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Under Edward L. Keenan, director from 1998 to 2007, Dumbarton Oaks underwent a great deal of construction and renovation. A new library, designed by Robert Venturi, was completed on October 11, 2005, and became home to the library collections and staff previously located in the Main House. Keenan had decided that it would be more efficient if, instead of having separate libraries for the three fields, they were all integrated into one main library with a single cataloging system.
Established in 1940, the Byzantine Studies program was the first area of scholarship at Dumbarton Oaks, and its library consisted of some twelve thousand volumes that the Blisses had acquired by the time Dumbarton Oaks became part of Harvard University. For the first two years of Dumbarton Oaks' existence as a research library, the books and periodicals were kept in what is now called the mezzanine, the space above the research library offices (what is today the Museum Shop).
However, the library quickly outgrew this space. In 1942, Dumbarton Oaks, with the Blisses' help, commissioned the architect Thomas T. Waterman to convert two second-floor guest bedrooms into a reading room in order to provide more shelving and better facilities for researchers. When the volumes were moved into the new library in 2006, the space was converted into offices for the director of Byzantine Studies and the museum director.
The rapid expansion of the Byzantine library collection again rendered the shelving in the reading room insufficient. The library quickly spread throughout the former residence: into the hallways on the second floor, the study and former dining room on the first floor, and even into newly built-in bookcases in the Founders Room.
Predictably, these expansions proved insufficient as well. Under Giles Constable, director from 1977 to 1984, Dumbarton Oaks installed on the third floor stationary book stacks and, in the basement, compact stacks, which operated on rollers, thus eliminating the need for space between each bookshelf. In order to support the great weight of the books on the third floor, the building was structurally reinforced with steel-reinforced concrete. To better protect the library collections, temperature and humidity controls were also introduced during this renovation. After the library vacated the Main House in 2006, the third floor stack area became the home of the publications department, and the basement compact stack area was retrofitted as storage for the museum collections.
The installation of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art in 1963 and the subsequent creation of the Pre-Columbian Studies program in 1970 brought an additional need for library space at Dumbarton Oaks. At first, Robert Bliss's twenty-four hundred volumes on Pre-Columbian art and archaeology were installed in a library room in the basement of the Pre-Columbian Pavilion that had been designed for that purpose.
However, in a manner similar to the expansion of the Byzantine library collection, the Pre-Columbian library quickly outgrew its initial allotted space. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, books were shelved in bookcases added to rooms and hallways, and, in 1997, compact stacks were again installed as a space-saving measure. With the books now relocated in the new library, the former Pre-Columbian library areas have allowed for the expansion of the Byzantine coins and seals collections and other institutional needs.
The library collection of the Garden and Landscape Studies program had as its nucleus the rare books that Mildred Bliss had collected between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. These were and continue to be elegantly shelved in the bookcases in the Rare Book Room, designed by the architect Frederic Rhinelander King and opened in 1963. Other rare materials are housed in the cabinets beneath the shelving.
The secondary resource materials in garden and landscape design were housed in the basement area under the Rare Book Reading Room, which also accommodated, in a somewhat cramped manner, the study carrels for the fellows. This was removed to the new library in 2006, and the space is today used for climate-controlled storage of the institution's rare collections.]]>
A devoted bibliophile and longtime friend of the Blisses, Ethel Burnet Clark helped Mildred Barnes Bliss catalog the Blisses' personal library before the transfer of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard University in 1940. After the transfer, she served as keeper of rare books from 1940 until 1944, when she reached mandatory retirement age. Highly knowledgeable about the rare holdings of Dumbarton Oaks, Clark published occasional essays on the collection, such as Chronicles of Froissart at Dumbarton Oaks, in 1947. Particularly close to Mildred, Clark wrote to her frequently and enthusiastically, often compiling extensive accounts of events at Dumbarton Oaks.
While the Blisses were in California, after they transferred Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard in 1940, Clark helped to generate the Underworld Courier, a short and sometimes tongue-in-cheek summary of events taking place at Dumbarton Oaks (see post). Mildred commented encouragingly on both the "versatile informativeness" and "feather-pated folly" that characterized the publication. In a letter written to Mildred, Clark expressed how fond she had become of writing for the publication, noting that after it ceased, she had been "lonely" without it, as her "heart had been kept warm and young" as a result of the "pleasant exercise of weaving" pieces for it.
Clark was also fond of creative writing, and she frequently wrote short segments of poetic prose to Mildred. An excerpt from one such work reads: "Life has bestowed many gifts upon me. Health with its companion resiliency; delight in the sky, the earth and the sea; unaccountable joy in life itself that surprises and sometimes shocks me by flashing its light when I ought to be sad." Clark was especially moved by the Blisses donation of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard University. She wrote about the gift: "All this time, I have marveled, saying 'It can't be possible. No human being, certainly not two, could so consistently, so unswervingly follow an ideal.'" She compared the Blisses' creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection to a "road built with wisdom, vision and will" for "pilgrims" aspiring to reach the "mountain top."
During her time working for the Blisses, Clark contributed much to the growth of what came to be called the Founders Room collection. Working with all forms of media, including books, manuscripts, letters, photographs, and even 78 rpm vinyl records, Clark was responsible for cataloging a significant portion of both the Blisses' personal holdings and Mildred's Garden Library Rare Book Collection. Beyond cataloging, she took responsibility for the acquisition of new rare books and miscellaneous other library matters. As such, she frequently interacted with book dealers, collectors, and authors to obtain new works. She also dealt with what she called the "exciting challenges" relating to the functioning of the library. Some of these challenges included rebinding library books, devising and mounting bookplates, and "sensibly and efficiently" organizing the location of books in the rooms at Dumbarton Oaks. She assisted in the binding of 388 volumes during her time working in the house bindery, from 1940 to 1942.
In 1943–44, Clark supervised a volunteer group that assisted the Arts and Skills Corps of the American Red Cross. This group took equipment and supplies to the Forest Glen Hospital, an annex of the Walter Reed Hospital, where they taught convalescing soldiers the art of bookbinding. She was strongly affected by the Second World War and strove to serve the nation's war effort as best she could. She attempted to qualify for the cipher and code division of the Office of Naval Intelligence. In a letter to Mildred, Clark revealed her diligence in preparing for the "aptitude" exam: "Often I reluctantly put away my pads and pencils at midnight and later jump out of bed because a possible solution has flashed across my brain." Clark contributed her time and effort as well to several book sales organized to raise funds for American troops.
Having happily worked to catalog and build the libraries at Dumbarton Oaks, Clark only surrendered her position because she had reached the age at which Harvard required retirement. A year before, Clark had commented on the "sorrow" of her predicament, especially after learning that she had no chance of being "an exception" to the retirement age after several conversations with "gentle and compassionate" John Thacher, the first director of Dumbarton Oaks. Nonetheless, Clark was able to remain at Dumbarton Oaks after her official "retirement," under the title: "Keeper of Rare Books, Emerita." In this capacity, Clark continued her work at Dumbarton Oaks and received a small monthly pension in addition to living quarters at the Acorn House, a small cottage on the Dumbarton Oaks property. Later, in the 1960s, she also helped catalog the Mary Mellon collection of books and manuscripts on alchemy and the occult, which Paul Mellon then gave to Yale University.
Robert Woods Bliss remembered Clark's service and friendship: "She was the doyenne of our staff and bore the strain and inconvenience of bringing order out of our personal Library; as well as in organizing a Bindery, rebuilding the Quarters and making catalogues at the same time. For this, and much besides the unfailing charm she brings to all her relationships and duties, we thank her warmly."
Particularly fond of the Acorn House (which had originally served as a kennel for the Blisses' guard dog Doberman Pinchers), Clark wrote about her new home lovingly in correspondence with Mildred, describing her "fundamental happiness and content" in being allowed to reside in the small house and even admitting that she had "not dared to put [her] delight into words—for fear that [she] would suddenly wake up." Mildred expressed her equal thrill at having Clark on the estate, writing: "I long to cross your threshold and to have you think aloud to me as we sit on the little terrace sipping lemonade."]]>
"The year 2012 is the centenary of Georgina Masson's birth and an auspicious moment to reprint here guide to the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks. The guide is a historically significant document, as it is one of four texts that trace the history of the gardens through the twentieth century. Dumbarton Oaks: A Guide to the Gardens was originally published in 1968, one year before the death of Mildred Bliss closed an era in the history of the gardens. Bliss had continued to alter the gardens after designer Beatrix Farrand's retirement in the 1940s. With Bliss's death in 1969, the gardens were effectively 'finished' (even though time will continue to transform them indefinitely). The guide is, thus, the text most representative of the gardens at the close of nearly a half-century of creative activity." John Beardsley, Director of Garden and Landscape Studies]]>
"[T]he book will immediately, I am sure, become an essential reference work for these interesting objects which . . . play much the same role for silver sculpture that the consular diptychs do with ivory in providing a large series of dated monuments in the early Christian period." Marion Lawrence, Speculum
The volume is divided into three parts: Part I presents and classification and analysis of the stamps and explains the method of dating. Part II explores the type of organization that applied them, and takes up the question of provenance. Following this is an excursus by J. P. C. Kent on the comes sacrarum largitionum. Finally, there is a descriptive catalogue of 103 pieces of silver dating to the period 400–700.
Dumbarton Oaks Studies 7]]>
The extensive fresco cycle discovered more than fifty years ago in the synagogue of Dura Europos has generated decades of scholarly debate over the role played by Jewish traditions in the initial development of Christian Bible illustration.Kurt Weitzmann returns the question to the primary evidence, the Dura synagogue frescoes themselves. Untangling the transformations introduced when the pictorial narrative was translated into the local idiom and adjusted to the monumental context, he argues that the fresco painters based their compositions on lost illustrated manuscripts of the Septuagint. By presenting numerous close parallels to these compositions in later Middle Byzantine and Western representations, he demonstrates that such lost Jewish manuscripts must have served as the foundation of Christian Bible illustration. Herbert L. Kessler considers the frescoes' program and structure in the context of pagan and Christian sanctuary decoration.
