Oasis of Books

In Arizona, distance determines fully as much as sky determines in New Mexico. Drought too. In Arizona, water is more precious than rubies. Books? Important, yes; essential to some, but not as basic as water and distance.

And yet books were the reason for my last field trip in Arizona, a visit to the two centers of population at Tucson and Phoenix, where books also are accumulating in significant numbers in libraries, museums, and homes, and where they form oases of culture, nearly as life-giving as water.

Among the most valuable of Arizona printed matter are the guide books and route maps the pioneers brought with them as essential equipment, fragile things, thumbed to pieces and tossed aside once the the goals were reached. Only a few have survived. Today oil company maps are issued by the thousands for free distribution. Yet a collection of all of them printed in modern times on Arizona alone, showing the development of highways, probably does not exist in any single place.

Distance lends time for thought while one drives in Arizona. I kept thinking of my bookish destinations as oases in the modern desert of mass media. To a library come travellers who thirst and are refreshed, who hunger and are nourished. A library is also a magnet which draws the intellectually curious. In a library one meets people from the four corners of the earth, and both sides of the tracks. The children's room in a public library seems to me fully as hallowed a place as a Sunday School. Paradoxically, the public library is one of the few places left where one can be private.

En route from San Diego to Tucson, such thoughts played through my mind in the intervals between soulshaking sights of landscape. Approaching Yuma the overriding urgency was to determine the color of the dunes.

Golden tinged with pink Amber with rose petal? Champagne? Here the river is relaxed and meandering, as it nears its delta union with the Gulf. In Yuma the Public Library is truly a park-set oasis. At Gila Bend the Papagneria lured me off course, and I took the long way to Tucson. Rolling south toward Ajo traffic fell away, roadside billboards were no longer profitable, and the palo verdes stood ready to shower the landscape with gold. Smelter smoke heralded the copper town. I drove to the viewpoint overlooking the open pit, one of the Southwest's greatest sights, an inferno without devils. The distraction of beautiful landscapes makes outdoor reading in Arizona a desultory activity. I have sat

under the pines on the top of Mt. Lemmon, for example, looking eastward on the valley of the San Pedro, and though the book in hand-Hariel Long on St. Augustine -was enthralling, a stronger thralldom was wrought by the beauty of cloud shadows on the earth and the blue ness of the receding ranges in the golden light of the westering sun. Thus the ride eastward from Ajo, over the Papago Reservation toward Tucson, was dominated by moun tains in the sky-the sacred peak of Baboquivari and the ro-be-telescope-surmounted summit of Kitt. I recalled the story told me by an astronomer friend of how when the delegation from the National Science Foundation appeared before the Papago Tribal Council at Sells, to ask for permission to locate the observatory on Kitt Peak, the tribal custom whereby petitioners must stand, kept the astronomers on their feet for four hours before the seated councillors.

Crossing the Papagueria is a cleansing experience, wherein the stains of city life are effaced in a bath of peacefulness. No billboards, no drive-ins, no beer cans or bottles, almost no traffic, this vast reservation has resisted encroachment by the predatory. From passing through it, blessed home of the Bean People, I came to Tucson refreshed in body, yet avid for the bibliographical experiences awaiting me in this oasis.

Books did not come early to the Old Pueblo. George Hand's Diary, bits of which appear each morning in the Arizona Daily Star, indicate other interests. The first books in Arizona which might be called a "library" were sent by Samuel Colt of revolver fame to his mine in the 1860's. It was a determining beginning, young Edward E. Ayer, a Civil War cavalry trooper guarding the Cerro Colorado mine, received the impulse from this little frontier "library" which led him later to form the great collection on the American Indian which is the pride of the Newberry Library in Chicago.

At the ripe old age of 85, Ayer wrote, "The finding of Prescott's Conquest of Mexico in that mine in Arizona in '62 has been responsible and is to be credited as the principal force that has given me a vast enjoyment in this world and is absolutely responsible for the Ayer Collection."

The first Ebrary reading rooms in Arizona were established by women's clubs. The first buildings were erected from Carnegie gifts to Prescott, Phoenix, Tucson, and Yums, and except for Phoenix's new building, all are still in use. Mining companies founded libraries such as the Copper Queen in Bisbee and the Old Dominion in Globe. In the pre-Phelps Dodge era, Jerome and Clarkdale were conspicuously without libraries. The Clark copper interests benefacted states other than the rwo-Montans and Arizona-from whence came their wealth. Nevada, California, and Virginia were the gainers.

Heart of Tucson is the red-mofed university, set amid orchards of olive, paka, and orange, and heart of it is the university Ebrary, the state's finest general library, which for fifty years gave statewide service to borrowers without local libraries. Although this service has now been assumed by the Street Library as a result of Federal aid, the university library lends books and periodicals increasingly, for example, to scholars at Tempe and scientists at Fort Huachuca. The present librarian is Fleming Bannert, a West Virginian who came west eight years ago.

