By MARTY LEVINE
“There’s a lot of mystery involved in our rare book room” at the School of Law’s Barco Law Library, says Marc Silverman, a library director emeritus who helped add to the collection during his time in the 2000s.
“We don’t know where a lot of these books came from.” He assumes many came from retiring faculty members, but no records were kept for most of the school’s history as donors offered their libraries — or simply showed up with books.
Until the mid-1980s, the room didn’t exist, and the library’s rare books were on the shelves with the rest of the legal tomes. Then-director Jenni Parrish finally decided to pull them into one room — a former study room — and house them in wooden cases.
While some institutions have a showy and rarified rare book room — all wood paneling and gilt-framed artifacts — the Barco’s version is more of a working space, with much to offer the researcher and the curious.
Silverman recalls one professor who liked to use the room because, he said, “he can feel history moving through his bloodstream as he is holding something that is 500 years old, and he knows that legal scholars for generations have used this particular book.”
He recalls another local attorney, to win a case before a history-loving judge, spending time here in search of ancient cases to prove his point — which worked.
But the room is not used often enough today, current law librarians say, and they are aiming to change that.
Sure, much of its material is available in digital form now, Silverman allows, meaning that “for a relatively small amount of money you can have access to a tremendous collection of old books that no one library could have ever afforded to collect in print.”
But individual physical objects still hold secrets digital copies can miss: “Sometimes the book of a famous scholar who donated it to the library may have notations in the margins,” he says. Some of the older books bear the signatures of their former owners and users. And there is an entire Pennsylvania section, with materials going back to colonial times. A few books in the room are from the 1600s.
Linda Tashbook, Barco’s foreign and international comparative law librarian and a 26-year veteran of the institution, unlocks the rare book room’s door. Its single room and short hallway are lined with glass-fronted bookshelves surrounding a wooden table. The few windows have their shades drawn tightly to keep out sunlight — enemy number one in the world of aging print.
Some of the books must even be kept from self-destructing, due to the acid in their paper, and are stored in special acid-free blue archive phase boxes made here in the library. Others get acid-free paper placed inside or are tied shut with cloth string to keep their bindings from further deteriorating. Some have already been rebound before arriving.
Overall, books from before the Civil War may fare better than those from afterward, since paper in the earlier era was made primarily from rags and in the latter era from wood pulp. Books using newsprint deteriorate most quickly.
Tashbook pulls out the oldest book in the collection, a thick, short volume in Latin by Grotius from about 1630, for international merchants to carry and consult about the laws of many countries. It is printed on parchment, bound in vellum, standing beside several other books by the same author.
Of more use today, in the legal world, are the many, many books focused on Pennsylvania. There are records of debates about state constitutional amendments and shelves of bound volumes of state laws, the oldest one from 1805.
Of course, there are many books that law school students and practicing lawyers used often and may still be consulting, with the author’s name most prominent on the spine: Wood on Limitations of Actions; Crocker on Sheriffs, Coroners And Constables; Stephen’s Commentary On The Laws Of England; Chitty On Contracts; Pigott On Recoveries. There are The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity and Viner’s Abridgement — 24 volumes summarizing something called Law and Equity. How much longer must the original work have been, if the abridgement is 24 volumes?
A certain Richard B. Earnest, on Feb. 4, 1915, signed his bound copy of the Pennsylvania liquor law from that year, when he was a mere real estate broker (his signature says). Then he signed it again later, to make sure his selection as justice of the peace (in the hamlet of Hummelstown, Pa., between Harrisburg and Hershey) was known. That book, too, ended up in this rare book room.
“A book can last hundreds of years,” Tashbook says. “An electronic resource will only last as long as the technology lasts, which could be a couple of years. But these books, you can still open them and look at them.”
Barco’s systems librarian, Chris Todd, and its circulation and public services specialist, Rachel Rossi, have no duties in the rare book room officially, but are working to preserve and provide access to its materials. Rossi has begun to create a master list of the room’s materials to give more notice to them. And she has been digitizing the law library’s photos and ephemera – such materials as the law school’s Bulletin, dating to 1897. These items can be found online at the Barco Law Library Digitized Archives and Special Collections site, which includes a focus on the history of the school.
Todd has been working to conserve and repair items as well as looking into the provenance of certain books. “I am trying to give more depth to this collection,” he says.
The most interesting books, he finds, are those with non-commercial bindings, especially those whose pages were stitched together in “signatures,” each of which had to be cut open on the outer edge to be read. But even cheaply mass-produced volumes from the Depression can be interesting, especially if they have old newspaper clippings or telephone book pages stuck inside as impromptu bookmarks or note paper.
“Chris and I do this out of interest,” Rossi said. “It would be great to have some sort of expert who could dive into” the collection. And to have dedicated funding for the room, for that matter.
In the meantime, Todd says, “If you’re looking for Pennsylvania colonial law, we have got it all. The ideal researcher is someone dealing with the early Pennsylvania law.
“What really helps this enterprise,” he added, “is not being afraid of print resources. ... A lot of the good stuff is on a dusty shelf and worth digging for.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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