Dumbarton Oaks Studies 28]]>
OG: No, I came with him, because when he came in the fall '48, he came for the whole year because they offered him the position of Director of Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He brought his wife and his two children. Nobody knew what to do with me. I was eighteen then. So, I was the proper age to go to a university. I didn't know anything about American universities. I was given the choice between Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. The only thing that distinguished it to me was the color. I still remember the three colors as being three different colors. Why I went to Harvard I have no idea. But in any event, I went there and eventually graduated from there. My father decided not to stay permanently at Dumbarton Oaks because of complicated reasons, one of which was my mother – she didn't know English well enough. And he had a good job in Paris and felt that there was something wrong with an institution that was so un-American and located in Washington. He felt totally alien to the American world, and so did my mother. It was nice to come and study for specific periods of time, but to run it, as was offered to him at some point, he felt was wrong. There were other reasons as well. That's how I came and so my first week at Dumbarton Oaks was Christmas, '48, because when we arrived in New York I went straight to Cambridge and my family went to Washington. It was an introduction to the feudal world of Dumbarton Oaks because at Christmas time, in those days, Mrs. Bliss always invited everybody at Dumbarton Oaks for a Christmas party. Everybody received a gift. She'd never known me but she knew my father had an eighteen-year-old son. I forgot what gift she gave me, but there was a little package for me under the Christmas tree. Everybody received something like this, and this was my first introduction to her. Again, afterwards my father was again at Dumbarton Oaks when I was a senior at Harvard, and I worked on my thesis partly at Dumbarton Oaks because they had the books I needed. I'd had some advice from Father Dvornik and others on the medieval subject I was developing. My first impression of Dumbarton Oaks was that nobody spoke English. It was essentially a European institution with wonderful European manners. One of the lovely memories I have of Dumbarton Oaks at that time – I can't remember exactly what year it would have been – was my mother, the old Russian historian Vasiliev, and Otto Demus, a handsome Austrian Byzantinist, and, at the time, the Princeton Byzantinist, Bert Friend, holding arms together and going up and down the Music Room, which was where the Greco painting is now, and singing Viennese operettas in German – nobody would sing them in anything but German. Then they went out and entered again singing the end of the first act of Massenet's Manon – and then three voices sort of going up. It was really wonderful to me. That was their world. Their world was the Paris opera, the Vienna opera, the Merry Widow, and so forth. America didn't exist as a culture for them. Nice and wonderful though it was, it was a world totally of its own, where tea was very important, where to be seen at the swimming pool was very important, and so to them it was part of a nice little feudal world. The hierarchy was very clearly established. Everybody knew who was who, who had the right to do what and not to do what, and all the fellows, like properly infeodated vassals, lived in the Fellows Building which now is something else. I don't know what it is now.
ABF: Guest House.
OG: Guest House, is it? Okay. In the Fellows Building some of the older professors lived in the apartments attached to that building. It was wonderful but pretty much out of the real world, which I think it always was and has remained like that. Its first impression was that of a feudal place, where French was the dominant language because Mrs. Bliss, as I would hear it, did not like anything German, and Russian was a second language. She was a great friend of Stravinsky. He composed a Dumbarton Oaks symphony for her. Vasiliev – who was a reasonable and broad scholar but not a great scholar but an absolutely adorable person with a nice little mustache and smiling face and sort of walking the way I walk now – that is an old man's walk – as an eighteen-year-old, nineteen-year-old, to walk with an eighty year old was sort of new to me. I hadn't encountered that. And telling stories – his stories were absolutely endless, whether it's in St. Petersburg, Australia, or Wisconsin, wherever he'd been. Father Dvornik was of the same vintage, but not as attractive. And then there was Sirarpie Der Nersessian who had an extraordinary personal history. After all she was born in Constantinople. Her uncle was the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople. She escaped dramatically during or just after World War One and then went to Paris to study. All three belonged to a little world of its own. Sirarpie Der Nersessian lived in Dumbarton Oaks with her sister. They were both very remarkable because they were very short. In the dining room in the Fellows Building – I still remember because it struck me at that time – when Sirarpie sat at the head of a table, as she often did, her feet did not reach the floor. They were sort of dangling. But those were very close family friends. To me, Dumbarton Oaks was a wonderful estate in which you do whatever you want – you read books, beautiful books. It was set up not like libraries, but on shelves surrounded by genteel living – you had a Monet here, then you had Byzantine books, then you had a nice work of art – it was your private library and your private collection, which is now being transformed into a mechanized and organized way.
ABF: Did your father know any of the scholars at Dumbarton Oaks before he arrived there?
OG: Yes. He knew all the old ones. Vasiliev, Dvornik, Der Nersessian, probably Underwood and Kitzinger. No – I think he met Kitzinger at Dumbarton Oaks. Because then you had the old blokes – Vasiliev, Der Nersessian, and my father who had been students together in the '20s in Paris. So they had known each other for a long time. The new ones, the four professors at Dumbarton Oaks – I think there were four – they were Kitzinger, Underwood, Anastos and Downy. They were all supposed to be equal. Nobody knew exactly what to do with them, as the academic system was slowly taking over the feudal one. They had not participated in the exotic life of Europe after the First World War or of the '20s. Harvard had two Byzantinists at that time, but for reasons that I don't know – Constable maybe would know better – the Harvard of that time was never brought to Dumbarton Oaks. Bobby Blake, for instance, who had been one of the big allied spies in the Caucasus during the First World War, who worked for the British, in Azerbaijan in 1919, never set foot in Dumbarton Oaks. That is something I don't know – that part of the story. The Harvard establishment was not the Dumbarton Oaks establishment. Dumbarton Oaks was separate from Harvard and I think Harvard at that point didn't know what to do with Dumbarton Oaks, and probably still doesn't quite know what to do with it. The Princeton faculty was more visible there than the Harvard one. My father knew these four younger scholars, and he got particularly close to Kitzinger because they would often work on the same things, the same fields. In a way, I'm not sure that even this was very good for Kitzginer to have my father there because my father was about fifteen years older than he was. And he kind of a little bit made life difficult – I don't mean technically but intellectually – for Kitzinger who was certainly the most intelligent, the most creative of these four professors. When he became Director of Studies, two of them – Downy and Anastos – left almost immediately. I think they were upset that they weren't considered. Underwood – I forget when Underwood died – he died relatively young.
ABF: In '69.
OG: But, he was so involved with Istanbul. He was constantly there. I have a wonderful memory of him because he found me my first hotel in Istanbul, which was the crummiest hotel I've ever been in my life. I shouldn't say this, but he was very stingy in things like that.
ABF: So how was it for you, as a student of medieval history?
OG: I profited from being my father's son, so that everything was open, everybody was very nice and sweet. For my work – at Princeton where I was a graduate student, then at Michigan or at Harvard where I was employed– their libraries were sufficient to me. I didn't need Dumbarton Oaks. And I was never a Byzantinist, even though some people think I am, but I never was. So Dumbarton Oaks to me – let's put it this way – Dumbarton Oaks to me was always a kind of second home. I always felt that I knew how to operate there. I got very distressed when they built the new shelves. I thought that the old Dumbarton Oaks would disappear. And I loved to go to the symposia. Every year we had a procession from Princeton where I was graduate student to go to Dumbarton Oaks for the symposium, where you kind of saw all the big shots you had heard about or read about. That was interesting and exciting. I think the symposium played a very important role up to whatever time it was when they changed the rules, when all the people who gave talks spent a semester at Dumbarton Oaks, so that the people preparing the symposium were all working together on the symposium. So, the symposium was not like now. People work wherever they are, then come the day before they give their talk, give their talk, and go away. This was a collective enterprise being prepared. But by the time I was involved in symposia, I guess in '62, that wasn't true anymore. I flew in from Ann Arbor the day before. So, as a collective operation, it was not as successful. These later symposia did not create as much excitement as the symposia of the '50s, which were really, truly milestones – the one my father did in 1946, what Dvornik did, the first one Kitzinger did – they were really major intellectual creations. Since then it has become another meeting of professors to get their trips paid. Byzantine studies have been in trouble for the last twenty years. It's not a field that is a growing – it has been taken over by all kinds of other forces than whatever is required of pure scholarship. The great thing about the central, western, and eastern European scholars of yore, as well as the first group of Americans who were there was that they were really only interested in scholarship. They had no other agenda. Now old national types have come, and Byzantine studies have tended to become a series of competing nationalisms, going from Greece to Ukraine or Russia. It is a series of national flags being waved, and that is very destructive. It is no longer what the old scholarship used to be. It is easy to say the old one was very nice and very good, because it was connected to empires, to big countries, and not to the small countries, which we are creating now one after the other. Have you heard of Southern Ossetia before last week? Now everybody's excited about what Northern Ossetia and Southern Ossetia are going to do to each other. What I think is interesting about Ossetia, actually, is that the Ossetian language is the only Romanian language of its kind. It's the only remaining Alan language that was known in the second century.
ABF: So, can you describe – speaking of the symposia – can you describe your experience at these early symposia?
OG: They were wonderful. I told you about the old symposia. I think they have changed quite a bit. The symposiums, first of all, never met on Sundays. That would have been immoral. Nobody went to church, but they did not do anything on Sunday. You rested. The old ones met on Thursday, Friday, Saturday morning and they always ended Saturday with a lunch at the Blisses' private house, about several blocks down from the main building of Dumbarton Oaks. That was very important because not everyone was invited there. Speakers were invited, and a few selected guests. So, on Saturday morning after the last meeting, you could see the poor participants who had to go to the drugstore to have a hamburger on Wisconsin Avenue and the elect who walked down toward the Blisses' house to have lunch at the Blisses' house, which was always catered – waiters in white clothes – and where you met not only the Dumbarton Oaks crowd, but you also met some of the social people Mrs. Bliss was cultivating or who were cultivating her. It was a very social occasion, as were the dinners on Thursday and Friday – Friday dinner was at Dumbarton Oaks and comprised always the same menu, a magnificent single salmon, totally glazed. I've never seen a whole glazed salmon like this. White liveried, white-gloved characters were cutting it up to give you your portion with, I guess, some salad. I forget what was the menu on Thursdays. It must have been a meat menu, because those were days following the tradition of Thursday meat, Friday fish, Sunday sleep. Now I think that you buy your sandwiches or you buy your lunch box, which is kind of repulsive. The big thing about the symposium itself was also its ceremonial quality. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss used to arrive and sit in the back. And it was an event, like the arrival of the deacon or the bishop at a religious ceremony. They had their own chairs in the back. Mrs. Bliss would always listen very carefully, then ask the speaker to give her a copy of what he has said because she wanted to read it before she would comment on it. And she always read it and always commented on it. She always had something to say. I don't think he ever did, and I think he slept through most of them. At the symposium itself, in the front row, were the big couches. I don't know if they still have them at the symposium. Enormous couches where the very distinguished, elderly professors would sit. In my days it would have been Kantorovich, Friend, Dvornik, Vasiliev – would sit there, I think sleep a little bit. They were too old to listen to talks. It was like a royal court. You have the top princes sit in front, then you have the variety of lower aristocrats behind, and then some poor little graduate students in the back. But the graduate students were future aristocrats, so they belonged there. What hardly belonged there was spouses. That didn't exist. It wasn't allowed. We never talked about things like that. Or companions – the word didn't exist. But it was always very – you felt that you were actually into a ceremonial event. And that was part of its beauty, that even if it was a lousy paper – most of them were not, in those days – it was a liturgical ceremony to listen to it and to partake of the learning. You were supposed to understand whatever language was used by the speaker. If you had questions afterward – the questions were in most cases stupid. The questioners were not stupid, but nobody had anything intelligent to say because they had just heard a lecture, so they hadn't had time to think of something intelligent to say – except the learned disputes between people, as with Weitzman and Morey, when they were present. But that's a special case. That I think has changed quite a bit. Now it has become much more routinized, like older colloquial of academic life. It's quite different. It doesn't have that prestige of a religious act. Food was very important. The teas were served at the right moment, the coffees at the right moment, the dinners – and who went to what was very important.
