What’s a Traditional Medievalist like me doing in the world’s largest SF Collection?
Hi, my name is Melissa Conway, and these are photos from my office in Special Collections & Archives at the UCR Libraries. This is just a fraction of my collection of aliens:
I know that there is nothing unusual about this kind of decoration among sf enthusiasts, but this level of intergalactic whimsy is not at all common among traditional medievalists, of which I am one. I am not just a medievalist, but a paleographer and specialist in pre-1600 manuscripts. I’m a Fan, sure, but of long-departed masters like Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, the Limbourg Brothers and Simon Bening, inter alia. So what, you may well ask, is a hard-core traditionalist like me doing with an office full of aliens?
Well, in 2001, I was invited to apply for a very good job at UC Riverside, which had much to commend it including its being in the same city where my husband lived. From 1991 to 2001 I worked contentedly in a fabulous private manuscript collection, the only disadvantage of which was the commute to Washington, DC, and the need to spend approximately five months away every year from home. So when the chance to be Head of Special Collections & Archives presented itself, I was definitely interested. SC&A at UCR is in many ways a typical rare book collection, with manuscripts from the 11th century on, incunabula, 18th century books, Victorian novels, and unique archival collections of the author B. Traven, critic and poet Sadakichi Hartmann, and music theorist Heinrich Schenker, just to name a few.
That SC&A was home to the Eaton Collection, the world’s largest collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror and Utopian literature, only sweetened the deal. Although it had been many, many years since the summer I spent on a front porch in Scranton, PA reading a friend’s expansive comic book collection, I never really lost touch with that inner geeky-kid.
Back in the 1960s, however, comic books were pretty much considered a waste of time and money by most parents (especially my mother) and all teachers, so I was strongly encouraged to divert my summertime enthusiasm for reading comic books back to the classical studies for which I was destined. SF was simply not High Culture, and my mother was all about High Culture. To give my mother her due, High Culture did seem to be where the jobs would be. So I directed my inner geekiness towards a classical education and, luckily, I truly loved every minute of it.
Meanwhile the times were changing and a mere five years after my mother forbad me spend even a dime on comic books, the august University of California, Riverside was the site of a quiet intellectual revolution. Perhaps the general unrest of late sixties made people more willing to question long-held traditions about what did—and did not—belong in a university library. Or perhaps someone just liked science fiction and decided to put some university funds towards his personal enthusiasm. Whatever the case, the fact is that in 1969 the then-University Librarian Donald Wilson decided to acquire the personal library of Dr. J. Lloyd Eaton, an Oakland, California physician and SF enthusiast who had assembled a collection of 7500 hardback editions ranging from the late 19th century to circa 1955.
Mr. Wilson’s intention to add science fiction to the holdings of the UCR Libraries was met with as much enthusiasm as William H. Seward’s acquisition of the territory from which a certain VEEP candidate claimed to be able to see Russia from her front porch. Adding a large science fiction collection to a university library’s holdings was an especially controversial decision at a time when even public libraries were not collecting sf.
Whether or not the criticism Donald Wilson received had anything to do with his untimely death a few years later, I cannot say. All I know is that after he died the Eaton Collection received no attention at all for a full ten years. The prejudice against sf was automatic among most librarians, but—amazingly-- another university librarian came to UCR who shared Wilson’s understanding about the significance of a genre that millions of people were reading --whether or not it was High Culture. This librarian’s name was Eleanor Montague and she was willing to allocate important resources toward increasing the collection, and—miraculum miraculorum—to hiring a curator for the collection in 1980. Enter George Slusser, a promising young scholar with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.
George was Eaton Curator when I arrived in 2001, as well as a tenured .50 FTE faculty member in the department of Comparative Literature. He taught several popular courses on sf, and he was the “Voice of the Eaton Collection” until his retirement in 2005. With George no longer on site daily, I—Melissa the Medievalist—suddenly and somewhat surprisingly found myself as the voice of the Eaton Collection. (Sorry, Mom, but now I HAVE to read all those comic books!)
Luckily, medievalism and sf turn out to be weirdly complementary, and since I’ve started here I’ve met several other writers, editors and fans of sf who started out as medievalists. I discovered—belatedly, I admit--the large body of sf work that is actually directly influenced by medieval history and literature and I now have a special affinity for that sub-genre. I expected the sf writers to get ‘my’ Middle Ages all wrong, but sf writers seem to love the Middle Ages even more than many bona fide medievalists do. The best sf writers ride medieval history into often frightening but always fascinating futures, and a trained medievalist like me is delighted to have the chance to review medieval history through these clever new renditions.
So although I still love ‘real Middle Ages,’ and still publish in my own field of medieval manuscripts, the position at UCR has brought me back into to the world of sf--and a marvelously exciting world it is.
Next installment: The Eaton Collection Today
Melissa Conway holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Yale University, with an emphasis on Book Arts. Her former institutions include the Library of Congress (Rare Book and Special Collections Division), the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where she worked as assistant to the Curator of pre-1600 Books and Manuscripts. Since 1991 she has served as a consultant to rare books and manuscript collections. With co-author Lisa Fagin Davis, she has completed a directory of 475 institutions in North America with medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in their holdings, available in press with the Bibliographical Society of America, New York, NY, and available at http://www.bibsocamer.org/BibSite/Conway-Davis/Pre-1600.Mss.Holdings.pdf. Since 2001, she has been Head of Special Collections & Archives at the University of California, Riverside.
3 comments so far.
Did anyone else notice the resemblance between Melissa and Princess Leia?
Yeah I did… they have quite resemblance 
David
1. J.Englund on 19th December 2008 at 9:13 am
Nice to read that story. Also liked the pictures, even though no sock monkeys were in evidence....