The Making of a Cape Cod Library

When books were purchased with William Sturgis’s endowment, each one was painstakingly hand-entered into a ledger, which, by number, spelled out the author, the title, the place and year of publication, the place from which the volume came (whether it was a donation or an outright purchase) and the cost. In each book, the Library placed a beautiful bookplate, hand-numbered and hand-dated. It mattered to the library that there be a record of when each book was purchased, and in what order.

After poking around a bit with the Library Director, Lucy Loomis, we re-discovered the earliest record of Sturgis’s acquisitions — a leather-bound quarto, the spine separated from the binding, containing ruled pages filled with these inked records. What a find! Now I could surmise — or perhaps imagine — what was in the minds of the people who were entrusted with Sturgis’s small fortune and commissioned to convert commercial paper wealth into food for the imagination.

I always thought that the library began with a donation of books from the estate of William Sturgis, and it’s true that he did give bequeath 1,300 books to the new collection, but these were not the first books officially received or entered into the library’s acquisitions ledger.

The Sturgis Free Library’s first trustees were personally selected by William Sturgis: Samuel Hooper, Lemuel Shaw, and Edward W. Hooper. Their first purchase for the library was the 8th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. There was always a strong Anglophile thrust in the early Sturgis acquisitions, and the Brittanica was (and still is) the nec plus ultra compendium of useful information in the English language. This purchase was followed quickly by the New American Cyclopaedia and the American Annual Cyclopaedia, pale cousins of their British counterpart.

The third acquisition listed was another safe choice — a current 1865 edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary. This was quickly followed by two atlases: Colton’s General Atlas, and Black’s General Atlas. Founded by an adventurer/entrepreneur and being on the East coast and physically sited among sea captains’ houses, the Sturgis Library immediately took a stand beyond regional parochialism and reached out for knowledge about the rest of the world.

Having made basic purchases in general knowledge, geography, and linguistics, it was time to feed the mind and the spirit. The Sturgis trustees chose the Works of William Shakespeare as their seventh acquisition.

The 8th and 9th choices, I think, were more motivated by personal passion than as choices for the commonweal. The trustees acquired the three-volume Naval Biographical Dictionary, published in London, 1849, by William R. O’Byrne. This was a huge compendium of the lives of every living officer — some 5,000 or so — still serving in Her Majesty’s Navy in 1845.

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The Making of a Cape Cod Library

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The Making of a Cape Cod Library

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