Book Collection Finds a Home

By Ruth Lopez

The collection of books belonging to the Spanish Colonial Arts Society has never had an adequate home. The Society's former office on Johnson Street was too small to accommodate the organization's more than 900 reference books (not including periodicals) relating to the Spanish colonial art and history. As a result, many of the books, particularly the rare ones, have been kept in the library at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe.

But with the establishment of the new Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, the book collection has at long last been consolidated. The Stockman Collections Center features, the Hale Matthews Library, a research library where Society members, scholars, artists and others can use and peruse the books at their leisure. Society members have full access to the collection, but in order to preserve the books as best as possible, the collection is now designated as non-circulating.

Until a few years ago, the only catalogue of the collection was a basic booklist that had been compiled by a Society intern. However, when Society member Jan Nelson decided to retire from the book business and close his beloved "Santa Fe Bookseller" store, he volunteered to appraise the books for the Society for insurance purposes. For Nelson, it was an opportunity to formally catalogue the collection and to begin to understand the collection as a whole.

"They (The Society) do have a good collection of basic material," Nelson says. In fact, a large portion of the collection came from the estate of Alan and Ann Vedder, two longtime Society members who devoted much of their lives to the organization from the mid-1950s until their deaths in 1989. Ann Vedder was a member of the Society's Board of Directors. Alan Vedder, who served as an assistant to former Society curator E. Boyd and eventually succeeded her as curator, also wrote Furniture of Spanish New Mexico, published by Sunstone Press in 1977.

Because of the Vedders' contribution, as well as the generosity of other members, the book collection has grown quite a bit since 1981, when an inventory of the Society's holdings included only ninety-nine books. Thus, appraising the Society's current collection of nearly one thousand volumes was not a simple task for Nelson. Many of the materials were in storage. Some were in boxes in the librarian's office at the folk art museum. Still others were haphazardly arranged on the Society's bookshelves.

"I had trouble at first identifying the value for them,'' Nelson says. ``But eventually I did, and because I enjoyed working with the Society, I decide to stay on as a volunteer a few times a week.''

Today, Nelson says, the Society's library constitutes ``the best collection in northern New Mexico.'' Among the more exceptional rare books included in the collection, is New Mexico Saints, published in 1941 by the small independent Rydell Press, which Nelson says is "a tough book to find under any circumstance.'' Nelson describes Platería Sudamericana by A. Taullard, also published in 1941, as "a very rare book on Spanish Colonial silver.'' And he notes that the Society owns the forty original watercolors used for the 1935 book The Spanish Colonial Ornament by Nellie Dunton.

"That is something that a scholar would find very important," Nelson says. "This is primary source material that no other library has."

Other rare specialty items include fragile documents issued by the Works Progress Administration in the thirties. The undated pamphlets, mimeographed in very small quantities, examine Spanish colonial furniture and colcha embroidery. And of course, the library also has all the major and minor works of E. Boyd, the noted authority on New Mexican Spanish colonial art who revived the Society in 1952 and served as its curator until her death in 1974.

Also belonging to the Society, are materials that could perhaps prove useful to a future Society historian--notebooks containing forty years of news clips covering the Society's activities. In previous years, the Society also has acquired other important historical library materials, including the 1965 purchase of an important collection of mostly liturgical books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At one time, the thirty-three books belonged to a mission in Peña Blanca, but somehow ended up in the library of a Franciscan college in Ohio.

With the new museum, Nelson is hopeful that other donors will come forward and help enrich the collection. One relatively easy gap to fill, he suggests, would be donations of back issues of El Palacio magazine. For now, Nelson says the collection stands as an important community asset that will only get better with time.

"(The collection) has a lot of holes...," he says. "It would be wonderful if people would pitch in and complete that run for the Society."

Indeed, with future donations and a beautiful new space to use them in, New Mexicans will have another resource to study and preserve a unique way of life. One can't help but wonder how happy this would make Spanish Colonial Arts Society co-founder Mary Austin, a writer and a great lover of books.

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