By Mary Williams
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Don’t judge a book by its cover. And the curators of
“The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los
Angeles” at the UCLA Hammer Museum don’t want you to
judge their exhibit by the fact that it’s about books.
After spending a day in Powell, going to see rare items from 32
libraries around Los Angeles may not seem like a student’s
idea of a good time. Yet those involved with the show insist that
it’s worth it.
“It’s hard to realize … how important they were in
their time.” Cynthia Burlingham UCLA Hammer
Museum
“You could probably do 10 shows like this and they would
all be equally powerful because there’s so much in Los
Angeles,” said Bruce Whiteman, the head librarian at the UCLA
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, which lent works to the
show.
These aren’t just any books, either. Included in the
exhibit, which features over 350 objects, are esteemed texts like
the first edition of Galileo’s “Starry Messenger”
and the first edition of Chaucer’s “Canterbury
Tales.” There are also some oddities, like the 1872 cookbook
“How to Keep a Husband, or, Culinary Tactics.”
Some of the books, particularly those that discuss science, are
the basis for later works. Galileo’s “Starry
Messenger,” for example, describes his first observations
through a telescope.
“Not all of the objects included in the exhibit are
monuments, but many of them are, so that you can see important
works that changed the history of science,” said Cynthia
Burlingham, the Hammer deputy director for collections and senior
curator of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, who also led
the committee that organized this exhibit.
This aspect of the show should be particularly interesting to
students, according to David Zeidberg of the Huntington
Library.
“This is the material from which modern textbooks have
been made,” he said.
Many of the books, although they have outdated information, are
milestones of scientific and creative thought.
“It’s hard to realize without seeing the original
works how important they were in their time,” Burlingham
said.
Books aren’t the only thing on display, however. There are
also film strips, pictures, posters, newspapers, architectural
models and other miscellaneous objects in the libraries’
collections.
“I do think that we did try to introduce a lot of visual
material, at least as many as seemed to fit,” said
Burlingham.
The exhibit as a whole, with both the texts and the visual
pieces, are given more space in the Hammer than they would in a
library book show. The works are shown in long curving cases, and
are divided into eight categories.
According to Burlingham, “Most of the lenders don’t
have galleries, or that much exhibition space to show their
works.”
The committee worked with the 32 libraries to form a collection
that would bring some of the best of each of the museums to one
space. The curators selected works based on both the
recommendations of the individual libraries and also how they would
fit into the collection as a whole.
“A book of any subject would have been in an exhibit like
this, so the categories came into focus gradually,” Whiteman
said.
This show, billed as a collection of the “treasures”
of Los Angeles libraries, emphasizes the local aspect of the
exhibit.
“We want to make the libraries better known,”
Whiteman said of his goal in working on this show. “We want
to get the people interested, help the libraries in increasing
trade and show what’s out there.”
“The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of
Los Angeles” will be at the UCLA Hammer Museum at Wilshire
and Westwood Boulevards until Jan. 13, 2002. UCLA students get in
for free. For more information, visit www.hammer.ucla.edu or call (310)
443-7000.