Ruskin Collecting by American Research Libraries in the Twentieth Century

At Yale University between the World Wars, collecting of Ruskin and of much else was driven by Chauncey B. Tinker, who advocated for building the libraryʼs special collections and encouraged their use by graduate students. Tinker generously opened his personal rare book and manuscript collection to studentsʼ use and persuaded his friend and fellow collector R. B. Adam II to do the same. While Adamʼs collection was devoted primarily to Samuel Johnson and his circle, he inherited a Ruskin collection from his father, which he built into one of the most comprehensive print collections of Ruskin in America. Adam donated his Ruskin collection largely intact to Yale University Library in 1929. One year later, Yale took the opportunity to complement Adamʼs bequest with acquisitions from the Sothebyʼs 1930 sale. Through the agency of Goodspeed and perhaps others, the sale afforded Yale with a range of manuscripts that was representative both of the chronology and diversity of Ruskinʼs career (see Sothebyʼs Sale of Ruskin Manuscripts and Library, 1930: Goodspeed, the 1930 Acquisitions, and Yale University Library).

In 1930, acquisition of a Ruskin manuscript collection by Yale Library formed a timely complement not only to the Adam Collection but also to the libraryʼs new home, the Sterling Memorial Building. Designed in a Gothic Revival style, the Sterling would inevitably have brought Ruskinʼs ideas to mind, though the building was also very modern. The structure wraps a Gothic cathedral‐ and cloister‐like shell, which houses the reading and circulation spaces, around a setback skyscraper tower, containing the stacks and technical operations. In context of this project, a research collection of Ruskin was probably considered appropriate, but not vital, to discussion about architectural style at Yale.

The time was past when Ruskinʼs ideas were realized directly in designs for Yaleʼs campus buildings. Ruskinian Gothic flourished from 1864, with P. B. Wightʼs (1838–1925) design for the Street Fine Arts Building, through the mid‐1880s, with Russell Sturgisʼs (1836–1909) work on Battell Chapel and other buildings. These men were Ruskin enthusiasts, and their understanding of his architectural and social ideas found supporters among the faculty (Lynn, “Building Yale and Razing It from the Civil War to the Great Depression”, 110–18). But by the 1920s–30s, Victorian thinking about architecture was being displaced by Bauhaus. Gothic Revival did persist in Yaleʼs campus development, just as “collegiate Gothic” thrived on American campuses elsewhere, and teachers like Tinker, who edited Ruskin, must have directed students to the criticʼs theories. Nonetheless, it is questionable whether Ruskinʼs ideas retained the force of an ideology for architects of American universities. According to Paul Goldberger, the designer of the Sterling Memorial Library, James Gamble Rogers (1867–1947), was not prone to defend either its neo‐Gothic design or its skyscraper functionality on ideological grounds. Rogersʼs buildings, Goldberger believes, did not aspire to “the same kind of moral authority that [Augustus Welby] Puginʼs or Ruskinʼs Gothic possessed in the nineteenth century” and that Wightʼs and Sturgisʼs campus buildings had articulated for Yale a half‐century earlier; Rogers sought, rather, “to provide pleasure for the eye along with a casual, undemanding association with the past” (“James Gamble Rogers and the Shaping of Yale in the Twentieth Century”, 272).

At the same time, the Sterling building epitomized what one historian has characterized as the “golden age” of the American university library (1890–1940), when free‐standing, architecturally imposing library buildings were erected at the geographical and intellectual heart of the university campus. Earlier, in the colonial era, college libraries occupied a single room in a multipurpose building; and then in the nineteenth century, larger colleges such as Yale constructed dedicated library buildings—in either neoclassical or (modeled on the English universities) Gothic Revival styles—which sat on the edge of campus and functioned more as glorified book repositories than as circulating libraries. Starting in the late nineteenth century, with the erection of vast and imposing library buildings, situated at the center of a revised campus plan, a new message was conveyed: “educators considered these structures to be ennobling, uplifting students by providing them with opportunities for cultural improvement, whether by studying library books or the building that housed the books” (Gyure, “The Heart of the University”, passim and 119). The architectural rhetoric mixed overwhelming cultural authority with individualistic aspiration and enfranchisement—values that are combined in a challenging and disconcerting fashion in Ruskinʼs lectures about books and reading, Sesame and Lilies (1865). During the golden age of American university library building, Ruskinʼs book servied as a universal school prize—small presentation volumes, which were tricked out as decoratively within their means as the ornate buildings to which the prizes were meant to direct the grateful recipient.

