Finding treasures in Van Pelt

Last Monday, the University libraries celebrated the acquisition of their five millionth volume, a hagadah -- a Jewish prayer book read during Passover -- dating from 1695 and containing the first map ever printed in a Hebrew-language book. The hagadah has little in common with Penn's first book, an inscribed copy of Milton's Paradise Lost, except that both are housed in the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Van Pelt Library. Like the rest of Penn's unusual or uncommon 250,000 printed books, over 10,000 linear feet of manuscript collections, and more than 1,500 codex manuscripts -- many one-of-a-kind maps, broadsides, playbills, programs, photographs, prints, drawings and sound recordings -- are housed in the collection. And in about 10 minutes, you or any other Penn student can sit down, request and read from the same copy of Paradise Lost that Milton once held in his own hands or browse through its recently acquired hagadah. Every volume is made available to any student. But while the collection is a fantastic University resource, it is unfortunately underutilized. Sadly, few students ever venture to the sixth floor of Van Pelt. But those who do will find the Rosenwald Gallery, which displays highlights from the University's rare book collection. Currently, the department has an exhibit celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Dreiser's Sister Carrie. The room is filled with paintings of major contributors to the University libraries, among them Edgar Fahs Smith, whose collection forms the backbone of the library's extensive chemistry collection. On one side of the room, one can find the Henry Charles Lea Memorial Library, which holds Lea's extensive collection of works on medieval history, religion and literature. The Lea Library is unique in that the entire room in which his collection was housed was moved into the Van Pelt Library, complete with floor-to-ceiling wood paneling, sculptures and furniture. Lea's collection is also this country's largest resource of medieval material. Opposite the Lea Library is the Rare Book and Manuscript reading room, where students can access any other book housed in the University collections. In fact, all that is asked is one register and keep all books within the room. Aside from that, the staff will show you any part of the collection -- be it Shakespeare's First Folio or a Venetian manuscript on the dangers of Jacobin societies. Penn's collection is particularly strong in history of science, Italian history, colonial American history, Shakespeare and English literature and American anthropology. It also holds many of Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Swift's letters and the largest collection of primary documents -- letters, diaries and newspapers -- on early Philadelphia history. The collection, however, is in no way limited to these fields. It also has extensive sub-collections whose subjects range from Third Reich propaganda pamphlets to Phyllis Wheatley's poetry to major histories of the occult. The only rule with the Rare Book library, it seems, is that you have to cast your research net a little larger. Since only 60 percent of the collection is listed in Franklin, the library's online catalog, finding what you need requires making an inaugural visit to Van Pelt's card catalog, which is located on the first floor between the east and west wings of the library. Although it may seem archaic, it is currently the only way to fully discover what Penn has in its most prized collections. Special Collections Director Michael Ryan is working diligently to get the collection online and hopes to have every English language volume online within a year and half. In the meantime, however, his staff of six Ph.D.s in various disciplines will work tirelessly to assist any student in his or her research. I tell you the value of this collection from experience. In conducting research for my History thesis, I traveled to Venice to look for a particular collection of documents that I thought could only be found in Italy. After weeks of searching in the Venetian archive, I finally found the book, in deplorable condition, and asked that it be microfilmed and sent to America. I am still waiting. One day by chance, I entered the name of the book I needed from Venice in Franklin. To my surprise, it came up in the rare book collection and I had it in my hands the next day. In a time when students are willing to spend such vast amounts of time in the basement of Van Pelt Library, it's about time they checked out the paradise, lost and found, in the sixth-floor penthouse.

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