According to local legend, the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony was born when Bolton Brown, Hervey White, and Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead chose Woodstock, N.Y. to build their utopian Arts and Crafts community – mostly because the light was judged to be exactly the same as that of Provence. Construction began in the winter of 1902, and by 1903, 30 buildings had been completed, to create a utopian rural community based on the Arts and Crafts ideal of a brotherhood of artistic collaboration. Of course, when dealing with this notion of “brotherhood,” one must cast a wide net, especially when it comes to Ralph Whitehead, whose fortune depended on the very industries the colony was meant to eschew, and his second wife, Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead, an ethereal society beauty from mainline Philadelphia. If you are going to understand Byrdcliffe, you have to accustom yourself to the notion of an egalitarian community with a servants’ wing.
Proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement, such as the Whiteheads, emphasized life as lived art, eschewing anything “that is not useful or beautiful.” While never being formally a school, the Byrdcliffe Colony did take on many students – particularly at the Villetta, where students were housed, and at the building now called the Byrdcliffe Theatre, where the Whiteheads assembled a library of nearly 3000 books, which ranged from practical items like catalogues of ceramic glazes to volumes of rare aesthetic value, including several Kelmscott editions.
Byrdcliffe’s library no longer exists. However, its catalogue does, which means that, unlike conventional art collections, it can be reconstructed both in terms of its intellectual content, as well as by tracking down the actual volumes that were dispersed – and as a long-time resident of a historical Byrdcliffe house with an established interest in the theory of collecting, I’m just enough of a geek to take on the project. But my admittedly idiosyncratic obsession also raises the issue of the relationship between collecting and scholarship. Does the act of simply acquiring and assembling the books qualify as studying them – especially if one has never read them?
Book collectors have long had to get used to answering the question “Have you read all of your books?” According to Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay on collecting, “Unpacking my Library,” the answer was mostly succinctly phrased by Anatole France: “Not one tenth of them. I don’t suppose you eat off your Sevres china every day?” More recently, several essays have been written defending having unread books in your library, beginning with Nassim Taleb’s explication of Umberto Eco’s “antilibrary” of some 30,000 books, in which he argues that unread books challenge Western culture’s concept of scholarship as acquisition of knowledge and its dependence on certitude as the measure of knowledge. Umberto Eco’s own Book of Legendary Lands, a meticulous catalogue of places that never existed, connects this comfort in confronting uncertainty with the imagination and the transcendent realm of beauty.
So what is the point in taking on this project? Frankly, darned if I know. I could argue that the very fact of surrounding yourself with the books once belonging to another group of artists gives us access to the world of their imagination in a way that the most meticulous examination of their artistic production cannot. Or I could just admit that I have an unnatural affection for spreadsheets. Either way, I invite you to join me on my journey as I explore What They Read at Byrdcliffe.
Well said, Erica. Thanks for this – we’re on the same page. Let me know I can help (or hinder) in anyway.