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Photos courtesy of History and Special Collections, Darling Biomedical Library

The remarkable thing about this 1880 Japanese woodblock print by Utagawa Kunitoshi is that the 12 female acrobats share six heads and are all pregnant.

COme explore and discover

The treasures in UCLA's 'wonder cabinet'

By Anne Burke
UCLA Today Staff

“Oh, this is so great.”

Victoria Steele, head of Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library, is showing off one of her favorite items in the papers of the late Susan Sontag, who, the librarian points out, “corresponded with absolutely everyone.”

In Steele’s hand is a one-page typewritten letter, dated Aug. 21, 1966, to Sontag from her friend, Jasper Johns, whose series of American flag paintings are among the most iconic images of the 20th century.

“I have to go to the post office to look at our flag,” Johns typed in all capital letters to the writer/art critic, who died just last month, “because I’m confused about the layout of the stars.”
Steele has seen the Johns letter perhaps dozens of times since the university acquired Sontag’s papers in 2002. But the correspondence still makes the librarian a little giddy for the small but telling glimpse it offers into the creation of a vaunted work of art.

The Department of Special Collections in which the Sontag papers reside is one of eight in the UCLA Library system, each containing rare and one-of-a-kind materials that have the power to elicit a gasp or make a jaw drop. Special Collections houses primary source material, not an interpretation of something, as you would find in the library stacks, but rather the thing itself. “It’s the raw material of scholarship,” explained Cynthia Shelton, associate university librarian.

Take a look, for example, at Oscar Wilde’s heartbreaking letters from Reading Gaol in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Copernicus’ “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” in the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, Edward Weston’s black-and-white photos of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the Young Research Library, or Nobel Laureate Ralph J. Bunche’s basketball uniform from his Bruin days, also at the Young Library.

The eight Special Collections departments together comprise about 500,000 of the 7.8 million volumes in the UCLA libraries. Far more numerous are the millions of manuscripts, photographs, maps, ephemera, works of art, architectural drawings and other graphic arts material. Unlike items in a museum, special collections materials may be held and touched.

The breadth and scope of these collections at UCLA are remarkable, especially considering that the university has yet to celebrate its centenary. UCLA scholars working on 19th-century British literature, for example, can remain here in Los Angeles to do their research, thanks to the voluminous Michael Sadleir Collection of Victorian novels, which rivals that of the British Library.

These glass eyes from 1860s Germany are a favorite among visitors to the Darling Biomedical Library.

With its dazzling collection of rare books dating to printing’s infancy in the 1470s, the Darling Library is considered one of the top five biomedical libraries in the United States. Its holdings — which, in essence, chronicle the history of Western medicine and biology — can be as visually stunning as they are shocking. The 18th-century Japanese scroll chronicling the dissection of the body of an executed criminal and an 1860 wooden box containing glass eyes inevitably draw the viewer in for a closer look.

Many holdings are works of art and scholarship that are uniquely Angeleno. Just last year, daughters of television pioneer Harry Crane, the “Honeymooners” creator who died in 1999, donated their father’s papers to the library. The university is in the process of acquiring the A&M Records collection from producer Jerry Moss and his collaborator, the legendary trumpeter Herb Alpert. While the collection will be of special interest to popular music and recording industry scholars, Moss and Alpert’s music occupies such an important part of the zeitgeist of the 1960s that the papers are bound to appeal to even the casual music fan. “Among the many interesting materials in the collection are letters from notable performers such as Chet Baker and Paul Winter, as well as many handwritten arrangements for the Tijuana Brass, including ‘The Lonely Bull’ and ‘A Taste of Honey’ that would have been used in performances,” said Gordon Theil, head of the Arts and Music Libraries. “This is not published material, so it wouldn’t be available elsewhere.”

The university generally acquires special collections through donations. While some donors have academic loyalties and connections to UCLA, others choose the university as the permanent home for their papers because of its reputation and its promise that their gifts will not sit in a basement collecting dust. Shelton was able to assure one recent donor: “Your material will be the stuff of dissertations.”

As an extension of the library’s main holdings, special collections are intended to serve the university’s education and research missions in the same way as the main holdings. But special collections tend to attract outside scholars and researchers in a way that a regular library might not.

On the afternoon before last month’s winter break, most of the campus was eerily vacant. Not so the wood-paneled special collections reading room at Young Research Library. Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian from Columbia University, hunkered over a cardboard box of architectural drawings by Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright. Across from her sat family genealogist Gaelyn Keith of El Dorado Hills, Calif. Keith is a descendant of Southern California real estate developer Hobart Johnstone Whitley, whose papers are held at the Young Library.

Produced in 1821, "The Royal Game of the Dolphin" is one of only three examples known to exist today of this finely crafted children's board game.

The remarkable thing about special collections is that they can turn non-academics like Keith into scholars. “If you take what you’re looking at and you write a paragraph on it, you’re a scholar. You’re interpreting the raw evidence of knowledge,” Shelton said. Undergraduates are increasingly making use of the university’s huge trove of primary sources, she added.

“About a year ago, we had a Western civ class of about 300 students come in. The professor brought them through 25 or so at a time to view, to touch, to see. Their jaws literally dropped to hold up a 1543 edition of Copernicus and Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia,” an autographed document from Michelangelo,” Shelton said.

While special collections may not be checked out, anyone may use the material, as long as they follow simple rules of protocol, such as calling ahead. Inventories, known as “finding aids,” of many items in special collections are available through the Online Archive of California (www.oac.cdlib.org), a component

of the California Digital Library. Despite its availability to any and all, much of the material has never been written about or even explored in-depth.

“What’s thrilling about working in special collections is that it’s a cross between being a detective and an explorer,” Shelton said. “You’re really discovering things that no one else may well have discovered.”