Seattle Public Library's story is a page-turner
But by the time you've reached the end of John Douglas Marshall's history of the Seattle Public Library — a 136-year-long story in which unpredictable blows by fire, earthquake, Red scare or budget crisis are delivered again and again — you may want to go out and rent yourself a nice predictable action movie as a way to calm down from the never-ending cliffhanger twists and turns laid out in "Place of Learning, Place of Dreams: A History of the Seattle Public Library."
Seattle Post-Intelligencer book critic Marshall has done a bang-up job of explaining exactly what it takes to create a major metropolitan library system in a little under a century and a half. Photographic researcher Jodee Fenton and the University of Washington Press have done equally fine work, digging up images from the archives that remind us how far we've come along since the notion of a Seattle library open to the public was first bruited about. And this handsomely packaged book isn't just a history of the downtown library but the story of the entire system, with all its various branches and points of outreach.
"Place of Learning" is also, inevitably, a history of Seattle. Throughout the book, Marshall keeps close tabs on the city's growing or waning fortunes, tying them directly to the library's state of health over the decades. World wars, culture wars and economic booms and crashes have all had their effect on the library. Heroes and heroines have emerged, as have well-intentioned fumblers and highhanded blunderers.
The first attempt to establish a library in Seattle came in 1868, with Sarah Burgert Yesler (wife of city founder Henry Yesler) elected as librarian. A subscription service, it went broke in 1881, and for seven years was not replaced. Momentum got under way in the late 1880s to build a publicly financed library, which finally opened Dec. 1, 1891 (the first book checked out: Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad").
But while Seattle now had a library, that library didn't have a permanent home. It was housed on various floors of various buildings until 1899, when it finally got a free-standing home of its own: the old Yesler Mansion at Third Avenue and James Street, a three-story Victorian gingerbread fantasy — which promptly burned down on New Year's morning of 1901. Marshall's account of the fire delivers a gut-punch.
To the rescue came Andrew Carnegie, who on hearing about the fire donated $200,000 toward the building of a new library (Seattle had impressed him on a visit he'd made here in 1892). The site where our new downtown library now stands was purchased by the city in 1902 (in one of his few slip-ups, Marshall places this block between Third and Fourth avenues, instead of Fourth and Fifth), and a handsome building of "classical design" went up there, opening in 1906. Carnegie went on to fund the cost of many of our branch libraries, the last being the Fremont branch in 1922.
Buildings were one thing; the budget was another. The Great Depression of the 1930s took its toll on the library system, and Marshall is at his most moving when recounting this period when the library was often the "last refuge" for the unemployed, while struggling itself with budget cuts and loss of staff. Building maintenance suffered, too. The downtown library had needed expansion almost from the day it opened, and by the 1930s it was in dire need of renovation. But its fate was sealed when it was structurally damaged in the 7.1-magnitude earthquake of 1949. The book's photographs of the beautiful old building in its prime are wrenching — it's a pity no way was found to save it.
World War II tested the library's resources in a different way, with all energies going toward the war effort, including provision of technical literature to Boeing and outreach to soldiers in local training camps. The war also triggered an unusual instance of institutional behavior going heroically against the tide, as the library made a point of sending books to internment camps where this area's Japanese Americans were held for the duration of the hostilities. (The library's 1942 annual report noted: "The evacuation of the Japanese removed some of the best patrons the library had.")
At other times, individual heroism met with institutional apathy or indifference. In 1930 Natalie Notkin, a Russian émigré in charge of the library's Russian collection, lost her job after being accused, by other refugees from Soviet Russia, of spreading Communist propaganda. The reason: 10 percent of the books she had purchased, including titles by Tolstoy and Gorky, came from the Soviet Union. Her eloquent letter of protest to the library board did her no good. But she did go on to a prestigious career at the University of Washington's Suzzallo Library.
In the 1950s, young Jean H. Huot got just as little backup from her supervisors when she protested signing an anti-Communist loyalty oath which all librarians, being government employees, were supposed to sign. "I believe that 'loyalty' by coercion," Huot said, "is a menace to the freedom it purports to protect." Her resignation soon followed.
Library and librarians were in closer harmony in 1989 when the Ayatollah Khomeini placed a fatwa on Salman Rushdie's head for the supposed blasphemy in his novel "The Satanic Verses." Head librarian Liz Stroup, in the finest moment of her volatile career, immediately made efforts to procure as many copies of the book as she could, adamant that the freedom to read should be preserved against any kind of threat. "A public library," she said, "is a dangerous place."
After 15 years of barely making do in the 1930s and 1940s, the library's prospects finally started looking up in the 1950s. New branch libraries were opened for the first time in 30 years, a new building for the downtown site was approved by voters and opened in 1960, and the first steps toward creating a high-tech library were taken. Budget crises continued and behind-the-scenes politics could still get gnarly. Marshall gives a wry account of boardroom controversies, quipping, "There were times when the Seattle Public Library seemed a star-crossed hero in a novel by Thomas Hardy, a protagonist incapable of taking more than a few steps forward without a step or two backward."
It all leads up to a full and reflective accounts of how present city librarian Deborah L. Jacobs was chosen to head the library system and how Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was chosen to design the new downtown library.
Written with verve and clarity, "Place of Learning, Place of Dreams" gives equal due to both the crises endured and the good works achieved by the Seattle Public Library. And in doing so, it is deeply informative about the foibles and aspirations of our city.
Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com
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