ABF: Were there any particular moments at these symposia or papers or even just one symposium in particular –
OG: I remember mostly one symposium that my father directed, the one you mentioned –
ABF: The Emperor and the Palace.
OG: – The Emperor and the Palace, which was really remarkable. But, of course, he had gathered probably the most spectacular group of scholars available at that time. Just even seeing them – I was a graduate student then – those people whose books I had read or was reading, here they all were. They were living beings. And so that was one. I think the one that Sir Hamilton Gibb did in which I was involved in '62 was also important because he brought almost for the first time the Near Eastern world into Byzantium instead of Byzantium always connected with Europe. Kitzinger led one on Sicily – that was many years later – which was also very interesting, because he had gathered an unusual group of people. If you look – and you probably have them all – the symposia still now have their liturgical function, that is, all the participants gather some place and get their picture taken with each other – the chairman must be sitting in the middle. The rest may be standing, but the chairman always sits. And if you look at those pictures, they're very interesting to see as a sequence, because you can see how people age. Some age well, some age not so well. The other thing – nobody, I think, ever smiles. But I would check that, because I'm not sure –
ABF: They start smiling later. They smiled later, in the '80s.
OG: They all dressed with coat and tie, and probably dark suits and so forth because it is a liturgical act. It is a liturgical function to participate in a Dumbarton Oaks symposium, like serving at mass. It was a liturgical moment – even staying at the Fellows Building at some point. But, I think there were two apartments at the two ends which were real apartments. And my parents stayed there. And I came to visit for whatever reason and the lunches and dinners were prepared at the Fellows Building. Now you fix your own sandwiches or whatever it is. But there was a whole group of staff – black staff, from a sort of formal American servants class – were there to cook and do the bedding. And I remember when the change began to happen – I forget when it was my parents were there, and I came late. I must have gone out to dinner or the movies or whatever it is, and I came back late, and as I opened the door, I see an extremely distinguished scholar making love to a woman on the couch downstairs. Because you couldn't do it in the rooms – I forgot now why – so they stayed down. It was a very odd thing. There were two small houses, to the right and to the left. And the one to the right was occupied at some point by Dvornik. And I got very irritated once when I was a graduate student because Kantorovich was here. Dvornik also was a great cook, both of them. And Kantorovich came to cook. And Kantorovich had asked me to help him prepare the chickens. He mixed some fancy I don't know what. And I was supposed to inject it between the skin and the meat of the chicken. But I was not invited for the dinner. You see, the dinner was for big guys. I was allowed to help. I got accolades; he knew I was going to be a big guy at some point and I will eat the proper chicken. But at that point I had not acquired the right to eat the chicken that Kantorovich prepared. And similarly, much later, the person who occupied that building was called Kraeling. I don't exactly know how many years Carl Kraeling was involved with Dumbarton Oaks. It was after he retired from Chicago. He went to Yale but spent a lot of time at Dumbarton Oaks. Carl Kraeling was a very American type. He was of German origin, very Lutheran – very strict Lutheran tradition – but very American in spirit. Carl spoke four languages. My mother said once that she had to go and ask him once for something – I've forgotten now what, some practical thing – and rang the doorbell, and he opened the door, and he was naked. So, he walked around naked in his house, which is, again, the kind of thing one didn't do at Dumbarton Oaks in those days. The rooms upstairs were single rooms, and they shared the bathroom, which is no longer acceptable now. And I don't know when they started buying or renting apartments. The result was – is – that people don't connect with each other the way they did before. But that's a price that one has to pay. Nearly all American institutions were based then on single people. So my memories of Dumbarton Oaks are mostly social. They are mostly social because my direct contact with it – until I became member of the board of scholars – but that again was part of the feudal system, because Giles Constable and I were classmates, we'd known each other since the '40s, and so there was a kind of automatic reliance on the people you knew to run whatever work was needed. On the whole that was good, but not always. But it was a completely different Dumbarton Oaks then. And as well as the board of scholars, we took care of masses of little details, which before were not handled by the scholars. They were handled by some assistant at Harvard or elsewhere. And that is one of the good but debatable things that Giles Constable did: he created an administration for Dumbarton Oaks instead of a tradition. You didn't do things because Mrs. Bliss said it should be done that way. You did things because that's the way you do things. That was the good side. There were some incidents with that too. I got into trouble with one of the members, with one of the fellows, whom I was interviewing because we all had to interview a certain number of fellows. And for some reason I can't remember, she was known as a difficult person. And I remember both Ihor Ševčenko and Giles telling me, "Well, you're so nice, you take her. We don't want to deal with her." And I said, "I suppose I can handle it." And she absolutely beat me. There was nothing I could say to which she did not have already set answers. And I never felt so completely overwhelmed by an individual. I was supposed to be the powerful one that's supposed to decide her fate, and she flattened me right there. I think she's still alive. I haven't seen her for many years. It became a different world when it became so much more Americanized and involved with graduate students and assistant professors, that is, with a very specific American problem, instead of being the haven to which the world's scholars come. I suspect because there is no need for Dumbarton Oaks, from that point of view. There are many other places that have now good libraries, with Internet you can get everything anyway. So, congeniality and pleasure of being together, having breakfast together, lunch together, dinner together, and tea together – that has disappeared. The humanities do not have what here I see with mathematicians and physicists: collective work. That is, they don't work collectively. We tend to work individually. Collective work is done in excavations, but that's out of Dumbarton Oaks. And the other thing of the Dumbarton Oaks I knew a long time ago was it was involved in masses of activity outside. The Istanbul excavations, the Hagia Sophia, project, and then another one in Constantinople, and then excavations in Syria, but the big Hagia Sophia project was something – have you ever seen those books?
CW: No.
OG: Oh, you should see them because you probably would not know how to use that book. You need a whole table just to open the book to look at the pictures. But that was the extraordinary person, Van Nice, involved in the project. He was an architect. I think he went to Princeton. Many scholar-architects had done that. Underwood went to Princeton. And that's an important side part of the relationship between Princeton's adventures and architects, Dumbarton Oaks, the Near East, ARAMCO, the Arab petrol company, and the CIA. All of this was very closely interrelated. When I took a trip – when I was at the University of Michigan – with George Forsyth, who was on the Dumbarton Oaks board and who had been with us in Princeton – every embassy we stopped at had a Princeton graduate as a C.I.A. agent there, and they all knew each other. They all started as archaeologists and became O.S.S. during the war stage of the C.I.A. because it pays better than Wellesley, as in the case of one. This again is another world that's gone. Now you have creepy individuals who went to military school. You don't have any longer cultivated spies. But Dumbarton Oaks was very much involved in that. But it is interesting that Underwood was an agent there, and all the other Dumbarton Oaks activities were not done by the people that were at Dumbarton Oaks. Kitzinger was not involved; Downey was not; Dvornik was not. That was decided by Thacher, Jack Thacher. I knew Thacher quite well, but I knew him personally rather than academically. He would represent the kind of things my father was very much opposed to at Dumbarton Oaks, that is, the power of rich people, rich amateurs. To my father, Thacher was a great amateur – very cultivated and very sophisticated, but he was an amateur. He was not a priest. He did not belong to the priesthood of scholarship.
ABF: So, this was happening while you were on the board of scholars?
OG: No. I wasn't on the board of scholars until the early '70s, and I would say that after the early '60s, for about ten years, I was hardly involved in Dumbarton Oaks. Then, in the '70s, after I came to Harvard, whenever Giles Constable became Director – he sort of got me back here. But I must admit, I was not as personally involved as I had been in early times. I didn't know the people anymore; and, also, because I was also in a different field from most of the fields of the people at Dumbarton Oaks, I was not important to anybody at Dumbarton Oaks. I was important as an administrator, as a Harvard representative, but intellectually I was not important. But, anyway, it was no longer a hot intellectual center, where you talk to people about scholarly things. Like all these institutions, most of the people who were here were young assistant professors looking for jobs or people whose concern was not whether somebody discovered a new manuscript; their concern was, is the job in Vanderbilt better than the job in Oklahoma State? So, it was a completely different attitude, and much more mechanically involved. By 1990 I was already here, and I went to Harvard for a few meetings to find a successor to whoever it is who was – who was the director just before Ned Keenan? – it was Thomson –
ABF: Laiou.