While James Gamble Rogers may have been no ideologue according to Goldberger, he did contend for maintaining “religion, or at least a version of it, at the Yale center”, according to another architectural historian; like other campus planners and library architects of his period, Rogers proposed “creating a new kind of sacred space for the modern American university—a cathedral library laden with quasi‐religious iconography”. Not only did the Sterlingʼs structural plan encase “the functions of a modern library within the shell of a neo‐Gothic cathedral”; the buildingʼs elaborate decoration scheme of Gothic detail encompassed an extensive iconographic program, which was perceived as important enough to sacrifice “six tiers of book stacks in order to fund more ornament” in stone and wood carving, glass and mural painting, and other media (Grubiak, “Reassessing Yaleʼs Cathedral Orgy”, 171, 174, 178). Ruskinʼs books on architecture were well‐known primers for reading iconographic programs, although the Sterlingʼs scheme appears not to have incoporated a direct homage to Ruskin himself (“The Sterling Memorial Library”).

As at Yale, the acquisition of a Ruskin collection at Princeton marked a period of library expansion. In 1939, nearly a decade after the transaction with Yale, Goodspeed supplied Princeton University Library with a similarly representative manuscript collection of Ruskin, which was drawn from acquisitions from the 1931 Sothebyʼs sale (see Sothebyʼs Sale of Ruskin Manuscripts and Library, 1931: Goodspeed and Princeton University Library). The key figure in securing the collection was Willard Thorp (1899–1990), who, like Tinker at Yale, was a tireless advocate for building the library collections, and was teaching Victorian poetry at the time.

For Princeton, however, the cachet of acquiring a Ruskin collection at this juncture was probably even less significant ideologically than it had been for Yale, since the pressing architectural problems were functional rather than aesthetic. Princeton already possessed a Ruskinian‐influenced library building, the Chancellor Green Library (1872), designed in the Venetian polychromatic Gothic style by William Appleton Potter (1842–1909). The buildingʼs octagonal plan—centered on a panopticon‐like reference desk, which was encircled by radiating shelves and reading desks—was responsive to librariansʼ thinking of the time, that services should be “tri‐partitioned” into staff services, secure stacks, and patron reading areas. This facility was rapidly outgrown, so the Chancellor Green was extended in 1897, by being joined to the new Pyne Library—a more practical rectangular building, designed by Potter in “collegiate” Tudor Gothic (Wodehouse, “William Appleton Potter”, 176, 184, 192; Kaser, Evolution of the American Academic Library Building, 32–33).

Even the combined Chancellor Green and Pyne buildings soon reached capacity, despite what was regarded as an embarrassingly modest pace of growth, compared to the mammoth collections held by Yale and Harvard. Moreover, the buildings were not designed to accommodate the flexibility and increased usage demanded by the pedagogical innovations that Woodrow Wilson introduced as president of the university in 1905—the preceptorial method of instruction—and that were further developed in 1923 as the “Four‐Course” plan, which stressed independent and wide‐ranging reading. In 1930, when Yale Library was moving to the new Sterling Building, Princeton took an important step toward addressing these limitations by organizing the Friends of Princeton University Library. While the Friends organization was at heart devoted more to amassing a competitive rare books and manuscript collection for the library than to advocating for brick‐and‐mortar issues, they nonetheless gravitated to a natural alliance with the bookish humanities and social sciences faculty, since, as James Axtell remarks, they expected their donations to be well cared for and used in an up‐to‐date special collections facility, as opposed to the dank storage and paltry exhibition space allowed by the Pyne (Axtell, “The Making of the Princeton University Library”, 507–10, 513, 521–23).

The alignment of these forces is reflected in the funding for the Ruskin purchase from Goodspeed, which was secured “almost entirely by means of contributions” from the Friends organization, faculty in the Department of English and Department of Art, and alumni. Among the contributing English Department faculty were Willard Thorp—well‐known to the Friends, and a chief organizer of the Ruskin effort—and Charles Grosvenor Osgood (1871–1964), a Spenser scholar known for his interdisciplinary approach to literature (Heyl, “Report of the Librarian, for the Year Ending June 30, 1939”, 2; “The Emergency Fund”, 34–35). Osgood had a long‐standing interest in Ruskin. Years earlier, he had answered an invitation by Tinkerʼs friend, the collector R. B. Adam II, to travel to Buffalo and lecture on the master.

While providing the means for institutions to build their Ruskin collections, Charles Goodspeed meanwhile continued to add to his personal Ruskin collection. It was primarily a print collection, “its scope . . . enlarged to include all the authorized editions of Ruskin and his biographies” and comprising “more than five hundred volumes”, but it also included drawings, letters, and other materials. In 1920–21, Goodspeed decided to donate the collection to Wellesley College, “principally in consideration of Ruskinʼs interest in the education of girls”, and because his own daughters had graduated from Wellesley (Yankee Bookseller, 265). Goodspeed continued adding to the collection throughout the 1920s to 1940s.