Fall
2001
Heaven on Earth
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William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library is not just a resource for scholars
and academics. Auniverse of people with a profound love of learning
has found "a place of mental paradise" within its walls
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By
Clara Sturak '91
Illustrations by Roman Genn
This
place glistens with memories. Memories of holiday parties and a
Christmas tree so tall that the painted figures cavorting on the
ceiling of its reading room seemed to be reaching out to touch its
top. Of the day a drunk driver crashed through its garden wall,
sending bricks flying -- and furtive scholars tiptoed away with
them, weighty souvenirs from their favorite literary haunt. Of a
sweltering summer afternoon when, on its lawn, sweating singers
costumed as stars and planets sang a 17th-century oratorio, the
name of which no one now recalls, though they still remember the
12-foot cardboard sun, painted a lurid gold, smack in the center
of the pageant.
To generations
of scholars, students and lucky others, that is just what this place
has been: a brilliant sun irresistibly drawing them into its orbit.
Far too
many people have labeled the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
a "hidden treasure" for the phrase to not be considered
cliché within its gates. But clichés become clichés
for a reason and, indeed, the Clark is a hidden treasure. It is
a world-class library ensconced behind high walls, a magnificent
Old World building smack in the heart of the once-grand West Adams
district, run under the auspices of UCLA and open to the public,
filled with works as important and rare as a First Folio of Shakespeare,
inscribed first editions of Rousseau and Keats and an unrivaled
collection of letters and manuscripts of Oscar Wilde.
For those
who are intimate with its book-filled rooms and expansive grounds,
it is something more: a home away from home, a retreat, a secret
garden.
It goes
without saying that the Clark is a haven for scholars and academics,
those who build their reputations on the tireless study of the obscure
and the more obscure. But there are others who have discovered the
Clark and made it their own. Call them civilians -- doctors, housewives,
cops and Hollywood types with nothing more in common than a love
of learning.
ADAM
WECHSLER, an emeritus professor of neurology at UCLA, is one.
He cannot contain his enthusiasm when he speaks of the Clark, which
he calls his "ivory tower."
"I
believe in heroes," he says. "I have lots of heroes. One
of them is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. At the Clark, I was able to read
from a first edition of du Contract Social inscribed by him!"
Wechsler, slim and tan behind dark glasses, first heard of the Clark
while teaching a course in the history of medicine. Since then,
he's come to the library once a month, each time requesting to see
a first edition of an important work, and spending a few quiet hours
poring over it. "I've read Hamlet and Macbeth from the First
Folio of Shakespeare," he says, his voice quivering with the
profoundly emotional memory of that experience. "Imagine, there's
nowhere else you can do that. The Huntington has one, but you can't
read it."
The fact
that the Clark Library makes rare volumes of such classics as The
Origin of Species, Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane and works by Thomas
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