OG: Laiou, it was for Laiou. Well, the Laiou appointment was a tricky one; because, first of all, Harvard professors were rarely appointed there and secondly, there was the Hellenization – a criticism made of Dumbarton Oaks, whether justified or not, that it was all taken over by the Greeks. But one could say that the early one was all taken over by Russians. Eventually, you will have the Serbs or the Bulgarians – there's not enough of them – or the Romanians taking over; and that is the drama of Byzantine Studies. It has become national, instead of being global and since nobody goes to church anymore, there was no Orthodox streak. You could say that this was true in previous generations – that they became Byzantinists because they had learned to be orthodox. They were not believers, they did not go to church regularly, but they knew the services, they knew the religion, they knew the theology – Meyendorf and people like this; my father, who's not religious at all, but knew every service. Weitzman went to every orthodox service he could lay his hands on. Kitzinger never did. They were no longer interested in Byzantium; they were interested in what happened to the antique world, the late antique world – that's what Kitzinger did. It became a different world. The collection is still a Byzantine collection, but I wonder how many of the professors ever go there, to the collection. I mean, this is a separate, public thing and, in fact, I don't think there are professors at Dumbarton Oaks anymore.
ABF: There aren't. In your opinion, do you think that's a good or a bad thing?
OG: I don't know. I think, on the whole, it is a good thing. I can imagine having two or three ancient scholars – like Kazhdan was there; but usually, you do it because you can't find him a job in regular universities. So , I'm not sure if that made sense at the time of war or with the Soviet regime; now, it is not necessary anymore. But that's something you can argue about, whether it should be a kind of temporary place, where people stop early in their career in order to form themselves properly or whether it is a place to which you come for a year of rest and breathing within your normal career. I don't know, I mean, I can argue it either way; and I can see people here who have exactly the same problem. Should it be a place to which people come with thoughts and to have peace of mind, or it a place where you go to magnify yourself to get a better job – which tends to be now that happens. So, half of our people at Dumbarton Oaks spend most of the time running out and giving lectures and showing off some place or other. And I'm not sure quite what it should be. I suppose that what an institution like Harvard has to decide – they have to set their policies for them, if they want to do that. It is no longer a great center for collective scholarship, except that it has a publication program, and the Dumbarton Oaks Papers are a very important thing. It is no longer because there are competitors for that; there are other places which do this. I don't think the kind of scholarship that Ihor represents is something that is still of significance to most people. I mean, if you read any of the things that Ihor writes, it's actually wonderful; but if you don't know Greek, German, and Russian, it becomes very difficult to understand and appreciate.
CW: Do you remember anything about the rumors of Harvard wanting to move the operation of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard?
OG: Well, my thoughts on the possibility of transporting Byzantine Studies to Harvard? You're going to be shocked if I even suggest this to Tom Lentz or anybody of that nature, but it would have been, probably, a good idea forty years ago. Now, there is no point in thinking about it. Harvard can't handle its own collections in Cambridge, and to bring all this down suddenly. When I knew Dumbarton Oaks, it was all Byzantine – then suddenly appeared all the Pre-Columbian and then the Garden. Should all three of these continue on a more or less equal footing? I simply don't know; but, then again, I don't do the budget, so I don't know where it is financially. I think it is strange bedfellows, I mean, these three things together; but maybe that is legitimate – I mean, if there is enough money, there is certainly enough space here to have all three of them. I want to go back to this question about the atmosphere of the place. Now the atmosphere of the place has changed because people are not in a monastery together. They are in a library together, whereas in the past it was like a monastery: you had breakfast together, you had lunch together, you had dinner, you spent all day together. Right now, you don't have breakfast. You still have lunch, and I'm told it's still very ceremonial: who is allowed to have lunch in the Fellows Building, who is not allowed. You have classes of visitors to the library, ones who are first-class visitors and second-class visitors. I don't know whether it's true, but in the past, it used to be a community working together, which I don't think it is now. Maybe these kinds of worlds have simply disappeared, and there's no point in trying to establish them. You're not going to invent a Vasiliev, a Dvornik, or people of that nature – they just don't exist. For instance, when Ihor tried very hard to get Hans Belting, who probably to the younger generation is the most brilliant Byzantinist or art historian or whatever you want – but he didn't want to come to Washington. One reason is that he doesn't feel at home in an American institution. And why should you bring somebody who's not at home in that institution? It's still easier to do here, at the Institute for Advanced Study – we still have quite a few people like that. Because here there is nothing around, you really live in your own secluded world with your lunches and dinners. And the world of Dumbarton Oaks can no longer be recreated. There was a mythology of Dumbarton Oaks, but it is really no longer clear to what objectives it responds. Is it a training place to prepare people for functions in American or other institutions. Usually, it has to be American institutions, because I don't think you get yourself ready for a position in Italy by coming to Dumbarton Oaks. Or it is a place where you meet for seminars and symposia? These should be organized differently, that is, where people meet twice: once to organize something, and then they do work wherever they are, and then they meet again to expose the results of their work; or all kinds of other techniques or patterns that can be proposed. I don't know, is there actually a board of trustees at Dumbarton Oaks now that is separate –?
CW: Yes.
OG: – that is separate from the Harvard one?
CW: No, I don't think it's – I think they are more or less the same.
OG: As the Harvard corporation, yeah. So to whom are they responsible? They are responsible to the Harvard president?
ABF: Probably
OG: See, one doesn't even know who runs that place. It was alright as long as the people running it were the Blisses, Thacher, Thacher's successor, Tyler, the former ambassador to The Netherlands. They were all American aristocrats, wealthy American aristocrats – they were superior to Harvard. They didn't talk directly to Harvard and didn't want Harvard to meddle with their little feudal entity. That's fallen apart. Now everything is run by the actual rule of professors, which means the bureaucrats of an academic system; and they have it different – they are not wealthy for the most part (some exceptions you have there), and it's a completely different world – and the academic world is a completely different world than it was thirty years ago.
ABF: When do you – what period do you pinpoint as the time when these changes began to take place?
OG: I think the '70s. This was when Giles Constable was Director.
ABF: This was when you were on the Board of Scholars?
OG: Yeah; and I think that the important thing is that Giles Constable is somebody who understood that. Giles knew that. Now, whether his solutions were the right ones is another questions, but he understood that there was something different – that you cannot recreate the world of wonderful, sophisticated learning – and cooking. I mean the idea of a bunch of professors cooking for each other is very interesting because all the professors I mentioned who cooked for each other – Friend and Dvornik and Kantorowicz – were all bachelors – and the whole history, which I haven't thought much about, about the intimacies of people at Dumbarton Oaks – the ones with families, the ones without families. See, Kitzinger was remarkable. He had three children, and one of them stayed in England I believe when he was at Dumbarton Oaks, but maybe two of them, I think, were little children – or only one. Anastos had a son nobody ever saw. Downey had a daughter, I think, who eventually became a professor at UCLA. Underwood had a daughter whom nobody ever saw – they were already grown-up children. They were no longer part of the community. I don't remember them showing up at Mrs. Bliss's Christmas party – but I may be wrong. In other words, there is an old myth at Dumbarton Oaks, which is cute to remember, and you can write nice little stories about it, but it has nothing to do with what Dumbarton Oaks could or should be. What it is, it is a fabulous library, and, I suppose, I'm sure it now has all the right equipment for computer work of one kind of another. It probably spends more money, just as we do now here, on all kinds of ways to improve the computerization of the place – and not on secretarial help or research assistants. Because, who needs a research assistant when everything's on the internet? But, that's true, you have to know how to use that thing, and half the time, it falls apart [laughter]. But, since Ned Keenan became director, I haven't been much involved with Dumbarton Oaks. Until then, I was. Thomson I knew quite well. Angeliki Laiou – that's different. She belongs to – because she represented a very different objective for Dumbarton Oaks than what Thomson had been.
ABF: What was that?
OG: Nationalism.
ABF: One thing, actually, that you said that I was a bit curious about. You talked about your father being a bit critical of rich amateurs, amateur scholars; but, isn't that how you would also describe the Blisses?
OG: Oh, they were not scholars. They were not trained to scholarship.
ABF: Amateur collectors.
OG: Yeah, amateur collectors; oh, collectors are mostly amateurs. But I think there is something interesting in that there was always a paradox in my father's opinion of the Blisses because he genuinely liked Mrs. Bliss; he was very fond in a social way of what she represented. She had a kind of charm and she understood intellectual theories – or maybe she acted as though she understood – that I don't know, but she understood, and she made you feel good. But she never claimed to be a scholar. She was a collector, but I think he was the bigger collector, Mr. Bliss. He was the real collector, but she was a collector too. I mean, that was a completely different attitude – and I suspect my father always thought museums should collect, not people – this is a public activity, not a private activity (which doesn't work). Was the DO faculty ever dissolved, or they just didn't replace people?
ABF: Well, they – in the '70s, basically, there ceased to be a permanent faculty at Dumbarton Oaks.
OG: Yes, well, who was the faculty? Ihor was there, then he moved to Harvard. Was there anybody else?
CW: Mango.
OG: Well, Mango, well, Mango – that was one of the mistakes. I mean, Mango was a great man, but it was a mistake for Ihor to have brought him because they are very close friends and kindred spirits. They are very old friends, but they are separate from everybody else who was there. And, therefore, you create a kind of – two bodies running everything, and both very critical of most people; and that was a mistake, that was the wrong kind of person to have. But then anyway I don't know that anybody really thought whether Dumbarton Oaks should have a faculty or not? So these guys are gone, or one goes and the other – "we'll take him to Harvard. Let's not do anything. Let's see how it runs." Was it a thoughtful decision or just it's easier to not have a faculty – because nobody ever knew. These became the years under Bill Loerke about whom the question had arisen whether he should be adhoc-ed by a Harvard committee or not; and I don't remember the discussion and decisions that took place. There was already a question as to whether Bill Loerke was a member of the faculty at Harvard or not; and similarly, you ask here why they abolished the position of Director of Byzantine Studies. Now I don't know why it was abolished. I think it was abolished when Giles became Director.
ABF: Mmm hmm.
OG: Yeah, because I think he thought he could do it. And then he reestablished it – or was it reestablished after him?
ABF: After.
OG: I would imagine so, because this is – I could see very well, Giles would feel, being a medievalist and a scholar and an academic, that he doesn't need a Director of Studies. But the moment you get somebody who doesn't get – but, again, Giles is a strong personality with strong connections, who belongs to the striped pants general staff of academia (very complicated system in academia, where you have those people who went through War College to general staff and people who did not go to general staff). And the German military always had striped pants, if you went to general staff school; and Giles, like I, belonged to general staff. We went to all the right places: the right institutions, the right degrees, at the right time, and so forth. If there are no studies, should there be a Director of Studies? I don't know, I mean, this is something – there is one now?
ABF: Mmm hmm.
