It is part library, part museum, part art gallery - drawing students and scholars from around the world. It is the repository of the life work of renowned men and women - manuscripts of books they have written, speeches they have given, discoveries they have made.
It is in San Diego, near you, another almost unknown treasure in our treasured San Diego. It is shared through free public displays and a Web site. It is the Mandeville Special Collections Library at UCSD, and you can visit online at orpheus.ucsd.edu/specoll/.
The sparkling-eyed librarian in charge of this magic show is Lynda Claassen, who aimed her schooling and her lifetime career at this job and would not trade it for any other, anywhere. Her magic kingdom brings history within your touch.
You see plaintive drawings of children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War. You see angry political cartoons that Dr. Seuss drew as World War II approached. And an exotic Siamese book from the 17th century and perhaps the most strategic letter in history, drafted by the Salk physicist Leo Szilard for Albert Einstein to sign and send to President Roosevelt, to inform him that an atomic bomb had been built.
When I last visited, a Moscow researcher named Elena was browsing through letters and papers of three famed San Diego scientists, Szilard, Jonas Salk and Francis Crick. Hilarie Heath, a university professor from Ensenada, had been researching in the largest existing collection of Baja California records, a century old.
The author, Ken Silverman, had come from New York to study the papers of poet Jackson MacLow for a biography of the composer John Cage. In this library's chilled, low-lighted labyrinths, such treasures are meticulously stacked or locked. The evidence of some lives is confined to two or three cartons. The papers of Salk, who discovered the polio vaccine, fill 700 boxes.
They are all original documents, except for those of one man who leapt to fame with his discoveries of DNA: British-born Francis Crick, who died last year after retiring from the Salk, longago promised his papers to London's Wellcome Library. For him, Lynda the Librarian made an exception. She photocopied his papers and letters, and sent the originals off to London.
When she has school tours, she opens with a presentation that has not failed yet to knock the kids' socks off. She brings out just three items: An original letter written by George Washington, Harold Urey's Nobel Prize and Dr. Seuss's original drawings of the Cat in the Hat.
