The Creativity and Beauty of Preservation:

Some Thoughts on the Pennsylvania Assembly Library

Richard J. Cox

Harrisburg , PA October 4, 2004

Lecture Given for the Pennsylvania Humanities Council

It is an honor to be here today to discuss the efforts to preserve the Pennsylvania Assembly Library, an eighteenth century enterprise that involved such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and served as the nucleus for the latter establishment in 1816 of the State Library of Pennsylvania.

This ancient library, passing its 250 th anniversary, reflects the efforts of the nation's founders to build a society based on law, reason, decency, and order. Isaac Norris's March 10, 1753 letter stating the need for building a “compleat collection of the best law books” 1 for the Pennsylvania Assembly is testimony to high ideals we would later see reflected in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, ideals we hope live on in the halls of government. The addition of books on religion, mathematics, architecture, and history remain as testimony to the knowledge informing the pioneering lawmakers of our state and nation. Even as Revolution neared, members of the Assembly continued to add to the library, and the library was used by members of the Continental Congress, the Convention of the State of Pennsylvania (drafting a state constitution), and the Constitutional Convention. In that regard, the library is a memory house of the origins of the nation, and if for no other reason than that deserves to be preserved as an early testament to the importance of books, libraries, and archives in the formation of ideas surrounding America 's birth.

My aim here today is not to provide a history of the Assembly Library, especially since that history has already been well done. My purpose is to try to engage you to reflect on the nature and importance of such a preservation task, one that has been both challenged and become confused in our modern society. Preserving the documents of the past is a task that is complex (technical), expensive (for obvious reasons), and sometimes controversial (are there not other needs more pressing, and, besides, what do we save?) Many ideas and notions about what is involved compete for attention – sometimes leading to more confusion than clarity. Why do we sit here today and worry with preserving a small pile of old books and assorted documents when the world seems to be spiraling into hell? Why do we dote about such matters when we seem to be spiritually bankrupt, fiscally broken, and threatened from both inside and outside our nation? Why do we worry about preserving a 1656 English printing of An act for the better observation of the Lords-Day or the sixteenth century four volume, third edition of The architecture of A. Palladio ? One reason is that these books represent a unique legislative library associated with the founding of our nation, a window in what was going on in the minds of the politicians making brave, and sometimes foolhardy, decisions to push the colony and later state into a new form of democratic government. It is not so much the individual value of each book, as an artifact or as a source of information, but the grouping of books suggesting how eighteenth century libraries were assembled that gives the Pennsylvania Assembly Library its true worth.

Preservation is also something that is easy to take for granted. How difficult can it be? Just put the books on a bookshelf, the manuscripts in a box, or the maps in a flat case – and store them away. Try this at home, of course, and you discover books with mildew, old family papers that are brittle and crumbing, and CD's that are degrading. And while it is regrettable about such personal memory loss, it is a stretch for many people to imagine that the nation can suffer monumental losses in its memory. After all, does not our government take care of its old records, its historical documents, and its collective memory? Are there not limitless resources to ensure that our documentary heritage is well preserved?

Sometimes preservation is difficult to explain so that its responsibilities and functions are fully understood. People assume that the mere act of moving stuff to an archives, library, museum is all this is necessary, when in fact it is often only the first step in what may be a long and difficult journey. More often than not, we assume it is someone else's task, when in fact it is all of our responsibility. Too often, some critic has tried to place the blame for the failure to maintain our historic resources on some institution or some discipline. One university librarian, mulling over the notion of preservation, likes to use the term “stewardship” because it “implies that the responsibilities extend beyond the tenure of one single individual, that stewardship extends ‘over time and over generations'. . . .” 2 So look around. We are all in this together. Like our Revolutionary forbears we all succeed in this, or hang together.

Americans seem to adore their history, anyway, so aren't they doing well with protecting their ancient documents, their historic sites, and their old buildings? We are immersed in the Antiques Roadshow and the History Detectives ; we track bidding contests on eBay for old objects (although one wonders what excessive bids for Britney Spears's used chewing gum says about us); we hang family photographs and mementos of our own past in our house and workplaces; we devour history books, both non-fiction and fiction; we frequent flea markets and antique malls; we go to museums and historic sites; and we pay to see movies about historical events. Sometimes, it seems to me, that all this activity is intended to make us feel good about our sense of the past, without assuming any of the responsibility for caring for it. Preservation, in almost any sense of it I can imagine, is a deliberative act. What I admire about what is going on today is the commitment to embrace and protect a small set of old books, both as testimony to what others have done before us and for the benefit of those coming down the road. It is difficult to know there is a past if there are no clues about that past.

