When we went to the Emily Dickinson Museum in July, I found out that Harvard owns Dickinson’s handwritten poems, her desk and other family effects. Of course! Harvard owns everything! I imagined the desk and poems on display where only serious researchers or major benefactors could get a peek at them, or worse yet, an Indiana Jones style warehouse. When we got home from Amherst, I spent a few minutes online and found that ordinary people could view the Emily Dickinson collection on a free tour every Friday. I had already planned to take an upcoming Friday off, and asked my wife, a librarian, if she wanted to come along. Yes. She definitely did.

I got to the library early, and spent about half an hour looking at the special exhibit on Alice in Wonderland at 150 years old. The exhibit features “Carrolliana” from the library’s collection that was collected and donated by a Harvard graduate (this is somewhat of a trend). There are studies for illustrations from the original edition, photographs of Alice taken by Lewis Carroll, photos of Carroll, and editions of the book in Japanese, and an edition published in raised print for the blind (pre-Braillie). It was pretty cool and the tour hadn’t even begun.

I was surprised by the size of the tour group. There were about twenty-five people on the tour. There was a German-speaking family that didn’t stay for the tour, although they were interested, because it was “zu lange.” Their teenage daughter seemed pretty bummed out by this. Our guide was a forty-year veteran of the library. He apologized for not wearing a tie (he forgot to put one on that morning), and looked exactly how one would imagine a Harvard librarian would look. His sense of humor was droll and sardonic, and his tour left me wondering how many PhD’s he had. He talked a great deal about the collection and how, contrary to my assumptions, the library is fairly open to the non-Harvard world.

Our tour took us first to the Samuel Johnson room. I don’t really have a strong interest in Johnson, but I appreciate the scope of the collection and the room Harvard built around it. Apparently they felt they needed to create a space worthy of the collection. The room is decorated in the style of Johnson’s time, complete with frescos on the ceiling, his chandelier, and chairs owned by and built for Johnson. Apparently he was a big guy. The chairs were huge. Our guide talked a great deal about Johnson, but I wasn’t there for him, so the displays of the restorations of the portraits in the room distracted me.

On our way over to the Keats room, we passed by an open door to the office area. The office looked pretty dark and cramped, but above the computers were pieces of art from the library’s collection. I guess there are benefits (cool stuff) and drawbacks (no natural light) about working there.

Harvard owns the most extensive collection of Keats – three quarters of his manuscripts, “autograph poetry” and the largest collection of his correspondence. They own the Shakespeare that Keats borrowed from a friend and marked up with his comments and reflections (I want to see what he wrote in there!), and other books from Keats’ personal library. I didn’t realize that all this was here, and I love Keats, and so I was eating this up.

As the librarian was talking about the scholarly significance of the Keats collection, I browsed through the display cases in the room. They had several letters from Keats on display, as well as some of his personal effects. On the other side of the room, one of the cases had a book clearly older than anything Keats wrote. I took a closer look. It’s the Book of Daniel from the Gutenberg Bible. Right there – pages from a Gutenberg Bible. (They have the whole thing, just not on display.)

The tour split up because we were too large to fit into the Dickinson room. Throughout the tour, the librarians talked about their collection of incunabula – printed material from before the sixteenth century. Our other tour guide asked us if we had any questions, and my wife asked about illuminated books and if these were considered incunabula. Our librarian launched into an interesting discussion of the technology of books. Apparently the original typefaces were designed to look similar to handwriting, and the first character on a page, in a chapter was often hand-illustrated. The book wasn’t produced using just one technology, not at first. She drew comparisons to e-books that have “pages” and to computer systems that use “folders” and have a floppy disk as the icon for saving. (I was reminded of the Medieval Help Desk.)

Then came the coolest part of the tour. The librarian asked us if we wanted to see one of the illuminated books, flipped through the keys on her lanyard, and unlocked a case. She pulled out a Book of Hours, and gently opened it up for us to see. The illustrations were impressively vibrant. She told us that the pages were vellum – calfskin. “Do you want to feel the pages?” she asked. The pages were so thin and delicate. It was a true work of art.

Then, it was time to go to the Emily Dickinson room. Our librarian told us that the Dickinson family had approached Harvard at some point and asked if the University was interested in any of her manuscripts and effects. Harvard was very interested in this! They wanted the poet’s desk, her chair, the bureau where the poems were found after her death, her herbarium, many of the family’s books, their piano, and some knickknacks. Our librarian told us with disgust how after her death, Dickinson’s editors ripped apart the small books of poems she had sewn together and arranged them for publishing. “They never bothered to think that the poet had already arranged them for publication,’ he sneered. On display, there was an original book that still held a small piece of the original string she used for binding. After the library purchased the poems, researchers republished her complete works in their original form. These works were copyrighted, and now the revenue that Harvard receives from the royalties is used to protect her work. “Ms. Dickinson is a very wealthy woman,” he told us. She paid for the surveillance system, and for the renovation of the room that houses her works.

The Dickinson Room was the last stop. I was completely blown away by the tour. The library’s collection is vast. (It is Harvard after all.) If it is cool or important, they own it. We saw a book owned by Trotsky with a heartfelt inscription from Stalin referring to their revolutionary work during the “illegal times.” They have T.S. Eliot’s papers somewhere, along with books illustrated by William Blake. There are six miles worth of manuscripts within the library. It is all stored underground because the library’s architectural style doesn’t accommodate a tower. Maybe it is a bit like the governmental warehouse in Indiana Jones downstairs, but this library is a vibrant place.