OG: Who is it now?
ABF: Alice-Mary Talbot.
OG: Oh, she's still at DO?
ABF: Yeah, for another year.
OG: For another year. She is very good at it; but I'm not quite sure what the purpose of it is, unless there are indeed – or they have now Junior Fellows, Junior Fellows, that's right. So they have younger people – so Summer Fellows, that's right. They have all kinds of groups of people to take care of, so therefore it would make sense to have a Director of Studies. Do they still have concerts?
ABF: Yeah.
CW: Primarily in the winter, I think.
OG: Yeah, in winter, usually. But, this again – the concerts or even the symposia or the lectures were a big social event in Washington, and I remember for the symposium, for instance, automatically, the whole staff of the Freer Gallery and the National Gallery came to the symposium, regardless of the subject, because they had to be seen. Right now, they don't even know what happens at Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, I'm close to both the Freer Gallery and the National Gallery; I've been very much involved with both of these. They don't even know what happens at Dumbarton Oaks. They don't even get invitations any more. Just as Dumbarton Oaks is not invited to their activities. Now, in the Bliss period, the Dumbarton Oaks affairs, whether its concerts or lectures, were a social event in Washington, and you played for a Washington public; and I think this is almost gone now. Maybe they'll try to – well, it should be reestablished. In a way, this is the kind of thing people like my father thought was silly, but they enjoyed it. It was a real occasion for them to see a certain Washington establishment. This is not the political establishment. This is the establishment of the Georgetown rich, old aristocratic Georgetown families that would meet there for a concert or for a lecture – symposia, usually they didn't stay very long, because symposia bored them. Also, the nature of publication has changed so much that, is there any use for most of these symposia? I mean, we have them all the time here in the sciences; but, again, the sciences work as a team. I mean, that's quite different as a way of doing things. But, the other great thing is the social change. A cooking staff disappears when most Fellows started being married, and therefore living in apartments, and not coming – but this is a rather important issue: do you create a social collective, as the Soviets would have called it, or do you create a convenience store, to which you come for whatever you need and then you go home? We have a wonderful library here. The great thing about this library in Princeton is that there's almost never anybody in it, because it's so easily accessible that people come at 3 a.m. or whenever it is they can come and work here. But it is a luxury. It is a luxury because all these books, no one – nobody ever touches them. They're there in case you want it; and here and there you suddenly want it. I think all these institutions of research have a problem. They, as I said, become, either, like the Getty, which just brings younger people and older people for six months to do their thing, that's one way; or you're creating something together. That's what Dumbarton Oaks tried to do, and I don't think it has been able to do it anymore; but I don't think we have common questions anymore. But, that, I mean, may be the pessimism of old age. Now, what I suggest, if you don't mind, we have a very simple lunch. We could do that.
ABF: Sure, thank you very much.]]>
The Rare Book Reading Room, which stands at the southwest end of the main building, was designed by the architect Frederic Rhinelander King (1887–1972). King, cousin of the novelist Edith Wharton, belonged to the same social orbit as Robert Woods Bliss (1875–1962) and Mildred Barnes Bliss (1879–1969), who donated Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard University in 1940. King's design, aimed to recall the grandeur of the French eighteenth century, is well suited to the historical nature of the rare books, drawings, and manuscripts it houses. The look speaks to a strong strain within American culture that seeks out inspiration in the Old World and Enlightenment.Projecting to the north of the main building, in the opposite direction from the Reading Room, are the eight domes, with a central fountain, that constitute the Philip Johnson Pavilion. Commissioned in 1959 to showcase the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art, it is remarkable for its interaction with the trees surrounding it. Thanks to their curves and glassiness, the octet of curving cells blends in with the nature around it, and the objects displayed within seem to float against the world outside. At the same time the architecture gestures to the Islamic world, particularly to Turkish structures of the Ottoman period. In sum, the Pavilion is anything but traditional European in either its design or its artworks (if the term artworks is not itself a Western imposition!).
Robert Bliss did not survive to witness the completion of the two edifices, since he died the year before, but his widow Mildred lived on through most of the decade. It is a tribute to the scope and flexibility they retained even as octogenarians that they should have envisioned a complex of buildings that could harmonize two additions as distinct in style and function as the Rare Book Reading Room and Philip Johnson Pavilion have been for the past half century.
To mark the anniversaries, we will celebrate not just the spaces themselves but also the uses for which they were established. The Blisses intended their buildings, grounds, and collections to serve both advanced scholars and the general public. Without interrupting experts who need library materials and without jeopardizing the proper protection of those materials, we are planning a series of small guided tours to the Rare Book Reading Room and the Philip Johnson Pavilion. Visits will be complemented by an ambitious calendar of talks, lectures, workshops, colloquia, and symposia. Through such activities we do our part to uphold the causes of the humanities and advanced research, while familiarizing the public with our complex missions—in historic preservation, innovative scholarship, and broad dissemination—and demonstrating their ultimate oneness.]]>
To accompany Dumbarton Oaks' participation in the NMWA exhibition, the Rare Book Collection presents an online exhibit featuring information about the artist and images from, among other sources, Merian's Metamorphosis.]]>
CB: You're welcome. Thank you for inviting me.
INT: Can you tell us a little bit about your work as a librarian and how you came to work at Dumbarton Oaks?
CB: I was a late person to go into library work because I went overseas for three years during World War II, and before that I tutored children on a 200,000 acre cattle ranch in New Mexico because I wasn't old enough to be accepted overseas through the Red Cross. So, when I came back from the Red Cross, I got married to the New York Times correspondent in Chicago and we lived there for three years, and I took some additional courses at the University of Illinois, Chicago campus, in art history because I'd taken really little – I'd taken mostly English. I went to Smith College. I graduated in 1942 – the Dark Ages. Betty Friedan – did you ever hear of The Feminine Mystique? Did you ever hear about that? Well, she was in my class. So that was sort of the early days – still there were no jobs for women of any importance at that point. Anyway, so I was overseas, then when I came back I got married, and then my husband, after three years – he'd just been appointed to a big job in Washington, died of lung cancer. So then I went to New York to start over again, and I worked at LIFE magazine in the library there, in the archives in the great days – this was before television, mind you, so it was wonderful. So then I left, three editors at LIFE went over to American Heritage and founded the magazine and I'd had no library training but I became the head of the library and the photo archives. And so, I learned from my friend who was at the Metropolitan and at the New York Public Library and so I was there for ten years and then married again and had a child at 42 and I decided that maybe I should get a library degree. So while I was working full time and pregnant I got my library degree at Columbia and I had no sooner gotten it when my husband got a job working in the Cultural Affairs Department of the State Department. So, we came to Washington and rented this house down the street, and our son was then four years old and in nursery school up at Beauvoir, which is up at St. Albans school, and there was a reception for parents or something and I remember very well sitting on the lawn and there was Ihor Ševčenko, who you probably have heard a good deal about, a great, great scholar, but a rather off-beat man. I don't know how many wives he'd had by then, but he later had acquired at least two or three afterward, two anyway. Anyway, we were chatting because his daughter was in Nicholas's class and he said, "What do you do?" And I said, "Well I don't do anything. I'm a librarian and I've got to start looking for a job." And he said, "Oh, I'm at Dumbarton Oaks, we need a librarian. Come down for an interview." This is the way things went in those days. Now, that was not very professional. However, I did go down. I really shouldn't have been hired because to be effective in this library you have to have knowledge of the languages and I have a great curiosity and I learned an enormous amount. I was here for five years and I went to all the lectures, I went to the symposiums. I took a wonderful trip to Europe, eastern Turkey, I'll tell you about later. I really worked hard, too. And I had French, but I really didn't have any of the other six or seven languages that I needed. I was trying hard to think what I did for those five years, which was a little bit of everything.
INT: What was it like working at Dumbarton Oaks at that time?
CB: This was still in the early days after World War II and, of course, Byzantine archaeology studies, travel had all stopped, so there was this marvelous opportunity, suddenly there was this great interest and, of course, many of the scholars that you know about had come from Europe and were – many of them were either at Harvard or Princeton or scattered around. And, of course, Byzantine studies really got their start at Princeton with the Byzantine Institute which was later combined with Dumbarton Oaks. But, so the years that I was here was, not many years afterward all these scholars either, like Ševčenko, went to Harvard or they went to Oxford or somewhere, but many of them died. And it was really an enormous heyday and there was money for grants and they were working on churches in Yugoslavia, in Greece, and certainly in Constantinople, and not yet in the Sinai, that came later. So, it was a very exciting time and I really don't know how, as they say, there was a fair collection, a good collection of books, but obviously it needed a great deal of work and there were people there doing things, like Mrs. Allen, you know she did the BZ Index, which is now – I guess, the kind of thing isn't needed any more, because it's all available online, I understand. I always wondered about the effectiveness of that, but that was her project, and she was an extraordinary woman. There were a lot of foreign-born people there and many of them had, sort of, different approaches, good approaches, but she was very intellectual, very proud, and I think she came from a very fine family that had seen better days in Yugoslavia. And she was quite demanding on the library because she kept requesting hundreds of books from the Library of Congress. Then there was the Index of Christian Art which, you know, I guess is at Princeton now, isn't it? You know what it is? It's an iconographic index of all the images prior to – well, through the Middle Ages, and of course Byzantium – so, if you wanted to look up a given saint or an image of anything, you presumably could find it, and there would be a card and there would be research information on it. Well, for scholars it was absolutely terrific. Now there's something – Iconoclass, you know about that? – which I know from the National Gallery of Art where I was later – it was marvelous, but anyway. That was sort of hidden away and impossible to get to and the card file was so difficult to use that you couldn't use it yourself, there had to be a staff person to help you find the cards because it was complicated.
INT: This was run by Mrs. Aston?
CB: What?
INT: Mrs. Aston? She was in charge of this?
CB: Yes, Joan Aston. And, of course, she was a lovely person, she had absolutely no background in cataloging or scholarship. She wasn't even a scholar. I mean, she knew Classics, but – so, there were these various auxiliary things around that were demanding of the library but weren't really our responsibility. Now, I was looking at one of these programs that I had, this was from '71 and it listed three staff members besides Merlin and myself, and I think maybe they were, I don't know, one of them maybe retrieving books and the other was cataloging. Cataloging was always a problem because they could never get people with the proper language and most scholars who were skilled in that couldn't – didn't want to work as a librarian, they wanted to work as a scholar, but there were very few jobs, if any. So, it was always difficult to get people and I could never understand why they, in the very beginning, they didn't change their classification system to coincide with Harvard's. And the issue kept coming up but it was before, of course, the age of computers, and it really would have been awkward and there wasn't enough push to do it, but it was always frustrating and scholars complained a lot about it because they'd be used to the classification numbers, say LC, which would have been wherever else they were. So, that was always a problem. As I say, I'm not absolutely sure what I did. I guess I just filled in for all kinds of things, and I did shelving and reference to the extent that I could and helped with processing new material that came in and out and, you know, not very elevating work for a professional librarian, but I really wasn't able to do it. And, of course, I may be wrong, and if you're talking to Merlin, he will explain it, but my impression was that he had studied with Ihor Ševčenko, I have a feeling it was at Columbia, but I could be wrong, but if not it was at Harvard, but I think it was at Columbia, and Ihor persuaded Merlin to come here to be the librarian. And whether he had a library background or not, I don't know. And, if I may say, it didn't seem to me that he did, but I could be wrong. But we didn't work closely together and he was, it was a rather loosely organized institution in those days. The Director, this was before Mr. Tyler came. Now, Mr. Tyler was, he was – Edith Wharton was his godmother, as was Mrs. Bliss I think, and he was married to, I think, a Belgian countess or something. Anyway, she had a chateau in Belgium. But he was a scholar and a gentleman and very strict. Well, the previous director when I was here was Mr. Thacher and he had been, I think he was a godson of Mrs. Bliss or something, he was a wealthy, single, middle-aged man and he lived right around the corner about the third house down on 31st Street on the right – one of those lovely houses. He was gay and there were a lot of gays around and there was a lot of gossip, so I'll just put it that way. So, I don't know, it seemed a strange place to me and, of course, I remember I'd take telephone calls about orders of wine, cases of wine, that were going to be delivered to certain staff members whom I shall not name. But I thought that was sort of unprofessional. Anyway, this – there didn't seem to be very tight control, and I know that Mr. Tyler tried a lot to improve it. And, of course, you know, in that beautiful house – and people have offices in it now – there was much more freedom than there is now, and, of course, however, we had tea down in the drawing room. And it was hard to, sort of, enforce it in a way, because it was a house not a museum, really. And they, in those days, they closed the gardens in the summer, and the pool was open to the staff so that was another – I mean, it was a different kind of place, and I was absolutely enthralled. I knew nothing about Byzantium until I came, and I learned so much. And I went to all the lectures and I went to the symposiums and struggled through things I didn't understand. And I made a lot of close friends with scholars and tried to help them to the extent that I could, but how good the library seemed to the scholars I don't know. They wouldn't have said anything to me.
INT: In those days, the library was in the main house, right?
CB: This was up – the librarian's office – when you're going up the head of the stairs, it's right straight ahead. It was Mrs. Bliss's bedroom, and in that corner that juts out – looks out over the garden – that L was the cataloger's and the storage and so forth. Of course, they were very short of storage space, shelf space, and, you know, a lot of the oversized books and the rare books were in the basement and it was difficult to get to them. I think it must have been somewhat of a challenge. On the other hand, it was such an extraordinary opportunity for people to come here that I think they may have forgiven some of that. But it didn't seem terribly professional to me, if I may say without criticizing anybody. Now, as for the acquisitions, of course, Seka Allen used to – she had Serb, Croatian, Russian, German, French – I don't know what else. But she would pick out a lot of the books herself and recommend them and those were usually accepted, and then, of course, the scholars would make recommendations and there were certain lists that the library would go through. How systematic this was, I never really could tell. But when Irene – and then I left, and then Irene – and Merlin left, and why, I don't know anything about that, maybe he just wanted to leave, I have no idea, but it didn't seem to me he was old enough, but he left. And when Irene came in – you will find her – you really must be sure to talk to her because there were quite a few changes. And again, she had this European background and I think they don't learn organization, they don't study organization the way we do here, it's more emphasis on scholarship, which, of course, is fabulous. And she has a Ph.D., and I have nothing but the greatest admiration for the way she acquired books. She read every single – in all languages – of the lists and backs of various Classical journals or archaeological journals or anything that came along, and she pored over them and really studied to be sure. So, there must have been a huge increase in the addition to the library when she was here. I'm sure that it became far, far more useful. Of course, there was also at that time a sort of a post-euphoria with publishing, our publishing, it was far more available suddenly, coming from both abroad and America. But it was not like that when I was here. It was sort of a sleepy place, and how systematic the acquisitions were, I don't know.
INT: Was there any sense of the mission for acquisitions or any sort of rubric?
CB: Well, I never saw any guidelines of any kind whatsoever. Now, the fact that they hired, let's see – Merlin had a Classical language background – I think that's what he studied – Latin and Greek or something, I'm not certain. He certainly wasn't a Byzantinist, and whether he had had a library degree, I really don't know. But, you see, when you have a library in an institution where there are no other libraries – now I know this from the National Gallery of Art which, of course, is a huge place and very, very professional. On the other hand, the people who run the National Gallery – the executives – do not know anything about library needs or administration. Now, if you were, say, at the University of Indiana, there are ten or twelve libraries, or fifteen, or thirty or whatever, so there's a huge group of professional people. So, if you you're hiring people, you have expertise from other departments – it could be a cataloging or acquisitions person or inter-library loan or whatever. But, if when you have a separate institution, I knew that when we had – when I went I was a little ragtag or rusty here because I really didn't think I belonged here. I saw in the paper that the National Gallery was going to open this big study center, which is in the East Building. And they were looking for a director of the study center and a chief librarian. Well, and they were going to greatly expand the library. Well, I rushed down the next day, practically, and it turned out that the man they were interviewing whom they had just hired, on the spot hired me. But of course you can't do that in the government. It took me weeks before, you know. But he had – let's say, I hope he had – the good judgment to hire me because he was a professional. But when he left to go to the Getty, the National Gallery did not go to the Library of Congress or the Portrait Gallery and say, "We'd like one of your top librarians to be on our advisory committee to help us pick a new person," because it's a big, big job. They just did it themselves. The way they did it was unbelievably awful. I mean, people were not – well I'm not going into the details, but the end result turned out to be awful. So this is what happens even in a big institution or a small one because the people who are hired who are administrators cannot be expected to know the ins and outs of what's needed in libraries, which is a little arcane, maybe. And, you know, I think now with the computer the walls are, obviously, are breaking down in many cases. The people using computers now – scholars and the librarians – are far more on the same wavelength. At the National Gallery, for instance, the curators had their own files and they wouldn't share them with anybody because they said, "Well, we're working on them; they're not perfect," but, of course, they're never going to be perfect. So, they kept to themselves and they, of course, turned their nose up, naturally, at the library, even people with Ph.D.s and so forth. Well now, you see, we're all on the same database and, because libraries have been able now, if they're indexing their archives and their rare books – things that were not readily accessible are now – well, people are in awe of what they can get. We don't have to elaborate on that, but it's just overwhelming. And so, here, it isn't surprising, there was obviously – Mr. Tyler certainly didn't know anything about libraries and they, to my knowledge, they didn't ask anyone to come from the Fogg to advise. There was always quite a bit of tension because Harvard kept wanting to take over, and they kept resisting here and, of course, there was a lot of duplication of material, but the advantage of a library like this is that a scholar, whether he's in archaeology, or music, or history, or coins, or maps, or whatever – it's all here within one period, and that's extraordinary. But how the personnel office hired people for the library, I don't know. I don't think I really should have been hired but I was. So...
INT: Was there talk of integrating some of the Dumbarton Oaks Library collection with Widener Library?
CB: No. Now, that was another thing. Of course, in fact, when Betty –
INT: Benson?
CB: Yes, who was wonderful at the Pre-Columbian library, and she came pretty much when I came or a little before – that was absolutely totally separate. It never occurred to anyone that a person could be over all of them, so they ran their library absolutely totally separate. In fact, I never even went into it, if you can believe that in all that time. Now the Garden Library also, of course, that had another history and Mrs. Bliss, of course, had wanted to have a complete history of early garden architecture and design and that was absolutely totally separate. And the scholars there often were away for a year and weren't there very long and we never even knew them or saw them. So, it was absolutely separate and there wasn't the facility to combine them if they had wanted to. There were terrible problems with space and they were, you know – the rare books downstairs – they said they were too close to where there might be a flood and there were all kinds of problems. So, that was never contemplated at that point. You know, it was all quite new, in fact, it was very new and it's interesting now so many of the scholars that were there – here – when I was here, now they're out at prestigious jobs around the country and in Europe and, of course, there were very few places where you could study Byzantine studies in the United States. And so this had a really important role, really important role, and their publications are extraordinary, a bedrock of the scholarship of Byzantium.
INT: Did you work particularly closely with any of the other professors you mentioned?
CB: Well, I was going to say, not terribly, because, first of all, you know, like Father Dvornik who was so wonderful, he was a Slavic expert and he was reading and working in languages that most people didn't know, and he was just in his own world. A lot of them were very much in their own world and Byzantine studies was so specialized and you couldn't really – you had to have majored in Latin and Greek in high school and then moved on. I don't know how you would have done that, but there were very few people who ever did that and Ševčenko's – I don't know which wife she was – but she was here – Nancy, Nancy Ševčenko. And she went to Brearley in New York, which is one of the best private day schools where they all had four years of Latin, and I think that Alice Mary may have gone there too, I'm not certain. But there were very few schools where Classical studies for four years were even available in the United States, so when people got all these degrees, you know, they were in another world because they were. But the languages are absolutely essential. If you didn't know the languages and a book was recommended, say in one of the French journals, you just take their word. Now, Irene wouldn't do that, and I would go to her office and it was piled – she looked at every single book that came in, at all the monographic series, there's so many of them, which Europe does so many of – they're individual series that come out. She pored over them and examined the bibliographies and she knew what was missing and lacking. What she found when she got here, I don't know.
INT: A lot of people have described to us the way that the library began as a very broad collection with a lot of Classical Greek and Roman works that aren't Byzantine and eventually narrowed, did you find that when you were here?
