James Raven writes:
This talk is about my book in progress, a history of the Charleston Library Society, and the challenges faced in writing it. Founded in 1748, the Charleston Library Society is the third-oldest membership library in the United States. Its renowned Special Collections & Archives include thousands of volumes dating back to the 1400s, including the surviving remnants of its original 18th-century ‘Foundation Collection’ (which, after my 2003 book reconstructing the library’s acquisitions from London is now given ‘Raven’ numbers – if nothing else survives of my work, these might). The library holds one of the most comprehensive archives of Carolinian Low Country history, including the earliest surviving 18th-century city directories, 19th-century tax and police records, architectural drawings, and early Southern newspapers. It also houses a modern lending library, continuing its original mission by making thousands of current titles, periodicals, and audiobooks available for members. Among the library’s treasures are two copies of Nicholas Trott’s Laws of the Province of South Carolina (1736), printed by Lewis Timothy (a business partner of Benjamin Franklin), which is the earliest book printed in South Carolina, the "Grand Papier" edition of Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s Les Liliacées (1807–1816), alongside early editions of Mark Catesby and John James Audubon (although its near perfect edition of Audubon’s Birds was sold in the 1980s), original letters and documents signed by Washington and Hamilton, DuBose Heyward’s original annotated typescripts and scrapbooks for Porgy (1925), as well as papers from Charleston Renaissance writers like Josephine Pinckney. Its exhibition room displays Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s architectural engravings—items so prized they were evacuated to Columbia for safekeeping during the Civil War. The library also houses an active on-site Bindery and Archival Lab dedicated to conservation. Borrowing is restricted to members, but scholars and visitors can view exhibitions or arrange appointments with research librarians to access the Special Collections.
My book, however, intends to be more than an institutional history and history of the collection; it examines an international, extraordinary library’s changing role in the dramatic and contested history of the region, and in popular and elite thought, prevailing beliefs and prejudices, achievements and disappointments. At its heart is a clash of seemingly incompatible goals and convictions: an enthusiasm for Enlightenment learning and civility, and the support of a pitiless system of the buying and selling of people to work the plantations and provide the foundation for economic expansion – an expansion that created hugely wealthy planter families, prosperous merchants and traders in enslaved people, and the luxury of an eminent and extremely well-stocked library of books and scientific instruments. Overseas connections and influences sustained both enslavement and intellectual networks. This long, sensational and controversial history is sometimes enlightening, sometimes cruel and bleak. A grand foundation, always the repository of learnedness and intellectual curiosity and keen on its professional development, it remained habitually silent and unresponsive to the legacy of enslavement until recently repurposed to embrace its community in new and rewarding ways. Its convoluted story tells us what a library can be and how challenging remains its historical assessment.