The origins of the University of Arizona Library go back to the first books acquired in 1891, described by Phyllis Ball in an article called "The First Hundred." Today this nuclear collection is kept intact in the library, just as at Yale University the few remaining books of Eli Yale ara piously shelved apart. They include mostly scientific works, intended to supplement the new university's camphasis on mining, engineering, and agriculture. Also present are several volumes of essays by Thomas Henry Huxley, grandfather of today's Aldous and Julian.

Another "first" in the university library is the collection of Bandar Log Press books, Arizona's first private press, moved to Phoenix in 1901 by Frank Holme, a Chicago newspaper artist in search of health, and named for the folk in Kipling's Just So Stories. Included also is a unique knot of original drawings by Holme of courroom and other scenes on his Chicago news-beats.

The University's Arizona collection was established a generation ago by Estelle Lutrell, university librarian from 1904 to 1931. Although it did not succeed in acquiring the famed Monk Collection of Arizoniana, because of its failure to provide a fireproof location for the M.D.'s books (they were given instead to the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles), the University has subsequently duplicated and extended the Munk holdings.

Under Miss Ball's perceptive direction the Arizona titles, maps, photographs, business papers, and memorabilia have been brought together with the collection of books about Arizona in Division of Special Collections, where they are being indexed and made available for research use. Such a facility, which at the same time conserves and serves, proves a magnet to attract collectors in search of an ultimate home for their cherished collections. For the past twenty years Fernsylvania oilman T. E. Hanley has been sending the university library volumes on art and literature, until now the Hanley Collection of 35,000 volumes occupies half a level in the central booksrack.

In the Tucson Public Library, headed by Mrs. Gertrude L. Burt, I found townspeople of all ages shopping for books, cramped and crowded by the long-since out grown Carnegie building. A yes-saying public librarian,

such as “Billie” Burt, can be an equally determining force in a child's life as mother and teacher.

Tucson is fortunate in having two depositories to ensure the survival of historical books and manuscripts. Across the street from the University is the handsome new home of the Arizona Pioneers' Historical Society, founded by Charles B. Poston in 1884, housing the state's best collection of historical relics, beautifully displayed in permanent cases. Under the direction of Eleanor Sloan, the Society has also assembled, partly through the benefactions of Tucsonian W. J. Holliday, a notable collection of books and manuscripts, with emphasis on Sonora. Mrs. Edith Kitt was one of the successfully acquisitive members of the Society's staff. Chief treasure, perhaps, aside from the Holliday materials, is the George Hand Diary, that unbuttoned saloon-keeper's clear-eyed view of bleary days in the Old Pueblo, an expurgated version of which is being published. Financed by Holliday, the Society is publishing a distinguished series of scholarly works dealing with Spanish days in Arizona. Mrs. Yndía Moore succeeded Miss Sloan as Historical Secretary.

Another admirable Tucson publishing program is directed by George W. Chambers, under the name of Arizona Silhouettes, which has issued both reprints and original works of Arizona interest.

The state's leading bibliographer is the university's reference librarian, Donald M. Powell, whose current indexing of the Arizona Daily Star, Arizona Days and Ways, and Arizona Highways is supplemented by the periodic reports of Arizoniana contributed by him to the Arizona Quarterly and the Arizona Librarian. Arizona and the West is the university's newest periodical, readably edited by John Alexander Carroll, and the university's history has been written by Douglas P. Martin, retired professor of journalism and Pulitzer Prize Winner, whose Yuma Crossing and works on early Tombstone are widely read.

I talked with these two scholars in their offices on the top floor of the Library, looking out on the silvery olive grove and beyond to the western mountains, and heard them say that without the university library's resources, ranged and stacked beneath and all around, Tucson would be merely desert to them. Joseph Wood Krutch is of the same opinion. To scholar-writers such as these, books come just behind air and food as life's basic necessities.

University of Arizona Library at Tucson

No account of Pima County publishers would be complete without the colorful and dynamic artist-writer Ettore de Grazia, the Southwest's most appealing primitive painter. His silk-screen series, Arizona South, beautifully perpetuates Papago and Spanish legends and tales; and his own reverently primitive chapel, Our Lady of Guadalupe, in the Catalina foothills, is one of the most simply religious modern shrines in all the Southwest. As the waves of industry and tourism wash over and obliterate the old landmarks, the work of libraries, museums, and publishers attains increasing importance in man's endless battle against oblivion. Another valiant warrior is Tucson's leading antiquarian bookseller, Mrs. Dorothy McNamee, whose Överland Bookshop was my haven for a buffet supper on my trip through Tucson. When rare books, rare beef, and rare friends meet together under one roof, I for one feel as close to heaven as I'll probably ever come. Mrs. McNamee is proving a gracious and able middlewoman between collectors who sell and libraries and collectors who buy; and the leading biblioperators of the region, and beyond, are finding the Overland Bookshop a rewarding rendezvous on their journey through the bookworld. Browsing side by side among the shop's treasures one may encounter University President Richard A. Harvill and Freshman John Doe, both drawn to this tiny oasis by the magnetic power of good books for sale.The road to Phoenix, as all roads in Arizona, is landmarked by mountain ranges. Through the windshield the Superstitions rise, as in the rear view mirror the Catalinas fall away, while smoke from the smelter at Superior smudges dges the eastern sky. Approaching the Salt. River Valley from Apache Junction through Mesa and Tempe, the odor of citrus in bloom is bittersweetened by stockyard smells, symbolizing the two important pillars of Phoenix's economy-agriculture and stock-marketing. In the Capitol's Department of Library and Archives I breathed the more familiar fragrance of old books and newspapers, as I talked with Mrs. Alice B. Good, director of the Department and member thereof since 1933, and from her, and later from her Extension Service assistant, Mrs. Catherine S. Chadwick, I learned of the burgeoning federal-state-aid library service to Arizona's less populated regions being carried out by bookmobile.

