The Book Keeper

By Matt Jennings

Bob Buckeye is living in the wrong century. No, check that. He's living in the right century for us, just probably not for him, at least when it comes to the written word. Nearly 15 years ago, while contemplating the future of books, he wrote, "Our concept of book or that of exhibit may be virtually incomprehensible in the distant future, understood intellectually only (if that), like potlatch, bricolage, or nomadism."

Buckeye, in his role as Abernethy curator of American literature, was writing the introduction for a catalog of a Starr Library exhibit of 60 acquisitions made by the Abernethy Library, the College's repository of more than 23,000 volumes of American literature, many of which are rare or in manuscript form. In his introduction, Buckeye concluded: "[This exhibit] is a message to tomorrow, a plea, in some sense, that we be better understood. . . we have lived by the book, and, at this point of its becoming irrelevant by the byte, disk, chip, we do not wish to be brushed aside as foolish, primitive, simple."

Now, it would be easy to write off Buckeye's words as the ramblings of a curmudgeonly technophobe, but the stocky, bald gentleman with a gold hoop earring dangling from his left ear is far from being a Luddite (he once took in seven movies in one day at a film festival in Montreal). It's just that when it comes to books, to the written word, Buckeye has a special affinity for the art form, for the act of writing, for the feeling of ink on parchment—qualities and processes he feels are being lost in the digital age of word processing and cyberspace and virtual books.

During his 32 years at Middlebury, a tenure that includes postings as an instructor of American literature, Abernethy curator, Special Collections librarian and College archivist, Buckeye has not only raised the College's profile among scholars as a mecca of American literary research, he has crafted a legacy that far exceeds in substance the 12,000 books he has acquired. It's not easy to quantify the impact one person may have on an institution, but in the case of Bob Buckeye, there are five distinct lessons one can take from his time at Middlebury.

#1 The way something is written can be as important as what is written.

Middlebury has acquired several first-edition works of acclaimed poet William Carlos Williams, including The Tempers (1913) and Spring and All (1923), but Buckeye points to another set of Williams's work in the College collection that tells the true story of the poet and the way he wrote.

Williams was a doctor, and on occasion he would jot down lines of poetry on prescription pads. The pads, with lines of Williams's poetic scrawl, join his other work in Middlebury's Special Collections.

"What does this method of writing tell us about Williams? About the process of writing?" Buckeye asks rhetorically. "I'd like to think that it shows that when he had a break, he turned to poetry, and he used whatever instruments were available.

"When you write with a pen," Buckeye continues, "it is like building a stone wall; the stone has to fit the first time. You don't want to take it out and move it again. With computers today you can have endless revisions. I've had people come in to study just the ink of a manuscript. How the manuscript is written tells as much about the time the book was written as the story itself."

#2 Building a literary collection doesn't mean acquiring the most expensive objects.

Buckeye has built one of the most impressive contemporary American literature collections in New England, adding Gertrude Stein (Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) and Theodore Dreiser (My City) to a collection that already included Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), William Faulkner (The Sound and The Fury), Emily Dickinson (Poems), and Henry David Thoreau's own copy of Walden (complete with holograph notes).
"The rare-book market is not cheap," Buckeye says, "so you have to make choices. If you don't have the resources to blanket the field, you really need to understand what you are doing, and often this means being ahead of the wave. In the late '80s, I was able to acquire works of poetry for $15, which are selling for nearly $2,000 today."

#3 What may not seem important today, might turn out to be a treasure tomorrow.

Buckeye says that as much as Special Collections are meant to serve scholars and students today, you always have to keep in mind the scholar of tomorrow. He uses the example of Melville to illustrate this point.

"After 1860, Melville wasn't read," Buckeye says. "In fact, in 1875, an editor at a publishing house contacted the author to see if he would be interested
in contributing a poem to an anthology. Melville's response? 'I'm surprised you know I'm still alive.'

"So the lesson learned here is, what if we were in a similar situation today, and we just ignored an author who we felt was irrelevant? It's our job to preserve material for those scholars down the road. The tough part is figuring out what we should acquire now that isn't on everyone's radar screen."

#4 A library should not be simply a warehouse. The life of the mind can be celebrated in myriad ways.

In 1976, Buckeye launched the Abernethy Lecture Series, a forum that has brought more than 250 writers and poets to the Abernethy Library for evenings of readings, debate, and discussion. "That seven of the speakers have been winners of the MacArthur Prize is accidental," Buckeye wrote this spring. "That fifty percent of them in the last ten years have been women or that eight of the speakers are from the Caribbean is not. At least eleven had no college degrees, 27 are alumni, and ten have been from the library."

Buckeye's eyes narrow and seem to twinkle when he adds later, "I'd like to think that I was able to offer the community a literary alternative, perhaps something a bit more radical than they were used to."

This radicalization of Middlebury included a two-and-a-half-hour poetry reading by Kamu Brathwaite ("It had people spellbound," Buckeye says) and a combination poetry reading/saxophone accompaniment by poet Thulani Davis and her husband, saxophonist Joseph Jarman.

#5 One man's junk is another man's treasure.

That's not to say that Buckeye would consider anything in the Abernethy Library or Special Collections junk; it's just that visitors have their own taste. "I could never direct someone to one specific item in the library or in the collection without knowing something about them first," Buckeye says when asked what he would show a casual visitor to the Abernethy Library. "What writers do they read and why? You have to find out what interests them, then you can offer them specific items for viewing."

Of all the rare items in Middlebury's collection—Thoreau's Walden, a 65-pound Spanish hymnal from the fifteenth century, the extraordinary work by Creeley and Kitaj—one item in particular holds a special place in Buckeye's heart. It's a catalog comment written by American essayist and journalist Katherine Anne Porter for a traveling Mexican art exhibit titled "Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts." The exhibit never took place and only five or six copies of the catalog were printed. Buckeye acquired one in 1992.