IES Book Collecting Seminar: Basie Gitlin – How Libraries Solicited and Recognized Gifts, 1600-1750

This talk will explore the strategies used in early modern libraries, focusing on those at Oxford and Cambridge and at colonial Harvard and Yale, to encourage and acknowledge gifts of both books and funds to acquire books. A prime early innovation was the benefactors’ register, first implemented to great effect by Thomas Bodley in his refounding of Oxford’s university library, which became ubiquitous in a range of library settings in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a highly visible way to recognize generosity. The library catalogue itself came to play a similar role in encouraging further gifts of books in a colonial setting, where most donors lived an ocean away. This talk will explore the interrelations between benefactors’ registers and the first institutional library catalogues printed in colonial North America, which were essential tools in transatlantic fundraising for America’s earliest college libraries.

Basie Bales Gitlin is Senior Director of Development and External Affairs for Yale University Library and Yale Collections. He also serves as a member of the Advisory Council of the American Trust for the British Library, Librarian of the Elizabethan Club, and Co-Chair of the Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes.