Jack Kelly’s Letter to Librarians

Jack Kelly’s forthcoming novel GOD SAVE BENEDICT ARNOLD is a vivid, fast-paced dive into one of America’s most hated men. Detailing Arnold’s string of military exploits, replete with wartime complexities, on treason, guilt, and guts, Kelly offers a fresh perspective on the reasons for Arnold’s momentous change of heart.

We are thrilled to share Jack Kelly’s ode to the library, the birthplace of his forthcoming novel GOD SAVE BENEDICT ARNOLD. Kelly’s original muse, the library at Vassar College, provides a portal, inspiration, and fount for historical research, scholarship, and contemplation. Read on to discover how timeless places shape spaces, histories, and memories.

GOD SAVE BENEDICT ARNOLD is available for download on Edelweiss here. LibraryReads votes are due by November 1st.

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As someone who writes about history, I’m fortunate to have access to the magnificent library at Vassar College, which is near my home in New York’s Hudson Valley. Besides its abundant resources, the library is itself imbued with an inspiring amount of history.

The college was founded in 1861 by local brewer Matthew Vassar. It was only the second degree-granting women’s college in the U.S. (it became coeducational in 1969). Among the collections housed here is Matthew’s personal library. It’s touching to know that before the Civil War, this hard-nosed businessman spent time reading The Philosophy of Weather, or that he regularly dipped into the droll works of Laurence Sterne, or paged through Benson Lossing’s 1847 history, Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-six, or, The War of Independence.

I was originally drawn to Vassar not just because of its proximity but because of the college’s policy of openness to the community. Public scholars are welcomed and can readily obtain borrowing privileges. Guided by the library’s knowledgeable staff, I have made use of its wide-ranging history collection while researching my books on the founding era. The twenty-nine volumes of George Washington’s Papers devoted to the Revolutionary War are a rich source of information.

The building itself is a gothic cathedral of literacy, complete with gargoyles and buttressed battlements. Inside, it features medieval circular stone staircases. The invitingly open stacks contain one of the largest undergraduate library collections in the country, currently more than a million books.

The library is named for Frederick Ferris Thompson, one of the founders of today’s Citibank. Thompson was a trustee and patron of the college, where he was known as “Uncle Fred.” His wife, Mary Clark Thompson, graduated from Vassar. After his death in 1899, she donated money to build the library, which was completed in 1905.

Evocations of history don’t stop with the gilded-age extravagance of the architecture. Dominating the main reading room is the large stained-glass Cornaro window. The image, glowing with afternoon light, depicts Lady Elena Lucretia Cornaro-Piscopia, a young Venetian woman. In 1678, the University of Padua honored this brilliant scholar, who spoke eight languages fluently, with the first doctorate degree ever issued to a woman.

Like all libraries, the one at Vassar has evolved to include access to the latest digital resources. But the beating heart of the place is its marvelous book collection. Among the rare volumes, I was particularly interested in their John Burroughs holdings. The journals of the ground-breaking naturalist, who was a distant relative of mine, mix homely observations of nature with records of the nineteenth-century progress of science.

This place is imbued with the pleasure of all libraries— the connections they allow us to make through time and space. In the case of the Vassar library, that includes a sense that some of these volumes may have inspired Edna St. Vincent Millay, who graduated in 1917, or Elizabeth Bishop or Jane Smiley from later classes.

Jack Kelly