Pulitzer-winning historian Barbara Tuchman has observed that her single most formative educational experience was exploring Harvard’s Widener Library. She captured the feelings of many library lovers when she added that her own daughter couldn’t enter that building “without feeling that she ought to carry a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Library Marvels”
Ron Evett from outside Boston sent us a wonderful quotation about libraries. This one is from Barbara Tuchman. She talks in one of her books about how she became a historian and the fact that it wasn’t so much one particular teacher or one particular book she read, but just the whole experience of walking into Widener Library for the first time on the Harvard campus.
And she writes, the experience was marvelous, a word I use in its exact sense meaning full of marvels. The happiest days of my intellectual life, until I began writing history again some 15 years later, were spent in the stacks at Widener. My daughter Lucy, class of 61, once said to me that she could not enter the labyrinth of Widener stacks without feeling that she ought to carry a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle. I too was never altogether sure I could find the way out, but I was blissful as a cow put to graze in a field of fresh clover and would not have cared if I had been locked in for the night.
Nice, I knew you could relate. I’ve had that feeling, yeah. I mean, I’ve been to big libraries and small, but they all have that feeling somewhere in them, right? I just know in that next stack is a book that I need, right?
Yeah, and I love the idea of walking in with a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle. Big libraries, man. Bookstores have the same effect on me, but not quite the same, but close.
Yeah, but that first experience, I love that that was her formative experience.
