Louise Beardwood, one of the Library Company’s longtime volunteers, recently completed an inventory of a scrapbook documenting part of the Library Company’s past. The scrapbook provides a fascinating glimpse into our mid-20th-century history, a time when the Library Company struggled to establish a vision for the future which finally culminated in our re-invention as a research library. The impressively-sized scrapbook (weighing in at more than twenty pounds!) covers the activities of the Library Company from roughly 1936 through 1966. Several hands compiled the scrapbook over a period of time, resulting in some material being clearly identified while other material is not.

Most of the items pasted on the more than 160 pages of the scrapbook are clippings from area newspapers. Much of the activity at our Juniper and Locust Street building involved the Women’s Committee, and news coverage of those events includes comments on the attendees and what they wore, interviews with the speakers, and general descriptions of the material in the related exhibitions. Other newspaper clippings include reviews of exhibitions, comments on specific holdings, many re-tellings of the history of the Library Company, notes regarding our various buildings, and occasional financial news.

The scrapbook also includes several rare book columns from New York publications in which Library Company holdings are mentioned. Oddities of the 200-year-old organization are reported with relish — the book that was returned 99 years late or the manuscript sent to the Librarian in a bread box. Obituaries of a few notable literary people are included, even if they were not Library Company members, such as the essayist Agnes Repplier. Generally, however, contemporary events in the world at large are not documented in the scrapbook.

More than a dozen photographs of Library Company buildings and furnishings and librarians are also included. Many of these photographs are not identified, including a series near the end of the scrapbook of a ceremony of some kind, probably taking place on the steps of the Ridgway Building on South Broad Street. While our scrapbook raises some unresolved questions, it also provides us with details about long-forgotten events of our past.

Louise B. Beardwood
Volunteer

Sarah J. Weatherwax
Curator of Prints and Photographs