Bryant Steps Down: The Man Behind the Stacks

When you ask Douglas W. Bryant what he does for a living, he hesitates for a couple of moments, smiles and stares at his feet. You sit back and wait, almost nervously, not wanting to push for an answer; his shyness or modesty or whatever you want to call it is contagious. Then he looks up from his desk in the midst of his Widener Library office and searches slowly and carefully for the answer, and his response is characteristically low-key. Bryant, who has more titles following his name than probably anyone else at Harvard, doesn't push himself. "I don't type file cards," he says quietly.

More than 25 years ago, Douglas Bryant came to Cambridge to work as an administrative assistant in the University library system. Today, as the only man ever to hold simultaneously the positions of University Librarian and Director of the University Library, Bryant has left more of a mark on what many consider the finest academic library in the world than even Harry E. Widener '07. For instance, Harvard invented the position of Director of the University Library for Douglas Bryant.

But as he sits in his office overlooking the Yard, the librarian laments that he's never gotten to know many undergraduates. Yet even if Bryant can't recognize students by name or by face, he's done as much for them as anyone else in Harvard's recent history. Every student who uses the library system while at school--and that, of course, means every student--is touched by the accomplishments of this man who sits among the bookcases and memorabilia of 30 years of Harvard.

This school year has been marked by vast changes in the leadership of Harvard's libraries. Louis E. Martin, for six years the College Librarian, left to direct the libraries at Cornell University. Top-level administrators in Widener and other libraries are leaving, and others have died. Bryant, who turns 65 this year, must leave Harvard at the end of this year too. You can tell he's not pleased about leaving half his life behind him.

Bryant has served under three different presidents, and the record of his tenure is, in the words of one longtime staffer, "beyond remarkable." He's built a library staff, which he ceaselessly praises as the most committed and competent in the nation, that has kept Harvard in the fore of the library world. The number of employees in the College Library system--those 15 which come under the Widener bailiwick--has stayed the same for the past ten years. But acquisitions of collections, and hence the workload of the staff, have dramatically increased. Harvard's library system, once labelled a network so vast and expansive that one can get happily lost," boasts almost 100 branch libraries holding nearly 10 million items. Bryant has seen the construction of the libraries that some consider the finest of their kind: Yenching, Countway Medical Library, Gutman Library the Education School), Pusey, Tozzer, the Fine Arts Library and many more. Bryant views libraries in the same light as museums, not as "static monuments to man's works, but as "living organisms" that must adapt and change with time.

A nationally-known figure in the libraries and the art of library science, Bryant has transformed this philosophy into actions. He has sat on myriads of library, book and academic commissions. For ten years, for example, Bryant chaired the National Committee on the Preservation of Books. "Practically any book printed since the mid-19th century is on paper which is deteriorating at some rate," he sighs. "The libraries of this country face the enormous problem of preserving man's intellectual memory." Bryant is not used to dealing with problems on a small scale. He designed, engineered and oversaw the massive switch of the library's catalogues to the more widely accepted Library of Congress system. But his decision was not rushed or unthinking. "Intellectually," he insists, "the old Widener system has certain advantages over the Library of Congress system." But he adds. "It had become a luxury to maintain a highly idiosyneratic system. One could no longer afford to keep it, even at Harvard."

Bryant ranks second only to the Archives he built as a storehouse of University lore. "When Mrs. Widener gave the library," he begins, "she conceived of it as containing Harry Widener's quite phenomenal collection of rare books and manuscripts." In the gift contract, the University agreed it would not change or add a brick to the original structure, although it later explored and rejected the possibility of building in the light courts which separate the east and west portions of the Widener stacks. "The bridge between Widener and Houghton Library is, technically, a temporary structure," Bryant says.

Bryant fearfully recalls some of the more tense moments he has spent in Widener. Sometime in the 1950s, he recalls, a professor emeritus "of vast age" disappeared into the stacks with coat and hat to read. Sometime later, one library staffer found just the coat and hat where the professor had been. "The rumors flew hot and heavy," Bryant remembers, but the professor had merely forgotten his things. Incidents of theft rattle his memory further. While Bryant was still a student, the story is told, a man stole thousands of books from the collection. The culprit was later caught and in each of the books, Bryant explains, a second bookplate now states who stole the volume.

But Bryant says the most elaborate robbery attempt occurred in 1971, when an intrepid would-be thief stayed in the building after closing hours and climbed out onto the roof of the Widener rooms housing one of the few Gutenberg Bibles in the world. The man broke through two skylight windows, lowered himself into the chamber and removed the extremely heavy volumes from their case. Bible in hand, he began to climb the knotted rope, but midway up, he fell to the concrete floor. The robber's moans brought one of the night janitors running. "He was terribly injured but he wasn't killed," says Bryant. "The two volumes were barely damaged."

Bryant recalls the era of the Harvard strike in terms of a siege. There was "enormous concern for the physical security of the building," he says while he stands in his office, glancing about and noting, "This was general headquarters." Bryant spent nights and weekends camped out in Widener during the worst of the strike, joined by a small corps of concerned faculty members and a few members of the library staff. Ten years later, he attributes the incident "to an unbelievable lack of communication and understanding" between the faculty and students. While he says he did not oppose all the students' demands, he "thought they were going about it in the wrong way." Students have become more academically-oriented in the last decade. Bryant observes, but doesn't let the blame rest. "Harvard has traditionally relied on tutorial-like instruction," the professor of Bibliography (a non-teaching position) notes. "Faculty are going to have to spend more time and energy and there will have to be changes," he says.

Bryant sits forward in his chair again, always ready to talk shop. He points to the major problem which he will leave the library system--soon to be under Oscar Handlin, Pforzheimer University Professor. Harvard's tradition of excellence must not be sacrificed to multiplying costs, he insists. "In a library like Harvard's, whose expenditures are much larger than any University in the world, there is a necessity to maintain our commitments to collecting." From a man who first got interested in library work while dissecting German war papers at Stanford's Hoover Institution, this feeling comes as no great surprise. "The degree to which libraries can coordinate their efforts is the field in which there is greatest hope," Bryant predicts. He goes on: "One of the most interesting aspects of my own work has been to increase the degree and quality of coordination among Harvard's 100 libraries." Bryant oversaw the establishment of the University Library Council, the senior forum for discussion of library policy and affairs. His efforts have been largely successful; the College system adds another library to its ranks each year. Martin says Bryant has succeeded in relating the library to the Faculty and campus research institutes "in an unparalleled manner. He brings to the University an identity and a sense of awareness," Martin adds. "But most of all, he has an understanding of cooperation and coordination--he was a unifying element." Staff members from secretaries in the personnel office to full-fledged branch librarians echo Martin's praise.

Bryant maintains a "sense of real pride" about his long association with the University. It took Harvard a while to lure Bryant away from his work in the foreign service, he recalls, "but I always have been glad I decided to come." Even so, Bryant does not believe that what Harvard does is always right.

Harvard has used Bryant's skills to build itself a library system that looks to the future while not forgetting its past. The University has demanded a lot from Bryant but he'll argue forever that he's gotten back his investment. There is never a word that even faintly suggests ego. "If I ever got that modest," a colleague says, "people wouldn't know me."

It's the little things, of course, that reinforce the image that one forms. When I leave for the last time, Bryant stands up, shows me to the door and goes back to work. "Call me if there's anything I can do for you," he says. In search of a balanced view, I visit or call people from all walks of the Yard who have known or dealt with Bryant, searching frantically for the person, any person, who will say something negative about him, or criticize his tenure. But nobody does.