Here in the Capitol is the state's priceless collection of early Arizona newspapers which, together with those in Tucson and elsewhere, are being microfilmed against the day of their crumbling away because of the woodpulp paper on which most are printed. These files were assembled by the late Mulford Winsor who served the State Library for a long generation and whose recreation was found on his date ranch at Yuma.

Most beautiful of all Arizona library buildings is the pink stucco Phoenix Public Library, set in a civic center which also includes Little Theater and Art Gallery. It is the product of long years of leadership by the recently retired librarian, Miss Jane Hudgins, one of the most vivacious of all Southwestern Librarians. The chronicles of librarianship in Arizona are peopled by heroic women such as Estelle Lutrell, Evangeline Berryman, and Patience Golter, who by their selfless devotion drove deep the foundations of good library service.

"In the arid Southwest it takes more to be a good librarian than elsewhere," wrote Patricia Paylore, assistant Librarian of the University of Arizona. "An ordinary man just won't do." New Mexico-born, resident of Arizona since childhood, and disciple of Miss Lutrell, Miss Paylore has been a main-pillar of the Tucson library and spokesman for statewide library needs for the past thirty years.

The Phoenix Public Library recently received a princely gift of general literature in rare editions, presented by Dr. Alfred Knight. The Library is thronged by young and old readers who seek in its cool, spacious, and comfortable interior what people ever seek and best find in the oasis of a good public library: learning, entertainment, delight, and escape into as well as escape from life. Books in truth are all things to all men. Headed now by Librarian Wilfred Henderson, the Phoenix Public Library faces a bright future.

Up river at Tempe, the booming Arizona State University Library is directed by hustling Harold Walter Batchelor, who is out to acquire and catalog and circulate more books than the older university library in Tucson. Batchelor's hobby is book hunting in the field, and I have encountered him in bookshops all over the country, dusty and happy.

The Tempe library, named for former State College President Mathews, serves also as an art gallery, and it is hung with many beautiful paintings and Burr etchings, and brightened by bold murals and colorful walls. Treasure of its growing Arizona Collection is the multi-volumed manuscript diary of Governor George W. P. Hunt.

Urgently needed is a union list of Arizoniana in Arizona's libraries, so that scholars and librarians, in and out of state, can locate and draw upon the printed and manuscript resources which are now recognized as cultural assets of supreme importance.

Himself an ardent collector of historical Arizona material, Senator Goldwater is faced with the collector's ancient

The problem of acquiring items in such rapid quantity as to lose track of what he has. While waiting for him to arrive in his own plane from having spent a day in Tucson flying jet missions, I browsed among the books which cover one entire wall of the living room, chatting with the charmingly hospitable Mrs. Goldwater and entertained by their toy poodle's parlor tricks. Goldwater arrived well along in the evening, still wearing his flying suit, and plunged into bookish conversation with me as though he had no other interest in the world.

"Senator," I said, "you've had a long day and I promise I won't stay."

"All my days are long," he laughed. "I'd gladly talk books all night with you. My family has always been bookish." And to prove his point he pulled from the shelf a copy of Vanished Arizona, bearing his grand father's bookplate and the date 1908.

Senator Goldwater is also a top-notch photographer whose specialty has been the photographing of Arizona's historical landmarks. From the time of Henry Fountain Ashurst the senatorial tradition in Arizona, exemplified also by Carl Hayden, has been devoted to the history, lore, and bookish aspects of the state. Together with Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, Barry Goldwater is one of the United States Senate's two leading bookmen. From books not needed by the Library of Congress, Senator Goldwater is regularly stocking more than forty small libraries throughout Arizona.

Next morning an hour before dawn I was on the road westbound for California, meeting the oncoming fleet of overnight Diesels from Los Angeles and overtaking scores of livestock haulers, bound for the slaughterhouses of the Angel City.

In an arid state such as Arizona, oases are few and far between, which makes them, once gained, precious beyond words. The thirsting body must have water, the hungry mind books. Without water and books there would be no true life in the state.

May I therefore extend the definition with which this article began? "Oasis," from the Greek, meaning a fertile place in the desert because of water-and books.