Armed with your backpack and bundled up in your North Face, you plunge through the library’s turnstiles, out of breath after crossing the icy campus tundra. If you’re Indiana Jones, you’re probably headed to plunder the library’s collections for that last clue necessary to save the world, and a beautiful woman, from evil takeover.
Or maybe you’re just going to study at Core.
Regardless, with an extensive amount of valuable and unique holdings, the Northwestern Library is one of the best university libraries in the country. So put down that chemistry textbook, don your Fedora and grab a sidekick.
Now, any good treasure hunt requires a map. Conveniently, Government and Geographic Information and Data Services holds maps ranging from those of Nazi Germany to artistic renderings of 12th- to 18th-century Paris to Chicago street names in the 1800s.
“We have all kinds of maps,” says Kathleen Murphy, a social science data librarian. “There’s a tremendous amount of wealth.”
The collection includes one of the first maps of Illinois, from around 1818. It was rumored to have been folded up and carried in a leather bookjacket all the way to Washington, D.C., by a horseback rider. It was drawn for Congress as legislators decided whether to make Illinois a state or not. The state’s boundaries appear similar to today’s, but the capital was Kaskaskia — a city that sits on the modern-day border with Missouri but that has been all but obliterated by a series of floods.
After planning out your route in the maps collection, you’ll notice a blue-and-white eagle symbol mounted on the door frame. It denotes Northwestern’s library as the sixth oldest member of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). Program members receive copies of government publications for free, as long as they make the documents freely accessible. The program was instituted in 1813 to promote an informed public.
“Citizenry is a good thing and helps ensure democracy,” says Beth Clausen, head of resource sharing and reserve collections.
“It sounds hokey, but it’s true,” Murphy adds. “This is that commitment.”
The government publications include documents like the census. “We’ve got censuses all the way back to the get-go,” Murphy says. Early censuses were surprisingly detailed. For example, the first census, taken in 1790, lists Robert McConnel of South Carolina under the category of “free white males of 16 years and upward, including heads of families” and the owner of 33 slaves.
The Census of American Business might also be of use to you on your quest. Well, if you need to know that, in 1933, New Jersey had 156 parking lots or that Georgia had 1,642 barber shops. And there’s always the Census of Agriculture in case you’re curious about how many apple trees Pulaski County, Illinois, had in 1925. (The answer’s 460.)
Volumes upon volumes of data, publications and propaganda fill shelves from floor to ceiling in the climate-controlled, internal stacks of Deering Library. The collection includes many colonial documents, which are bound in sheepskin. “It flakes all over the place and is in a mess,” Murphy says.
The U.S. Congressional Serial Set is impossible to miss, and fills up multiple rows with volumes of government data. “It doesn’t sound like a party,” Murphy says, “but it is.”
The set includes statistics for many aspects of American life, even going as far as venereal diseases. That was back when the Department of the Treasury handled social hygiene. How’s that for an adventure?
“The Treasury Department of all places decided to promote cleanliness that could stave off venereal diseases in particular,” says Louis Takacs, international documents librarian. “It’s almost comedy, but at the same time it’s serious.”
In a collection of pamphlets and readings, titles like “Manpower,” and “The Facts About Venereal Diseases: A Pamphlet for Men” give instructions like, “The only way to keep from getting gonorrhea or syphilis is to keep away from all loose women and prostitutes.” Along with crafty metaphors and slang terms for STDs, that’s the advice issued by the U.S. Department of the Treasury around the 1920s. Theodor Geisel, popularly known as Dr. Seuss, even illustrated a pamphlet for the government about a mosquito in his famous style, advocating the use of DDT to combat malaria.
Be sure to keep exploring: Many items in the department are literally hidden. They aren’t catalogued, so who knows, browsing the stacks might even reward you with the Holy Grail. If not, you may find some government propaganda in the war department. In travel-sized books from the ‘40s, such as The German Soldier, selections like “Pride in Weapons” supposedly describe the enemy. As Germans prepare for combat, “their faces are serious. They realize the time is near when their lives will depend on their weapons,” it reads. Also in the collection are instruction manuals for marching and handling a pistol in 1916. And if you get hungry while you’re perusing, there are recipe cards, in case you would like to make government-instructed pancakes for 100 people.