The reality is quite different, as it always is. The threat to the loss of our documentary heritage is greater than ever before. Not only are the older works deteriorating through natural decay, overuse, sometimes neglect, but the newer documents and texts, increasingly placed in digital form, face immense technical challenges in their maintenance. Someday, in the not too distant future, the nature of this threat will be brought home to countless Americans, as they watch their family photograph albums and videos, all now being put into digital form, begin to disappear before their eyes. Most are stampeding after the digital camera without thinking through the unintended consequences to switch to a technology that seems more user friendly and convenient. Many people will probably seek the advice of librarians and archivists, after they have exhausted their patience waiting for an answer to a telephone helpline or trying to make sense of an online assistant – both of which might speak different languages. One wonders how much of our Revolutionary heritage we might have left for us today if the patriots had had access to the Internet, a communications system they certainly would have used because of its power in reaching countless people in remarkably brief periods of time. As the speed of communications would have shifted from days to nanoseconds, so would have the amount of time to preserve the messages shrunk in an unbelievable fashion.

The greatest threat, however, may come through complacency – the idea that other, greater priorities press us for time and resources. There is always something more important to do. And sometimes this is true. Many of our cultural institutions face real, hard choices between keeping the lights turned on and providing extraordinary care for the documents and artifacts they hold. Occasionally a benefactor bails them out, or a government funding program helps out. There is another kind of complacency that is more dangerous, one revealing how we really see a responsibility like preservation. This is when we labor hard on every other activity, but never the technical and labor intensive preservation because the financial costs seem so high. We gamble that the books, manuscripts, and objects will last just a bit longer. We invest in short-lived information technology . . . and invest and invest and invest … while the historical collections deteriorate. We hold parties and put up exhibitions to build interest in what we do, but we often fail to convey a clear message about our sometimes less than glamorous stewardship responsibility. Public events such as these are critical to revealing the hard, monotonous, boring, and costly labor often needed to ensure that a small part of our documentary heritage survives. We need the books and other documents so that we can listen to what those who founded and built our nation had to say about what a democracy stands for and how it must continually evolve when faced with new threats.

And historical documents have so much to say. The people who began this library were trying to tell us something important, just as were the founders of this nation (and some were involved in both). Historian Joseph Ellis, in his brilliant book Founding Brothers , writes that “all the vanguard members of the revolutionary generation developed a keen sense of their historical significance even while they were still making the history on which their reputations would rest. They began posing for posterity, writing letters to us as much as to one another. . . .” 3 They looked to the future, leaving us a legacy of their words, careers, institutions, and the nation they built. They wanted to instruct us, and they worried that this new nation was a fragile experiment – and they seemed conscious that their documents would form archives and fill libraries that would be used. Jefferson bequeathed his personal library to be the nucleus of the Library of Congress, while he carefully arranged and indexed his personal papers. Adams labored to save every letter, note, and financial record and his heirs followed suit to build perhaps the most impressive family archives in American history. And the two engaged in a lengthy correspondence about the meaning of the American Revolution over the last fourteen years of their lives that was more for eventual public edification than for personal enjoyment and instruction. Individuals who formed libraries such as the one we are celebrating here usually operated with similar motives.

These same individuals also looked to the past. They cited ancient philosophers, Enlightenment scholars, and older forms of democratic republics as their authorities and their inspiration. They understood their own history and that of England and its relationship to America . They designed and built residences and public buildings based on classical models. Yet, there was considerable creativity in how they utilized these older sources. Another intrepid scholar of the Revolutionary generation, Bernard Bailyn, suggests that these individuals looked to the past, but , he writes, “though they searched the histories they knew, consulted the learned authorities of the day, and reviewed the masterworks of political theory, they found few precedents to follow, no models to imitate. They struggled with logical, ideological, and conceptual problems that seemed to have no solutions.” 4 Bailyn believes the founders applied a creative genius to these problems, in shaping a new nation. Obviously, in the documents and libraries they left behind they hoped their own creativity would be infectious to later generations. It can't be, of course, if we allow their ideas to suffocate through the loss of historic documents emanating from their labors.

