Rare books still treasured in digital age

By Ajay Singh

It's a little-known fact that Mexico City was once called the "Land of Lost Children." An 1811 document posted all over the city and signed by the colonial Spanish ambassador to Mexico warned of the prevailing problems of that time — child abandonment and abduction.

In the latter case, explained the broadside, "the adult hides the child and eventually ‘finds' him or her for the frantic parents — for a finder's fee."

This intriguing glimpse into Mexico's past was one of the highlights of a course recently offered on campus. "The History of the Book in Latin America" focused on books and documents produced throughout Latin America from the 16th to the 19th century and covered everything from printing presses, publishers and authors to audiences, censors and libraries.

The weeklong course was offered by the California Rare Book School, a continuing-education program on campus that is the only one of its kind on the West Coast. An offshoot of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, UCLA's school was founded in 2005 and launched last year by the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies to train students and professionals in the somewhat obscure but highly specialized field of rare books and manuscripts.

"As modern collections increasingly become digitized, access to the wealth of information housed in special collections becomes more important," said Beverly P. Lynch, the rare book school's founding director and a professor of information studies. The courses, she added, "helps to impart the knowledge and skills necessary for the next generation of librarians, archivists, book dealers and bibliophiles to protect and preserve our cultural heritage."

This year's program, which ended Aug. 10, included five other courses on such topics as books of the Far West (with an emphasis on California) and the librarianship and cataloging of rare books. The classes, limited to 15 students and taught by expert visiting faculty from across the country, attracted a diverse group — curators, academics, antiquarian booksellers, conservators, collectors and amateurs interested in the field. Among the distinguished faculty taking part this year was historian Terry Belanger, who created the Rare Book School in 1983 at Columbia University before moving it to its current home in Virginia in 1992.

"The History of the Book in Latin America" attracted eight Latin American bibliographers from universities as far as Wisconsin and North Carolina.

"No one has ever offered a course of this kind," said Adan Griego, curator for Latin American collections at Stanford University. "We were all very excited." He added: "We had a wonderful time in class asking questions that led to all sorts of information."

Griego and his classmates took field trips to some of the leading repositories of rare books in the Los Angeles area, such as UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and Charles E. Young Research Library.

At the Huntington Library, they saw one of the world's rarest books: a copy of the Gutenberg Bible dating back to the dawn of Western printing in the 15th century. "There are only about five of them in the whole of the United States," gushed Griego. "It was amazing."