We are pleased to continue our series with Mike Widener. It was our final chance to interview the Lillian Goldman Law Library’s rare book librarian before his retirement at the end of last month, after 15 years at Yale. He will, however, remain very much involved in the Rare Book School course, “Law Books: History & Connoisseurship,” and will start as the U.S. advisor for Italian rare book dealer, Bibliopathos.
At what point did you want to become a librarian?
My first career was in journalism, as a broadcast journalist in my hometown of Laredo, Texas, and then in the public information department of a state agency in Austin. In 1986 I met my wife, Emma, who had returned to the University of Texas after earning a library degree there in the 1970s, followed by a stellar career as a librarian in Mexico’s leading academic libraries and in the office of the President of Mexico. After we married, she worked for the rare book dealer Dorothy Sloan. Emma’s work was a lot more interesting than mine, and she inspired me to begin a master’s in library & information science. Meeting Emma was the best thing that ever happened to me, both personally and professionally.
What has been your most exciting discovery?
Most of the individual discoveries in my career should be credited to the researchers, book dealers, donors, and exhibition co-curators who have (literally) handed them to me. I wouldn’t know where to start. However, there are a few classes of items that, for me at least, have been eye-openers.
When I first arrived at the Yale Law Library in 2006, I found an extraordinary collection of Italian statuti, 800 volumes containing the laws of jurisdictions big and small in pre-unification Italy, including a dozen incunables and fifty manuscripts. Most of them represented the collection of an unknown Italian lawyer, acquired en bloc by Law Librarian Samuel Thorne only months after the conclusion of World War II. For legal historians they represent the crucible of the European civil law tradition. For book historians they cover the gamut of early printing, from broadsides and pamphlets to grand folios. Their title pages are expressions of civic pride, with decorated borders and images of patron saints. Since most of the titles would have been of little interest outside of their localities, their bindings represent an array of local Italian binding styles. The collection was my introduction to Italian limp paper bindings, those simple yet lovely bindings that develop a velvety patina. The collection had been largely ignored for decades, but I featured it in a couple of exhibitions and bought all the additional items I could afford. I believe it is now the largest collection outside of Italy.
Another “discovery,” or perhaps obsession, has been law-related illustrations in law books. My discovery, if you can call it that, is the extent and variety of the illustrations. I’ve been particularly eager to identify and acquire law books bearing images of Justitia with her scales of justice. I acquired many books for the sole reason that Justitia was pictured. My search led me to the largest and most ignored genre of western legal literature: early modern legal dissertations. Hundreds of them have images of Justitia in headpieces, tailpieces, woodcut initials, and titlepage vignettes.
Tell us a little bit about your latest project.
My last exhibition, “Precedents So Scrawl’d and Blurr’d: Readers’ Marks in Law Books,” was on display only two weeks before the COVID pandemic intervened. However, an online version of the exhibition is now available: https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/marks-in-lawbooks. It was the last in a series of exhibitions I mounted on the physical aspects of early law books. Others were on bindings, manuscript fragments, and typography.
In the past year I became enamored with printers’ devices. I built a collection of 440 images on the Yale Law Library’s Flickr site, Unlike other online collections of printers’ devices, these images are in full color and include the imprint when it is adjacent to the device. Many of them are miniature masterpieces of the graphic arts.
What exciting plans are in the pipeline?
Retirement! On April 30 I retired after fifteen wonderful years as the Yale Law Library’s rare book librarian, preceded by another fifteen years at the University of Texas Law Library. My wife and I are packing for a move to the Washington, D.C. area, where our son Henry is the librarian of the Oliveira Lima Library at Catholic University, the largest collection of Brasiliana outside of Brazil.
I’m not yet leaving the rare book world. I will teach my Rare Book School course, “Law Books: History & Connoisseurship,” for the sixth time in August, with the assistance of Ryan Greenwood (University of Minnesota Law Library). This will be the first time, and hopefully the only time, that we will teach it online.
In addition, I have accepted an offer from Bibliopathos, the rare book firm based in Verona, Italy, to be their U.S. advisor on institutional sales. I’m very excited about this opportunity.
The pandemic cancelled my plans for a farewell exhibition of my Yale Law Library acquisitions, but the Law Library remains open to the idea.
Do you collect yourself?
Before I became a librarian, I had assembled a modest collection on Mexican colonial architecture. It includes a few volumes from the library of Elizabeth Wilder Weismann, whose Art and Time in Mexico (1985) is one of my all time favorite books. I have another modest collection of the works of the Spanish historian Américo Castro. I continue to collect titles on book history and the history of legal literature for my Rare Book School course.
If money were no object what book/manuscript would you like to add to your library?
For the Yale Law Library, it would be the first illustrated edition of Jacobus de Theramo’s Consolatio peccatorum, seu Processus Belial, which was a German language edition of 1473, Das buch Belial genant. The work uses a fictitious trial, in which the Devil sues Christ for trespassing into Hell, as a tool for teaching legal procedure. It competes with the 1473 Nuremberg edition of Giovanni d’Andrea’s Super arboribus consanguinitatis et affinitatis (which the Yale Law Library owns), for the honor of the first printed law book with illustrations.
What is the greatest challenge facing rare book librarians in the next few years?
The greatest long-term threat is the flagging support for the humanities, both as disciplines in themselves and as vital components of professional education in general. I have been blessed to work at an institution, Yale University, that continues to support the humanities, but many universities are under pressure to prepare students for lucrative jobs, and politicians are blind to the value that the humanities contribute.
Has the pandemic brought some positives for librarians as well as negatives?
The pandemic has given librarians a crash course in online instruction, and forced us to learn new skills and rethink how we ourselves teach as well as how we support faculty teaching with our digitization efforts.
Online professional meetings and conferences are much easier and more affordable to attend. In the past year I’ve attended virtual events hosted in Europe and the Americas that I could not have dreamed of attending in person.
The pandemic has taught all of us, librarians and others, the value of human contact: the informal coffee-break encounters at conferences, the hands-on encounters between students and special collections materials, the serendipity and camaraderie of book fairs. At their best, special collections are profoundly social instruments.
You can see Mike giving visitors a video tour of the Rare Book Collection, and browse thousands of images available on their Flickr site.
The Lillian Goldman Law Library’s rare book collection stands at more than 50,000 volumes and is actively growing. It supports the curriculum of the Yale Law School and the research of students and faculty within Yale, and far beyond.
The rare book collection is located in the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Room, on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, 127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT.
Read other entries from our popular Interview with a Librarian series, including Katie Birkwood from the Royal College of Physicians, and Liam Sims from the Cambridge University Library.