Teaching

Charles H. Watts II Memorial Visiting Professorship in Historical Bibliography and the History of the Book

In 2002, the Library received an endowment of $1 million to establish the Charles H. Watts II Memorial Visiting Professorship in Historical Bibliography and the History of the Book. Each year a course is taught in the John Carter Brown Library on the subject of “the history of the book,” a flourishing academic field that considers the book primarily as a physical and cultural object of immense usefulness in the history of civilization, especially that of the West. The visiting professor comes to the Library under the auspices of an academic department at Brown University, usually History or English.

Charles H. Watts II, who died on September 26, 2001, at age seventy-four, sat on the executive committee and had been a member of the JCB Board continuously since 1978. A Brown graduate, he earned a Ph. D. in American literature and taught for some years. His leadership ability was quickly recognized, however, and he was recruited into academic administration early, becoming president of Bucknell University when he was merely thirty-seven. Following his retirement from Bucknell in 1975, after twelve years as president, Watts devoted himself mostly to service in the business and cultural worlds. Among other responsibilities, he was chairman of the JCB Associates from 1979 through 1981.

The donors of the Watts Professorship endowment were Mr. Finn M. W. Caspersen, Mr. Robert A. Tucker, and Mr. William B. Warren.

As implied above, the history of the book includes, among other specific subjects, the study of historical bibliography (both enumerative and descriptive); the impact of the book on society—whether manuscript books, printed books, or electronic books; the history of book collecting and the book trade; the study of the so-called culture of the book and of print, with all of its societal, political, and economic ramifications; and the study of the media revolutions that occurred when writing on paper or vellum, when modern printing, and when computerization of words each began.

The field first became prominent in France in the 1960s under the designations “l’histoire du livre”and “livre et societé” just when it was becoming apparent that the centrality of the printed book in Western culture was on the verge of being eclipsed by electronic media. In the Foreword to a JCB publication, Julie Greer Johnson’s The Book in the Americas: The Role of Books and Printing in the Development of Culture and Society in Colonial Latin America (Providence, 1988), we observed that the history of books is endlessly fascinating because few other products of human society are so reflective of the world around them or of the world from which they spring.

Books are part of a complex and organic cultural system, and their history cannot be studied without reference also to modes of education; literacy and the psychology of reading; authorship as a vocation; the technology of book production; the establishment of agencies for publishing and distributing books; the impact or influence of books and reading on society, politics, and culture; and the inter-relationship of the production and distribution of books with such institutions as the nation-state and the church.

In the five hundred years from Gutenberg to the end of World War II, it is now clear in retrospect, the book was the pre-eminent concrete medium of communication; the indispensable mode of information storage and of documentation both sacred and profane; the principal means by which illustration was broadcast; the supreme outlet for the literary imagination; a major source of entertainment; and the basis of most formal instruction.

At the John Carter Brown Library there has been a long and continuous tradition of interest in the history of the book. George Parker Winship in 1912, when he was the Librarian of the JCB, discovered and identified the first work to appear from a press in South America, Pragmática sobre los diez días del año (1584), and wrote a history of the first press in colonial British America, The Cambridge Press, 1638–1692, A Reexamination of the Evidence Concerning the Bay Psalm Book and the Eliot Indian Bible (1945).

Among the numerous contributions to the history of the book by Lawrence C. Wroth, Librarian from 1923 to 1956, were The Colonial Printer (1931), still the best comprehensive study of the press in the thirteen colonies, and An American Bookshelf, 1755 (1934), a study of reading at mid-century. Thomas R. Adams, Librarian from 1957 to 1981, is a renowned enumerative bibliographer, compiling only recently, with David W. Waters, English Maritime Books Printed before 1801 Relating to Ships and Their Construction and Operation at Sea (Providence and Greenwich, 1995), which the JCB published jointly with the National Maritime Museum of Great Britain, and before that The American Controversy: A Bibliographical Study of the British Pamphlets About the American Dispute (1980).

One purpose of the History of the Book course will be to nurture in young minds an appreciation of books as crafted, practical, historical objects. As a result of the Watts Professorship, generations of Brown students will come to see books as peculiar and wonderful cultural, economic, and artistic artifacts that for more than five hundred years have been inseparable from progress.

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