The Desk Set

On Friday afternoon we arrived in Burlington, a city of nearly 40,000. As Vermont’s largest, it’s America’s smallest biggest city. On the Eastern shore of Lake Champlain, Burlington boasts gorgeous views of the lake, the Adirondacks to the West and the Green Mountains to the East. The downtown area is dominated by the pedestrian-only Church Street Marketplace, home to dozens of bars, coffee shops, and boutiques. There are plenty of organic treats, hemp-based products, food carts, and street musicians, as well as your more corporate shopping opportunities -  Borders, Urban Outfitters, etc. – and, as we found out later that evening, a variety of inspired cocktails.

Our Burlington destination was the Special Collections Department of University of Vermont’s Bailey/Howe Library, housing the Wilbur Collection of Vermontiana, as well as an impressive selection of rare books and manuscripts. Prudence Doherty, Special Collections Librarian for Public Services, met with us to discuss everything from artists books to library signage.

With Special Collections Librarian Prudence Doherty at UVM

Upon entering the library, we paused and waited to be asked to sign in, show some ID or the contents of our bags, or to drop Prudence’s name in order to gain entrance. But this is Vermont, and the University’s library is truly open to the public, so we waltzed in undisturbed. The Special Collections Department is equally open; one need not make an appointment or show scholarly credentials to stop in and use the resources. Community members make up a large portion of the patrons; authors, researchers, historians both professional and amateur, and those studying their own genealogy are just some of the regular users.

The very functional looking Bailey Howe Memorial Library

So, what exactly is Vermontiana? Put simply, Prudence and the SC staff will collect anything about Vermont, published in Vermont, written by a Vermonter, or of special interest to the people of Vermont. It’s a historical collection as well, chronicling the past and the present of the Green Mountain State. A small exhibit on display when we visited – Temperance and Prohibition in Vermont 1800-1933 -  used journals, letters, pamphlets, broadsides and all sorts of ephemera from the Vermontiana collection.

A larger exhibit coming up in the fall will highlight the University’s Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from the rare book collection. Happily for us, Travis Puller, Mallary Fellow and Processing Archivist, was on hand to show off some of the manuscripts he’s been working with. Among the highlights, a dis-bound and stunningly illustrated Italian herbal circa 1500, and a 1458 city code and list of statutes from Ferrara, Italy.

A more scenic part of campus

We were surprised (and delighted) to hear that UVM has a wide and expanding collection of artists’ books, from the 1970s to the present day. Not only are artists’ book super gorgeous and fun to look at, they can also provide fabulous entrance into special collections for the undergraduate population. A growing interest in the books as part of curriculum has coincided with the growing collection. As if to help make the point, two young undergraduates stopped by to peruse the collection while we were chatting.

During our visit, our paths crossed briefly with Robin Katz, Digital Initiatives Outreach Librarian, just before she left for a weekend visit in – of all places – Brooklyn. Having recently graduated from Kent State University’s MLIS program, Robin is working to serve UVM’s grant-funded Center for Digital Initiatives project connecting users to online materials.

Prudence, like most of the librarians we love, has no interest in being the custodian of a collection that sits unused and pristine. A University collection, dare we say, can only be truly fabulous if it serves the population for which it is created – the students (and in the case of UVM, the entire state of Vermont). The Special Collections staff has access at the front of everything they do, from making Vermont history available online to welcoming the public (including a couple of curious NYC librarians) to view, handle and experience their resources.

Unfortunately, our timing in Burlington was not such that we were able to visit the city’s public library. We did, however, stumble upon several signs of avid library life during our jaunt downtown.

Sarah with the Fletcher Free Library's Outreach Van

The Burlington Permaculture Library inside Muddy Waters coffee shop

Saturday morning we roused ourselves out of bed at an ungodly hour to get to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in time to see memoirist Patricia Hampl speak. Bread Loaf, part of Middlebury College, offers a rigorous program of workshops, classes, lectures and presentations for writers. Astonishingly, Bread Loaf’s morning lectures and evening readings are free and open to the public.

Housed inside a little white-washed, old-timey theater, the lecture began at 9am, and we slid in just in time to catch it. Hampl is a terrific story teller, and her stories tend to be her own. Anyone who prefers the instruction “write what you know” to the quest for creative invention will appreciate Hampl’s admission of failure in writing her grandmother’s story, and the success she found when she inadvertently wrote a memoir.

The Little Theatre at Middlebury's Bread Loaf campus

After Hampl’s talk, we wandered about the campus, feeling the thrill of crashing a party full of super smart people. Adirondack chairs and pale yellow buildings scattered around the grounds added to the lost in time mood of the place, and made it easy to imagine Robert Frost critiquing student work while sipping iced tea on a porch. The tiny library was full of quiet readers and writers, the barn-like meeting room full of coffee drinkers and lounge chairs, and the whole place full of charm and peaceful summertime cheer.

Maria and the Inn at Bread Loaf

Being even a modestly successful writer is clearly among the coolest possible ways to make a life and (possibly even) a living. Bread Loaf and other retreats and workshops make it seem even more desirable and romantic. Oh, we know it’s tough! But who wouldn’t be inspired by a few weeks of intense expectations and constant contact with creative and ambitious teachers and fellow students? Not to mention the views…

So, yeah. We like it here.