The founding of a library is a creative act in itself, as well as kind of a museum of many other creative expressions. Anyone who has built a personal library knows the care and thought that go into selecting books for it, building the shelves, designing the room, and organizing the volumes. Imagination is a requirement. Within the library, whether personal or public, each book represents a separate creative act of writing, scholarship, and imagination. Pittsburgher Annie Dillard, in her book about writing, gives us a glimpse about how creating even a sentence is a deliberate act of creativity, and hard work, when she writes, “writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick . So you might as well write Moby-Dick .” 5 Each act of reading is creative as well, since every writer is an avid reader and their craft honed by what they read. Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography , states, “ From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books,” 6 leading to his first career as a printer and certainly influencing his later activities, few of which could not be called creative. Writing constitutions and political tracts is no less a creative act, so it is no surprise that the early Pennsylvania Assembly had a library or that it was well used. Or that Franklin was one of the individuals involved in its formation.

If writing and reading a book are creative acts, then preserving books and documents is no less a process. There are highly technical activities and skills involved in the preservation of our documentary heritage, but the process of both selecting what is to be preserved and how it should be done is as much art as science, as much craft as technology. Some may wonder why we do not just digitize the Assembly collection and throw its contents on the World Wide Web? Perhaps that should be done as well, but from time to time we face an artifact or a collection where the value of the original is such that the object (or objects) conveys as much evidence and information as the content, and attention must be given to conserving the artifact in order to preserve its meaning. There is great debate about such matters, of course, and I have been involved in these professional and public arguments for the better part of two decades, but there is, every once in a while something that speaks more loudly to our hearts as well as our minds when we are engaged in such work.

Although we need to be careful about confusing preservation with sentimental mushiness, a rabid antiquarianism that does not really help us make wise decisions about what to preserve or how to do it, we also need to recognize that there is an emotional side to preservation. Another Pittsburgher, historian David McCullough, gave us a glimpse of this when he was interviewed while working on his biography of John Adams, relating how he liked to work with Adams 's original letters: “There's something about holding those pieces of paper in your hands. You have the feeling very nearly that you are the recipient of the letter – your hands are in the same place as the hands of Abigail Adams or Jefferson or Washington.” 7 Think of the various hands that may have held the books in the Pennsylvania Assembly Library.

We are doing a good thing here. In a time when our liberties seem under attack, it is important to gaze on the authorities used in establishing such liberties, not merely as a benign or random thought, but as a living testament to what we believe. When I leave here, I am heading down to Williamsburg, Virginia to continue some research regarding America's first public records office and oldest extant structure specifically built for such a purpose. Our ancestors were deliberate in trying to preserve their government records, and I am curious as to why our best-known and major historic site has not been more deliberate in interpreting the structure as an archival facility. This is not intended as criticism, since Colonial Williamsburg has restored the structure to what it looked like. Yet, I think we could do more to inform the millions of tourists who go there (and my interest in history was propelled by a visit there in 1957) why government records should be preserved and accessible as a hallmark of democratic society. The preservation of the Pennsylvania Assembly Library can also serve as a reminder of why our knowledge held in libraries needs to be lovingly nurtured and the books and documents associated with that knowledge preserved in ways meaningful to our understanding of it.

1 Quoted in Barbara E. Deibler, “A Valuable Collection of Neat Books Well Chosen”: The Pennsylvania Assembly Library (Harrisburg, PA: The Society for Political Enquiries in conjunction with the Capitol Preservation Committee, 1994), p. 7.

2 Nancy M. Cline, “Stewardship: The Janus Factor,” in To Preserve and Protect: The Strategic Stewardship of Cultural Resources ( Washington , D.C. : Library of Congress, 2002), p. 3.

3 Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation ( New York : Vintage Books, 2002), p. 18.

4 Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Revolution ( New York : Vintage Books, 2003), p. 5.

5 Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), p. 71.

6 Originally published in 1791 in French and then in London in 1793 as The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D....Originally Written By Himself, And Now Translated From The French . The quotation is from the first chapter, derived from an online version at http://earlyamerica.com/lives/franklin/.

7 Quoted in Diane Osen, ed., The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists ( New York : The Modern Library, 2002), p. 103.