At the end of the week, Terry Belanger approached me and asked me to return to Rare Book School the following week to take a course. He had some money from a fellowship that would pay for my tuition and housing. I said yes, called Coldstone and asked for the time off, and enrolled in The American Book in the Industrial Era. I wasn’t particularly interested in American books, but that’s the class Terry Belanger suggested—and it was taught by Michael Winship, the foremost expert on American printing during the industrial revolution. I needed little persuasion to take his course.
As part of the fellowship I became a staff member for the week. My duties included helping tear down from the previous week’s classes and setting up for the up-coming week’s classes. I wrote earlier that the purpose of RBS was to handle objects. The ‘problem’ with rare books, of course, is that they are, by definition, rare. Rare book reading rooms allow one person to handle (usually one or very few) book(s) at a time, always under close supervision. Damage to a book is kept at a minimum because access to the book is kept at a minimum. RBS operates on the principle that if you want to learn about something, you’re going to have to handle it. And RBS’s collections reflect this. The RBS collections are a teaching collection, built of old—but not necessarily rare—books. The ‘rare’ books that RBS owns tend to be parts of books or books that are in poor condition. RBS faculty members have free range to select course materials, resulting in each course having a significant amount of material that must be sorted through, arranged, and prepped. So actually setting up a single course can take several hours of labor.
Being on staff allowed me to see the inner workings of Rare Book School. From the outside, RBS appears to run very smoothly. To create the appearance of smoothness, an amazing amount of work goes on behind the scenes. Every day, RBS receives numerous packages of books that must be accessioned, catalogued, and placed in the collection—RBS has a prodigious ebay habit. Some books that receive heavy use need to be repaired—after seeing the results of one group attempt at fixing bindings, TB commented, “My, aren’t we provincial.” Other books have been in the collection for years (RBS has been around for a quarter of a century) but haven’t made it into the computer system—I spent a week this past June cataloging a (mostly) nineteenth-century binding collection. So there is always plenty of work to be done. When the school is in session, the hours are long but always rewarding.
During my second week at RBS, TB asked if I would like to be on staff next summer on a more permanent basis. There was no hesitation in my decision. Being offered the chance to work at a place filled with other people who shared my interest in books was a priceless opportunity. I was eager to return the next summer to explore the world of bibliography.