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The proprietors and friends of Lamont Library held a reception there January 7, the opening event of a year-long fiftieth-anniversary celebration. Guests heard speeches by dignitaries and took light nourishment, along with lapel pins and gold-colored pencils.
A part of the Harvard College Library especially but not exclusively for undergraduates, Lamont is sponsoring five contests open only to undergraduates and one for alumni, with entry dates scattered throughout the year. Undergraduates may strive to write the most persuasive essay about what Lamont will be like 50 years hence, or identify famous alumni from their first-year photographs, or guess the book and video most often checked out in 1998. (Hint: not Stephen Hawkings's Brief History of Time, nor Love Story, says Heather Cole, librarian of the Hilles and Lamont libraries.)
Other celebration highlights include a poetry reading by Donald Hall '51, Jf '57, on April 7 and a retrospective sampling of 50 years of junk food, served on May 7 in the lobby to fuel students cramming for exams. Cole will feature native junk food, such as NECCO Sky Bars, Haviland Malted Milk Balls, and Tootsie Roll Pops from Cambridge Brand Foods.
When Lamont opened, the Crimson raved about its amenities and published this cartoon. A uniformed library attendant is saying, "How would you like your Age of Jackson, Sir? Illustrated, unabridged, or Hymarx edition?" (Note the cigarette girl at right.)HARVARD CRIMSON/DAVID G. BRAATEN '46, L '51 |
Lamont's festivities might be said to have begun when the library ran an advertisement in the September-October 1998 issue of this magazine soliciting contributions to its "Memory Book," to be found on-line at "http://www.fas.harvard.edu/lamont". The best entry received by the end of 1999 will earn its author a prize. Fond memories have already been recorded--and some ornery ones. "You bet I remember Lamont," writes Joanne Henderson Pratt, A.M. '50. "Lamont was the beautiful new library that I, a woman, was not allowed even to enter, much less enjoy its collections." "I always despised Lamont," asserts Jonathan Newmark '74, M.D., who found it ugly. He goes on to say, however, that one book--the only book--he can remember reading there, the West Point Atlas of American Wars--a "very expensive" work of which Harvard had only one copy, part of the non-circulating reference collection at Lamont--aimed him toward an eventual career in the military and thus changed his life.
John Updike '54, Litt.D. '92, recorded his debt to a library in remarks last November as he received the 1998 National Book Foundation Medal. "If I reflect on the psychological history that led me to become a cottage laborer in this industry, an impression of glamour was part of it," said Updike. "There was something glamorous about the Reading, Pennsylvania, public library, a stately Carnegie-endowed edifice at Fifth and Franklin, next to a sweet-smelling bakery, where I would go with my mother from an early age, walking at her side the block from the trolley-car stop at Fourth Street, climbing the many wide steps, and stepping into a temple of books. The towering walls of books seemed conjured from a realm far distant, utterly mysterious and gracious --the little numbers inked onto the spines, the pockets for a borrower's card at the back, all these angelic arrangements. Who had done this for me?"
Although professors Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray could not agree about the origin of species, they shared a naughty disdain for library rules. Clarence E. Walton, in The Three-Hundredth Anniversary of the Harvard College Library (1939), relates the anguish of librarian John Langdon Sibley on the occasion of an annual inventory, probably in 1858, when all circulating books were to be returned (see "The College Pump," January-February, page 84). On June 23 Sibley wrote, "Fifty-seven persons delinquent, among the worst of whom are some of the College Officers." By July 16, "all the books were returned except one charged to Prof. Agassiz and another to Prof. Gray."
~Primus IV