Word: hofer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hofer, who founded the department of Printing and Graphic Arts, has been with the Houghton Library since its beginning. "Before the Houghton was built." he recalls. "the rare books and manuscripts were being kept in Widener Library in stacks that were on the ground, or even below ground, where the heat was enormous. There wasn't any way to turn it off adequately. Every morning when Bill [William A Jackson, curator or the Houghton from 1942 until his death in 1964] and I arrived at the so-called rare book room of Widener Library the temperature would be a minimum...
...Hofer, at 70, remains a young, spry, active man. He laughed as he remembered the episode swung his legs over the arm of his chair, and went on, delighted. "That angered Arthur A. Houghton, class of 1928, who met with us afterward in the bar of the Ritz in Boston, where we took him to assuage our anguish and his thirst. He was a very good ally, and I said that I would go out on a Middle Western and Eastern tour of various friends of the Harvard Library to raise the money, if he would go with...
...care and cataloguing of the collections is another: and the acquisition of new books is a third. Every institution, however, has similar problems. The Houghton-with an annual budget of about $750.000-is in a good position today because of its tremendous accumulation under the leadership of Jackson and Hofer over the past 25 years...
...collecting as fast as ever-building on its strengths and working on areas of weakness. In the late 1950's, for example, the library began collecting Oriental manuscripts, of which it had only a few. "There were opportunities. the prices weren't high. and there wasn't much competition. "Hofer says." It goes like that. We use our money well...
...find this logical for big city institutions." Hofer says. "but less logical for a university institution, and still less logical for a rare books library such as ours, where we primarily want to serve scholars. We are essentially here for scholarship work and we allow the public in to the degree that it is scholarly. The real value of this library is that these are source materials for the scholar who wants to get right down to the fundamentals: where did it all come from...