Collecting Texas: Essays on Texana Collectors and the Creation of Research Libraries (review)

For many years I have advocated to any audience who will listen the social imperative of "applied history," which is a knowledge of the past not for the pedantry of being able to spout the dates of reigns and battles, but because everything we believe today filters like coffee through what we ever understood about history. At this writing, for one example, the news is dominated by the controversy over whether to allow the construction of an Islamic community center near the former site of the World Trade Center in New York City. Few who are verbally engaged are even aware that the intended building is in the heart of a community once known as Little Syria, a formerly thriving enclave that was all but wiped out by construction of the World Trade Center itself. Informed social participation is impossible without historical literacy.

There is a vast amount of history on the Internet, but much of it is erroneous or even deliberately misleading. Historical literacy, while it is conveyed through honest writing, lives in its essential elements in the great research collections, repositories of papers, letters, ephemera, and photographs that give one a communion with past days that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Collecting Texas tells the stories of nine such collections in Texas, and of the determined—perhaps even manic—devotees of history who forged them.

For a work that is a celebration of literacy, it was somewhat jarring to encounter some questionable English on the very first page, in describing a meeting of the Texas Library Association that suffered from the absence of Texas's senior bibliophile, Al Lowman, to add his "customary flare" (1), I think the editors meant "flair," but then knowing Lowman and his Roman-candle passion for history and books, "flare" might be equally accurate. Of the nine essays in the collection, Lowman's is first. This is appropriate: he is the only one of the principals still with us and able to contribute his own memoir of a half-century of gruesomely knowledgeable book collecting. Most of his large assemblage now resides at the Texas A&M University Library.

After Lowman's essay, the remaining eight are in chronological order from the various times that the collections were conveyed to the benefiting institutions. The legendary Earl Vandale and Thomas W. Streeter are acknowledged and summarized in the introduction. Thereafter, George A. Hill's part in the creation of the San Jacinto Museum of History, and his collection that became the nucleus of the Herzstein Library there, is written about by Lisa A. Struthers, the current librarian. Next, long-time and the recently retired librarian of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo, Elaine B. Davis, tells the story of Dr. William E. Howard and the founding of their brilliantly assembled research library. The remaining essays, similarly written by those with intimate knowledge of the collections, maintain consistent quality: E. L. DeGolyer and Southern Methodist University; Frank Caldwell and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas; on the life's passion of maverick historian J. Evetts Haley, whose collection not surprisingly went to his own free-standing institution; John Peace and the University of Texas at San Antonio; Jenkins and Virginia Garrett and the University of Texas at Arlington; and Dan Kilgore and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

This delicious volume is published without ISBN number by the Book Club of Texas, associated with SMU's DeGolyer Library, in a finely bound limited edition. And that is my one complaint. This mode of publication, special and attractive as it is, concedes that the love of history has become the domain of gnostics who know and appreciate things not for the rest of...