Further along your quest, prepare yourself for the more gruesome aspects of being a marauder. Enter the University Archives room, and pass beneath the portraits of university presidents.
“We only keep the dead ones up there,” University Archivist Patrick Quinn says.
University Archives holds 26,000 cubic feet of Northwestern records, including photographs, faculty bios, complete runs of The Daily Northwestern and the Syllabus yearbook, as well as works by Northwestern faculty and graduates. The collection goes back to the very beginning, including the original, hand-written minutes of the university’s founding meeting.
Quinn says it would be criminal to graduate without having visited the archives: “You’re not going to find stuff like this anywhere else on Earth.”
Diaries and letters from adventurers Henry Bannister and Robert Kennicott are included in the archives. The two explored Alaska in the 1860s. Kennicot died during one expedition to the territory, but Bannister carried on. Alaska eventually became a state thanks to their contributions and information.
Odds are, your party will make it out of this trip alive, but you may still need a rest. A nice place to set up camp is in the Eloise W. Martin Reading Room in Deering Library. With its neo-Gothic design, high ceilings, low lighting, statues and paintings, the room is the perfect spot for the clandestine planning of your next move, or just relaxing and studying.
“It’s a cool place to be when you’re in a thunderstorm, because it’s like you’re in a haunted castle,” says Lindsay King, the art collection manager.
One of the most important pieces of the art collection also hangs in the reading room. “El Bohemio; Poet of Montmarte” features the French composer Erik Satie. The portrait was painted by Catalan artist Ramon Casas, a friend of Charles Deering, in 1891. It has been loaned out for major art exhibits in Barcelona, Chicago and New York.
Follow some of the 68 painted window medallions, 19 of which are in the Reading Room, back into Deering Library. Designed by G. Owen Bonawit in the 1930s, allow the subjects of the medallions, like Lao-Tze and Brahman, to guide your hunt.
Trail blaze until you hit the familiar image of Abraham Lincoln in a window, and you’ll be in the Music Library. With more than 1,300 manuscripts, numerous archives and the largest selection of music published since 1945 in the country, it attracts treasure seekers — ahem, researchers — from around the world.
“It’s meant to be a national resource,” says D.J. Hoek, head of the music library.
Hoek says the most prominent and largest collection is about composer John Cage. Famous parts of the collection include Cage’s correspondence with many other musicians, as well as the musical notation, of mostly classical composers, that he collected from around the world.
Some of the most appealing material in the collection are the seven Beatles manuscripts submitted by Yoko Ono. Scrawled on notebook paper and envelopes, Hoek says they are extraordinarily valuable and were placed under extra security. They include lyrics for “Yellow Submarine,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “The Word” and others. “The Word” was painted in pinks and blues by Paul McCartney, and you can see the doodles, cross-outs, underlines and edits on the other manuscripts.
The notation part of the music collection aims to show the unique ways composers create music. “We’re trying to get to that moment where the composer puts the pen to the paper and first jots down the idea,” Hoek says. One of his favorite pieces is “A Haunted Landscape,” by composer George Crumb. The imperfection gives a quality of creation and originality to the piece. “There’s this great coffee stain,” he says.
If your material thirst still isn’t satisfied, behold the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. From sci-fi paperbacks to 20th-century art movements to underground comic books to a replica of the first Gutenberg printing press and the many things in between (like hundreds of feminist posters) something is bound to spark your interest.
Again, the library’s holdings span history and subject. For example, in “The Siege and Commune of Paris” collection are thousands of posters and caricatures. It is one of the largest collections from the 1870s outside of France.
“Because these people were starving, there are parodies of people eating rats,” says Scott Krafft, acting head of special collections.
Also in the collection are extensive files on the Leopold and Loeb case, in which two University of Chicago students murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924. Considered to be nearly perfect and one of the “crimes of the century,” Special Collections has one of the only complete transcripts of the trial. University Archives holds the original ransom note.
“We have so many interesting things here. I’m just happy to be among them all,” Krafft says.
Students, staff, and the public have access to all facets of the library’s collections. Just set up an appointment or speak with a librarian. With no vine-swinging or swash-buckling required, why not check something out?