CB: Well, you see, when you think how it began, it was the Blisses' library, and obviously, although they were highly, incredibly elegant, educated people – I'm sure, for instance – well certainly Arabic studies was outside, nobody studied, very few people studied Arabic. And certainly, I think, Slavic languages were not their forte, and also how much was forthcoming in those during the World Wars. You have to remember, during the World War II years probably nothing was done, and it took a while for it to get going again and there was a lot of animosity between these countries and these people who came. A lot of these scholars, they'd lost their homes and their reputations and their universities and, you know, collaboration was not something that just popped up, and I'm sort of talking off the top of my head, but this is what I think. It took a while, you see, for the collection to get richer. It took more knowledge that people in the library didn't have. It was maybe that there wasn't much being published. Now, I'm working right now as a volunteer in the Textile Museum, and they're in dire straits and let their director go – he'd been the Islamic curator at the Met, but he was an excellent scholar but not a good administrator. Well they're now downsizing, they've fired the librarian – she'd been there too long and was an old-fashioned librarian, of course. I volunteered there right after I left here, or after I left the Gallery and I couldn't stay there because I thought it was so unprofessional but there was no one on the staff that were textile scholars. They knew the library needed to be improved, but they didn't quite know how to go about it, and it's hard to fire a long time librarian or staff person – it isn't something you just do casually. Anyway, one of the things that they found and are finding, because they are now shelf-listing volume by volume, is that the collection had gotten diverse and the librarian was very strong on crafts, so she had a lot of how-to-do books. But, of course, they don't belong there at all, and there's an enormous amount of exchange now. How systematic the exchange program at Dumbarton Oaks is now – it is very probably very well organized if Irene did it – I don't know. But with scholarly libraries, exhibition catalogs and museum collection catalogs and scholarly monographs from museums are their major source because really scholarly material does not go into the average bookstore – most of them. So, it is very, very important that the librarian is up on this and that. Anyway, I'll finish in a minute, but this is now going on at the Textile Museum, and it's interesting because the staff is getting endless duplicates, and they would get things on exchange that had nothing to do with textiles. Well, just because it came from, say, the Hermitage you don't keep it if it has nothing on textiles. This is probably common – it's easier to keep things than to be tough about not keeping. Now, Dumbarton Oaks, you see, had such a regular routine, often it was late. There were terrible complaints about how long it took to get the annual reports out – and the various scholarly publications, that was another sore point. See, there were all these little, kind of, empires and the two ladies who were there, who ran it, nobody could touch them. There was a lot of tension, the scholars used to have a fit about that, I know. But anyway, at least when they came out – you see, I'm sure I never saw the list, I didn't have anything to do with that, and how well, if there was any coordination between the library and the exchange list, I'd be surprised. And, of course, they were expensive books. But actually it's very, very important that the library maintain a list of exchange that they know which institutions would be useful to them, and the Textile Museum is very, very strong in material from the most obscure places in Asia, for instance, or Bhutan, or Malaysia – heavens knows – that obviously are not going to see the light of day otherwise. So, that is something that when you're talking to Merlin, he may know all about this, but I never was even apprised of it. There was no sharing of information – I would say, not much.
INT: So there wasn't much interaction with the Dumbarton Oaks Library and other libraries in the area?
CB: Well, I'm just saying first with the publications department because, of course, to exchange you've got to send and get back and, of course, that involves budget but it isn't always that you can get everything you want, but there should be coordination on that part. As for cooperating with any libraries in the Washington area, it didn't exist, at least during my era. Now, again at the Textile Museum, this librarian never cooperated, never looked outside the window. Now, today of course, with online databases and everything, obviously this is all changing and libraries can be greatly enriched by access to other collections and shared information and so forth. So – but at the National Gallery, of course, they've got a huge staff, they have someone who does nothing but inter-library loans. He's a real character. He's been there now about 35 years, and he goes to the Library of Congress twice a week and people – scholars, you see, come from all over the world, so often they're doing, say, architecture in Japan. Well, of course, this has nothing to do with the National Gallery's collection. So, of course, we borrow it for them. So, if we can't get it at the Library of Congress – and they have incredible resources – we borrow it elsewhere. The European scholars come here – they cannot believe the efficiency of the American library system, because if you go to European libraries you'd be lucky to borrow a book or even get one off a shelf, right? While I was there we would loan books to South Africa, to Australia. Isn't it amazing – never once did we not get a book back. Now, of course, you see, a person can't do it, it has to be institution to institution. But I feel that – and here certainly – there are extraordinary resources in the various religious and university libraries here and the Library of Congress, and it's a huge, it's a big job to do this. But the library should, the scholars should be made aware that they – first of all, you've got to help them find the book, and a lot of scholars don't know much about library procedures – how you can find things in the National Union Catalog or whatever it is. The library has a responsibility to supply, to help the scholars find the books they need, whether they're here or not. And no library can have all the books, nor should they, and maybe they're rare or they're out of print in any event, so this is a very important aspect. I can't say that I was I aware that that was going on. Now, I could be wrong. I know that Seka Allen got loads of books. She knew how to work the system; she knew how to get people to wait on her, let's put it that way. But I mean to what extent it's used here, I really don't know. Now, I know everything has changed so, and has gotten so much more professional and, of course, now they have, they're on the same system with Harvard – is that right? – which is wonderful. Now, how the library works today, I don't know. I've been very active in the Art Library Society of North America – you can call a library from any place in the world and say you're a member and they get you something. So, I did know what's her name – who's the librarian here? She came – what's her name?
INT: Sheila Klos?
CB: Sheila. But I have never laid eyes on her since and neither has anyone else in our library group, she never comes to any of the professional meetings, and I've never seen her at any of the functions. I'm told she never comes to any of the functions. Now, she may systematically feel that isn't her job, and that may well be that it isn't her job. But, on the other hand, this is still a rather small place and getting to know scholars and some of them are shy about asking help. Anyway, I had one little tour after, a couple years ago, a symposium – I had a tour of the new building, and I went along after getting through security, which took me hours, and then had everything in front of me, and in the middle of the guide showing us around someone said "Is there a Mrs. Backlund here?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "You took the key to your locker." I said, "Aren't I supposed to keep the key?" "No, you have to return the key." It was just funny. In any event, Sheila wasn't around at all – I never even laid eyes on her. Her assistant was there, and I said, innocently, "Where is the reference area?" "Oh," she said, "this is a post-doctoral center, we don't need a reference area." Okay. I was very disappointed in the new building – I think it's cold and impersonal, and I can't imagine it not having an escalator. It's terrible to go – to just have that elevator to go down, and there should be photocopying machines on every floor. I don't know, maybe some of these things have changed, but it seemed terribly dark and unfriendly. I was very disappointed. I think the reading room is lovely looking now, but that was the only part I really liked, and I've heard other people share this view. But to what extent the librarian should be out and about is something else again. I have my own views on that, but, of course, at the National Gallery, I was head of reader services. I was there for twenty-five years after I left here – twenty-four years. And our job was to help and that was open to scholars and visiting senior people and an informed public but not high school students or anything. And we did an enormous amount of helping people find things, and some of the worst people in terms of understanding resources were the scholars at the gallery – they get their PhDs in Rembrandt or something and they would keep up on all the Rembrandt literature, but they knew nothing about these wonderful databases that were out there that they could be accessing. It was really kind of shocking. Gradually, you see so many of the scholars are coming along now – all are very sophisticated because they've been there. But in the beginning it was really – so they demand, you know – they know more than some of the scholars about how to find things. Well it's not easy to keep up with it.
INT: Did you get the sense when you were at the National Gallery that there was a lot of interaction between Dumbarton Oaks and the National Gallery, generally?
CB: I think Dumbarton Oaks has a reputation at being exclusive and snooty, and I think that's ridiculous, it shouldn't be. Now, in the first place – the number, even if you were more open about it – how many people are going to be asking for obscure Byzantine material, I mean really? So, on the other hand, there's a very good inter-library loan department there because, of course, they're very active. They have, you see, visiting scholars, about fourteen a year who were there, and they all have to be hired, they all have to be publishing or have some project, so many of them come, you see, with a vast need to do research. If there was something on Byzantium that they needed, I'm sure, they would call here and they would get good service, I'm sure of that. But it doesn't automatically come to mind. Occasionally I think, in fact, I've met a couple people who have come up here and been given privileges in the reading room or something, I don't know. I can't believe that it isn't done. It would be appalling if it weren't, because, after all, as we all know, in these scholarly libraries there are tons of books that don't get looked at year in and year out. You build them up because you want rarer things and they meet special needs, but they should – but is this library online, is it on the Internet?
INT: Yes, it's integrated with the Harvard catalog.
CB: It's part of the Harvard catalog? – well, they probably get requests now, you see, I would hope they do. That's one of the wonderful things, you see; you don't have to be friendly, you just have to have the internet. That's really marvelous, isn't it? I don't know how big a staff they have and I don't even know where they sit, they're back there in some remote place, but I have a friend in the building I live in who's the chief volunteer docent for the gardens and museum, so I hear about things from her, and well, what's going on in sort of a roundabout way. Of course, she doesn't know anything much about the library, which never seems to emerge to anybody. And I go to a lot of the receptions, and I never see a soul from the library, not a soul, so I don't know.
INT: Did you ever meet Mrs. Bliss? Was she here?
CB: Well, she came to tea twice before, when I first came, and she was very frail, and then she never came again. But it was fairly normal, I mean, it was a weird place because there were an awful lot of off-beat people in those days. The Byzantinists were much more off-beat than they are now. No one had even heard of Byzantium and it just had been a relaxed kind of place. So, it was nice to be here on the grounds. They were friendly, but you can't run a place like that anymore, and that's understandable. As for my own personal experience – I mean, it was the most marvelous thing that could have ever happened because I learned so much when I was here. It was just like a graduate or postgraduate course, and I kept reading and studying and listening to these lectures, you know, and it was all new to me and I went on one perfectly marvelous trip that one of the scholars who came from Birmingham in England – where there's quite a large Byzantine center in England – and he was here, he was working. One of his books is on the history of the Pontic Alps which is in Anatolia right along the far, far remote eastern Turkey border which is next to Armenia and Iraq, right out there and, well, just above Iraq and Iran. And I went on this Byzantine trip. I could tell you – I could spend a week telling you how marvelous it was, but it really was extraordinary. There were mostly Byzantinists who were on the trip. It was sponsored in England, so they were English mostly, and that made it even more interesting, and after that I went to the International Byzantine Symposium which they used to have every five years. This was in Bucharest, just a few years before the president was murdered, you know, with his wife and, in fact, I threw out an invitation I had from him to go to a reception. So, this got me interested in that part of the world. So then, when I came back I joined the Textile Museum. I've been on four trips with them. I've been to Turkey twice, Morocco, Tunisia, and then I went on this archaeological expedition. So, that's what it did for me, not what it did for Dumbarton Oaks, and of course I made great friends and my job was very different. Of course, when I would go to the National Gallery, and it's very structured in your position description and what you did. I don't remember ever having a position description, I don't think they had them in those days, I'm sure they didn't, but I don't know.
