparent.
“It took 10 years with Bette Davis, the actress,” Gotlieb said. “Ms. Davis was not sure she wanted her papers here, that they should be saved or they should go elsewhere. She checked on us; she looked us over, but after 10 years she agreed they should come.”
Sometimes the protection and supervision the library offers serves as the most convincing argument. Many people ultimately donate their delicate keepsakes because they know they will be preserved and utilized, Gotlieb said.
“We tell them that their papers will be cataloged, safe in our vaults. They will be periodically exhibited, scholars will make use of them hundreds of years from now and they’ll never be destroyed; they’ll be cared for,” Gotlieb said. “I think that those are the most compelling arguments that anyone can receive.”
Bragging about their current collections also helps Special Collections land new ones. When people hear their colleagues have donated their belongings to Special Collections, they become more comfortable donating theirs, Gotlieb said. People like to be entombed with others in their own profession.
“If it’s a journalist, such as Alistair Cooke, he was pleased with the fact that we have the papers of Oriana Fallaci, Dan Rather and other great journalists here,” Gotlieb said. “If it is an author such as Irwin Shaw, he’s pleased that we have the papers of George Bernard Shaw and of Eric Ambler and other people that he respected. People like to be in our vaults with people that they respect.”
Many people donate their works to ensure that their memory will be preserved and accomplishments will be viewed by future generations.
“All of them are very career-oriented and of course look for a place in posterity, history, a future biographer,” Gotlieb said.
Researchers at the library most frequently access the papers of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., filmmaker Maya Deren and former Speaker of the House John McCormack.
Members of the BU community are not the only people who visit the Special Collections library.
“We have a lady who has come now for over 20 years to look at the papers of Leslie Charteris,” Gotlieb said. “Charteris is the author who wrote The Saint books. The Saint was a detective; it was a very popular series from the 1930s on. Now she’s not a scholar, she’s not writing a life of Mr. Charteris, but she’s so fascinated by him and the books that he wrote that she comes week after week to look at his papers, read his correspondence and look at the original manuscripts and I consider that a serious purpose.”
Gotlieb has also acquired collections from some of the accomplished and prominent figures at BU, including Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel and BU Chancellor Dr. John Silber.
“Dr. Silber has a correspondence with world leaders, politicians, presidents of various countries,” Gotlieb said. “All of that material is in a collection of his papers here as well as the manuscripts of his speeches [and] of his published work.”
Though Silber’s collection is not open to the public yet, Gotlieb presumes it will become available when he retires as chancellor. However, trustees of SpecialCollections don’t determine when Silber’s collection will be open and neitherdoes Gotleib; Silber does.
In order to obtain collections, the library must cater to the demands of the collectees. Gotlieb is willing to abide by any reasonable restrictions that donors place on their collections.
Some donors request that their personal things be kept private for years.
“An author or a public figure [may be] worried about their diaries, that they’ve said something about someone that might get out,” Gotlieb said.”[Some] say ‘Can you keep my diary closed for ten years or five years?’ and we know if we don’t say yes we won’t get that diary so we say yes.”
Martha Gellhorn, a famed World War II journalist and the second wife of Ernest Hemingway, demanded that herhusband’s works be kept private for 25 years following her death.
“Ms. Gellhorn was adamant that nothing may be shown,” Gotlieb said “She threatened to destroy all of the Hemingway material if I did not agree to that restriction.”
Gellhorn died about five years ago, so Special Collections cannot exhibit its Hemingway or Gellhorn collections for 20 more years.
“I think her reason was that she wanted some time to elapse so that no pop biography would be written about her and Hemingway but that time would allow more thought to go into the research behind doing a book on their marriage and their literary competition,” Gotlieb said.
Shirley MacLaine’s collection, which includes correspondences with politicians and actors, film scripts, awards, memorabilia, notebooks and photographs, is also currently closed.
“She is a very frank person and there are things in the collection about some of her colleagues she doesn’t necessarily want published at the present time,” Gotlieb said.
The majority of collections preserved by the library are from people who have notably contributed to society, but the library doesn’t discriminate and evencontains the papers of King’s assassin, James Earl Ray. Gotlieb would not sayhow he obtained the papers but feels they are an important part of the King collection.
“Curators have to be dispassionate,” Gotlieb said. “When you collect history, you collect everyone from great men to scoundrels. It fills in a point of history.”
Gotlieb said the library is constantly looking for new additions to its existing collections.
“We read constantly, we are constantly looking for new authors, even if it’s a first novel,” Gotlieb said. “We make an effort at that early stage in the novelist’s life and say ‘Let us collect you now as your career grows your collection will grow’ and we’ve been right. We began collecting Martin Luther King just before the march on Selma, we began collecting [Samuel] Beckett before he was produced in this country we began collecting Heinrich Boll before he was even translated from the German into English.”
Once people begin donating their materials, Gotlieb encourages them to send anything and everything they can. Even after donors die, family members continue to send things. He usually asks that items be donated, however, Gotlieb said on rare occasions he will purchase a collection with the help of the Friends of the Library, an organization that raises money to support the collections.
“We go to Sotheby’s, we go to Christies, we go to the auction houses in London to add to the collections we have,” Gotlieb said.
Gotlieb enjoys collecting so much, he has made it not only a career but also a personal hobby. He admitted to having a vast collection of rare association books.
“Association books are copies of books that one author gives to another author like Charles Dickens giving a book to [Alfred Lord] Tennyson and writing in it ‘To my dear friend Tennyson here is my first book on David Copperfield,” Gotlieb said.
Tennyson and Lord Byron are just two of the authors that highlight Gotlieb’s collection. He even has the Bible that queen Elizabeth I carried with her while fleeing from her father, Henry VIII.
“I’m very suspicious of people who don’t collect something,” Gotlieb said. “I don’t care what it is, bottle caps, matchbook covers. It shows if you don’t collect something your not interested in life and the culture around you and you don’t want to become an expert in your own field. Everyone should be a collector.”
Timeless and enriching, collections empower people of all ages, Gotlieb said.
“When you’re a certain age, you’ll no longer be able to play tennis or play golf or swim but if you are a book collector, you can do that until the day you die, and you will find it the most satisfying of all hobbies,” Gotlieb said. “It’s not only a hobby, it’s an education. You learn something and you become the world’s greatest living expert in the little field that you’ve carved out for yourself.”
