Collectors and Libraries: Some Studies in Symbiosis

Abstract

On May 17, 1904, a four-year-old boy stood quietly at the dedication of a library his late father had decreed should be built and turned over to Brown University in Rhode Island. “A child bearing the name of his honored father has presented to you the keys of this building,” Robert Hale Ives Goddard declared on the youngster’s behalf: “No words of mine can add to the dignity or to the pathos with which this simple ceremony is invested. Enclosed within these walls is a matchless collection—the harvest of centuries of learning and of historical research. The books which . . .