Gleanings from Libraries: The Winterthur Library

Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Inc., The, Mar 2005 by Cooney, Catherine, McKinstry, E Richard

One of the highlights of the 2004 EAIA annual meeting was the day spent at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. As part of the visit, members received a special "tool collectors" tour of the museum's Library and Special Collections. For longtime EAIA member and Winterthur Curator Emeritus Charlie Hummel, the visit was inspirational. 'Wouldn't a column that focused on the holdings of various libraries be of interest to readers of The Chronicle?" he asked. We agreed, and he arranged with his colleagues at Winterthur to write the first of these columns and thus was born this new occasional column, "Gleanings from Libraries." The name was taken from a title previously used m this journal, "Gleanings from Collections," which described museum and private collections. We thank Charlie for his idea, and Winterthur Library's Catherine Cooney and Richard McKinstry for writing the inaugural article.

Editor

The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum opened its doors to the public in 1951. One year later, the museum's library came into being, chiefly to serve Winterthur staff and students in the Winterthur Program of Early American Culture, a graduate level course jointly sponsored by Winterthur and the University of Delaware. Today the library is open to the general public and is recognized as a national research center for the study and appreciation of America's artistic, cultural, social, and intellectual history. There are two main collections: Printed Book and Periodical, which includes the Rare Book Collection and the Trade Catalog Collection, and the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera.

The Printed Book and Periodical Collection has grown from H.F. du Pont's private collection of books on the decorative arts and early American life to a library of over eighty-seven thousand volumes. Chiefly a collection of secondary sources, the Printed Book and Periodical Collection also contains valuable primary research material. The collection includes materials from the late-sixteenth century through the present day, including current imprints, serials, rare books, trade catalogs and auction catalogs.

The Rare Book Collection contains an extraordinary amount of material for the researcher of tools and instruments. The eighteenth century was the era of the encyclopedia, with Denis Diderot's Encyclop�die considered the crowning achievement. Winterthur has the complete Encyclop�die, including the eleven volumes of engraved plates, as well as its English precedent, Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia. Chambers' Cyclopaedia was initially published in 1728; Winterthur has the 1738 second edition, the 1751-52 seventh edition, and Abraham Rees's 1781 re-edition. For the scholar of tools and technology, there can be no match for the Descriptions des arts et m�tiers, published by the Acad�mie Royale des Sciences. An attempt to describe all aspects of industry, the Descriptions was published in parts from 1761-1788. Some individual cahiers of note are L'art du menuisier, three volumes on carpentry and woodworking by Andr� Jacob Roubo, Pierre-Augustin Salmon's L'art du potier d'�tain on the pewter trade and J.R. Lucotte's L'art du ma�onnerie showing masonry tools and practices. The Winterthur Library has a remarkably complete set of the Descriptions, one of three such sets in the United States.

The Trade Catalog Collection contains a wealth of material for those interested in early industry. There are significant holdings concerning tools and instruments, especially from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. A guide to the collection, Trade Catalogues at Winterthur: a Guide to the Literature of Merchandising 1750-1980, is widely available. That this guide contains separate sections on agricultural implements and machinery, hardware cutlery, utensils, and hand tools, measuring instruments, plumbing, and heating and cooling equipment is a testament to the depth of this collection.

While the strength of the collection is the later nineteenth century, there are many early examples. Joseph Smith's 1816 Evplanation or key to the various manufactories of Sheffield is known to EAIA memhers, due to the reprint the association did of Winterthur's copy in 1975. Other Sheffield catalogs are available as well, such as the Statement of prices of table knife hafters, published in 1816. Winterthur's copy of John Wyke's Catalogue of tools for watch and clock makers, published circa 1770 was issued in facsimile in 1978 with the help of a subsidy from the EAIA.

The library has many examples of trade catalogs that were produced for the trade; given by manufacturers or middlemen to retailers, rather than directly to consumers. A recent addition to the collection, a German trade catalog of metal goods, may he such an example. Printed in Dusseldorf in the middle of the nineteenth century, it contains hand-colored lithographs of metalworking tools, coffee grinders, ice skates, nippers, files, and so on. Many of these catalogs for the trade include manuscript annotations of prices per unit (Figure 1).