Of all Chicago’s cultural commissars, Lawrence W. (“Bill”) Towner was, until his death in 1991, perhaps the least known but the most nationally influential. Many people on the staff of the Newberry Library considered him a dictator when it came to policy, but no one doubted his scholarship, sense of purpose, or vision, which made the gloomy library into a shining example of independent scholarship.
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In the two and a half years I worked for him as gofer-clerk-editorial assistant, I was able to watch a protean mind operating at full speed: he’d churn out lengthy letters cajoling people for money, then maybe an internal memorandum to the staff bibliographer about collecting books from a particular period, then a talk he was preparing on the uses of a library or to testify before Congress, then perhaps a book review or some other scholarly item. In nearly every case the writing was elegant, passionate, and forceful. He was never afraid to pile on an avalanche of words to support a cause. These writings often reached far beyond the confines of academia or of libraries, because Towner was not only a good writer but a humanist well aware of his place and time and the importance of the institution he represented.
Towner reshaped the Newberry according to his own simple theory, articulated in one of his many speeches: “By ‘Past Imperfect’ I mean that our knowledge of the past–whether of literature, history, music, or philosophy–is, indeed, imperfect. It follows, so it seems to me, that it is the indispensable and primary use of a research library to preserve the records of the past so that research can make our knowledge less imperfect than it is. Any other purpose of a library, however appealing, can only be secondary.”