INT: How many other people worked in the library at the same time as you?
CB: Well, I thought, if you wanted to copy any of these. This, I found was '71-'72, this one was, I don't know, it was just an announcement of the staff, and you might like to Xerox this, because this was '68-'69 and at the back here it lists the staff, and I looked down here and I think there were three: there's Merlin's name and my name, and then I think three others, but they were just staff, so they could have been shelvers or something, I don't know, and then I had this one from '71-'72 and again it lists staff, so I think you might want it. And then I – oh here, this was a symposium, I've been almost every year, I hardly missed one, I must say, it's sometimes a little hard for me, the acoustics in that Music Room are awful and as someone said when they redid it, you know, renovations, they did nothing to improve the acoustics. It's almost – there's nothing they can do about it. I sit in the front row and, you know, often people are speaking with foreign accents, but you see a lot of the scholars. And I know one thing that Irene had said, that in the later years, the top scholars had already come here so then they were getting a different group of scholars, mainly from Eastern Europe, many from Greece, Turkey, other countries, and their backgrounds were post-World War II in countries that had suffered greatly and the whole level of scholarship was different. There was just a different kind of person, you understand what I mean? So these people needed a lot of help in finding material, whether the library is helpful about that or not I don't know, you see in a way it's sort of fortunate that they're stuck away, I mean, usually in the library, even in a big university library, there's an open place where someone sits and people are intimidated, even all these scholars, especially if they've come from another country and their English isn't all that good. That's what disappointed me about this library. Who designed it, I know they changed design about four times because of problems with the historical requirements, but it doesn't impress one as a very friendly place when you walk in, frankly, just the way it's designed, I can't imagine. I guess that gets back to the point of how much communication there is, I have no idea. This particular symposium was in '73. You can copy this if you'd like. These might be nice for the archives of the library if they aren't in there, they may be, and it's just that this is a symposium about Art, Letters, and Society in the Byzantine Provinces under the direction of Professor Ihor Ševčenko. A lot of these interest me, you see, I've been to a lot of these countries now and I would love to have access to reading these. I feel apprehensive of asking to use the library here, it is not friendly at all, and I'm not sure they'd even particularly want me to come. I don't know. I haven't done it because I don't wish to impose myself and cause them extra work and so forth. Well, and you see there's no sort of easy open place for visiting scholars, or say, someone who just comes for a few days, and they don't want to sit in the middle of the periodical room, there ought to be some kind of a center, in which someone could sit, say an assistant librarian, who would be private enough so that she can do her work, but also can be available. And then the visiting scholar for a day or two can ask because it's not easy to find things. I find now that I'm out of the library and I'm looking for things and I think, I can't imagine, I'm somewhat off put because I don't know the latest sources and I think that when I was at the National Gallery, and people asked me all kinds of questions, that I didn't really know the answers to, so I would take them to the different sources. And say we would be looking for a printmaker in say the 1600s and then I'd find that the book included everything but prints. See this is how you learn your craft, you learn it by helping people. The other day I was at Whole Foods grocery store – this was really last week. A woman shouted my name and came across, I swear I'd never laid eyes on her and she said, "I can't believe I've seen you. Don't you remember when I came and I was getting my doctorate and I didn't know any of the materials and you just opened up the resources to me?" So she said, " I never forgot you!" You know, that makes you feel good. So, I know a lot of librarians are supposed to be shy and backward and maybe a lot of them are and they don't have this kind of attitude, but it made my job every day just thrilling, and I know that people now at the National Gallery at the reference desk, they knock themselves out for people and of course the fact that there's so many sources doesn't mean that they don't need help because people don't use them adequately. I mean, there's so much more to the resources than just finding one entry and they don't know about linkage and all those things. I think if I were back there now I'd go mad. Anyway...
INT: Shall we wrap up, then, I guess?
INT: Thank you.
CB: I don't know whether this is of any interest to you, this is just my Curriculum, it will save you from making any notes and so forth. Anyway…
INT: Well, we just have a few minutes left on our tape, so I wonder if you might, in closing, talk a little bit about whether there was a sense of the Blisses' legacy in the library?
CB: A sense of what?
INT: Mr. and Mrs. Bliss's legacy in the library, because they're known as great collectors of art objects, but they also – the library began as their library.
CB: Yes, but you see, Joan Aston who was a frail, lovely person, she was very English and she came over from England, I think, and she worked in the British Embassy and I think she was one of those lovely ladies that was hired, but she wasn't really a professional. She had Greek, but then she was a friend of Mr. Thacher's – met him at some embassy thing – and so they hired her. She really had no professional background, but she could translate and she was very good at what she did, but she was very fragile. Now, she was, at one point, in charge of all the objects in the museum, that isn't in her title, but, I was reading her obituary the other day. So that things need reupholstered or if the pictures weren't hung straight – of course there was no real painting, they didn't do any renovating of major things but minor – there were all these things that had to be done. She was in charge of that, so the library had no information about any objects in the house at all and where they were I don't know. Now, Mr. – what's his name? – the former director, Tyler, he was in the room that's now just on the way to the Orangery? I don't know what that room is now. What is it?
INT: It's the Study.
CB: Because during the symposium it was empty, we just walked through it, but that was his office, and of course there were books from floor to ceiling there. They were books we never accessed, and I think there were books in the room where we had tea at the end, the – what do you call it – the scholar's lounge or whatever?
INT: The Founders Room?
CB: Is that what it's called?
INT: I'm not sure.
CB: Well at the end, on the first floor, underneath the stairway that goes up, that long room in there, that's where we had tea and I don't know what it's used for now, maybe –
INT: I think it may actually have been divided into offices, as well.
CB: No it is not, it is one, it is not open. I was there during the conference. It was raining so we were eating in there. Well, there are bookcases in there too. And the two lounges opposite the front door which have little French furniture and sofas, have you been in those at all? They had books in them, but those were the Blisses' libraries – they hadn't been out of it terribly long, it had nothing to do with the library, we had nothing whatever to do with anything about archival information. Now, if it was there it's news to me. Now, Seka Allen, I mean, Irene Vaslef would certainly tell you that. When I go home, I have your telephone number but give it to me again. I will give you her telephone number and address and I'm sure she'd, she's a vigorous lady, as you'll see. There were quite a bit of prima donnas around, many of them were, not quite middle aged but not quite young, women from Europe who'd been forced to come to this country and obviously they were people of great education, maybe. They were quite demanding. They didn't come in the way the rest of us had – Americans – worked our way, so it was a special kind of place, and there certainly wasn't much coordination between any of the departments that I am aware of.
INT: Well, thank you for speaking with us today, this was really wonderful.
CB: Does any of this help you at all?
INT: Oh yeah, very helpful.
INT: Absolutely, yes.
CB: You see, I was only here for five years, and then it certainly became much, much better when Irene came, vastly. Now, what Merlin will have to say I can't imagine. I won't comment. But it was just a wonderful place to be.]]>
The Dumbarton Oaks Research Library holds almost 2,000 microfilm rolls that are reproductions of medieval and early modern manuscripts, the originals of which are held in institutions around the world. Researchers have difficulty using the collection, as it is still without a finding aid. Last year, the library started a project to develop a searchable finding aid for this collection. The project is coordinated by Byzantine Studies Librarian Deborah Brown, who is assisted by Special Projects and Reference Librarian Sarah Burke Cahalan.
In close consultation with Deb and Sarah, Web and Graphic Designer Michael Sohn and Database Specialist Prathmesh Mengane designed a FileMaker Pro database for recording each film's information. During the summer of 2012, Deb and Prathmesh will design a version of the finding aid and auxiliary pages for the Dumbarton Oaks website. Until the new pages are launched, a simplified version of the database is available to researchers on Library levels one and four.
Key to the project are three graduate students who joined the library staff as interns for the summers of 2011 and 2012: Vladimir Boskovic (Harvard University, Classics/Modern Greek studies), Saskia Dirkse (Harvard University, Classics), and Roderick Saxey II (The Ohio State University, Classics). Their task involves evaluating the physical state of each film, identifying its contents, researching manuscripts using print and online resources, and recording the information into the FileMaker Pro database. In 2011, the team processed 531 microfilms representing 509 manuscripts. The library staff is delighted to welcome the same enthusiastic, friendly, and highly skilled team for another ten-week internship this summer.
For more information about the project, visit the project's blog or contact Deb Brown.]]>
Historical and archaeological research into the ancient and medieval periods of the Maghreb must confront the legacy of nineteenth-century colonialist enterprises. In honor of the Byzantine spring symposium, "Rome Re-Imagined: Byzantine and Early Islamic North Africa, 500–800," a new rare book exhibition in the Library invites viewers to reflect on the nineteenth-century authors and publications that contributed to the creation of this legacy. Featured items include Alphonse de Lamartine's Voyage en Orient, Charles Tissot's Exploration scientifique de la Tunisie, Nathan Davis's Carthage and her remains, the Beechey brothers' Proceedings of the expedition to explore the northern coast of Africa, Smith and Porcher's Discoveries at Cyrene, and items by Adrien Berbrugger, Stephane Gsell, and other influential nineteenth-century scholars of Roman Africa. The exhibition will be up through July 15 in the Dumbarton Oaks Library.]]>
Our page officially launched April 14, 2012, on the 104th wedding anniversary of Robert and Mildred Bliss, who were married on April 14, 1908.
Please visit, "Like", and share our new Facebook page!]]>
Marcus reconstructs Classic Maya political organization through the use of evidence derived from epigraphy, settlement pattern surveys, and locational analysis. This study describes the development of a four-tiered settlement hierarchy and its subsequent collapse.]]>

subset: commoncrawl