For the love of the book

  UCLA Archive Photo Lawrence Clark
Powell, university librarian for 17 years, and a man known
for his love of those "little packages" died March 20 at age
94.

By Marcelle Richards
Daily Bruin Reporter Scores of faculty members will remember one of
his backyard barbeques. Even more will remember his dissertation on
his favorite four-letter word. But it was the collections of
Lawrence Clark Powell, university librarian from 1944 to 1961, that
turned a page in UCLA history. Born in Washington D.C. in 1906,
Powell died on March 20 at the age of 94, leaving behind a vast
pool of admirers who remember him as a “true bookman”
with a contagious passion for these little packages. “I do
not believe that life holds anything more basic than food, love and
books,” wrote Powell in his 1964 publication, “The
Magpie Press Topographical Cookbook.” “Various
arrangements of the three are possible, either simultaneously or in
sequence. In my experience, however, the two that go best together
are eating and reading.”

A leader, and a reader When he founded the
School of Library Service in 1959, Powell broadened the
curriculum’s scope by teaching all aspects of a book from the
ink, to the binding, to the quality of the content. Coming from a
Quaker background, service to others was of the utmost importance
and was apparent in his desire to better library service through
more extensive library education. As a child, Powell was
disheartened by the the Carnegie Library near his home. While ample
donations made for a luxurious building, Powell documented that the
library was nearly empty; manned by a scant, frigid staff.
“It is the obligation of a head librarian … to be a person
who is recognizable by his acts, who can answer questions about
books, who will take a stand on issues involving books, all without
referring the matter to a subordinate, or worse, to a
committee,” he wrote in a 1957 Library Journal. “A
library administrator could wish for no better epitaph than,
“˜he was a leader, and a reader.'” Former students
and co-workers remember his near-fanatical “bookish”
charisma ““ the quality of living for, on and through books
““ which seemed to almost outsize the shifty-browed,
wire-framed man. “People who met him just don’t forget
him,” said Elizabeth Eisenbach, who was a member of the first
graduating class from UCLA’s School of Library Service, since
renamed the Graduate School of Education & Information
Studies.

Friends with benefits During his service, the
collection of books skyrocketed from 400,000 to 1.5 million, thanks
to Powell’s prominent circle of friends that included Henry
Miller and Anaïs Nin. “He had contacts with just about
everyone in the book business, which helped get donations and
publicized the library,” said Harold Borko, a retired GSEIS
professor who also attended SLS and worked with Powell. “The
man was a great bookman, he used to smell the damn books! Just his
concept of the importance of books, library education, it all
influenced us.” Rare books in special collections greatly
benefitted from Powell’s connections, as private collections
miraculously became public, said university librarian Gloria
Werner. “The whole focus on building collections has stayed
with us over the years,” she said. “He felt special
collections needn’t be just rare medieval books, but 20th
century authors that may be interesting to scholars a century from
now. That was unique in his time.”

The making of a “bibliophile”
Powell’s fervor for collecting and reading books crossed over
into writing as well. His bibliography swelled quickly, chock-full
of articles, novels and essays on books and his second love ““
the Southwest. An East-coaster by birth, a West-coaster by heart,
Powell spent his boyhood coming to California every winter. His
father G. Harold worked for the Department of Agriculture and was
sent to California to investigate the cause of rotting citrus
fruit. This meant annual migrations to Riverside, and eventually, a
final relocation to South Pasadena. It was there the obsession for
books took root, fueled by the supply of reading material given to
him by librarian Nellie Keith, to whom he later dedicated
“The Alchemy of Books.” It was in Keith that he found
the antithesis of his experience at the Carnegie Library.
“Mrs. Keith let me take out any books “¦ and in
quantities limited only by the number I could carry home,”
Powell wrote in his autobiography, “The Little
Package.” “When I appeared with a laundry basket wired
to the back of my bike, she let me fill it with books and pedal off
to my idea of an orgy.” “Thus my philosophy of
librarianship was formed by my good fortune in knowing good
librarians whose favorite word was “˜yes.'”

Death of a salesman He graduated from high
school in 1924 and advanced to Occidental College majoring in
English. Powell was a jack-of-all-trades; he played the piano and
numerous woodwinds, he acted in plays for the drama department, he
was president of the fraternity Phi Gamma Delta. He even took a
year off to perform as a musician on the Dollar liner, which took
him to the shores of Alexandria and elsewhere, with the help of an
ever-present bound companion, the surface of the moon, the sands of
the tropics, whatever was contained on those pages. Though Powell
became a legend as a librarian, his beginnings originated from the
other side of the counter. Before Powell the Librarian came Powell
the Book Salesman, which at the time, seemed fitting. Those days
came to an abrupt end when Powell encountered Althea Warren,
then-head of the Los Angeles Public Library. Powell contacted
Warren to instigate a sale, but the tables turned when Warren
delivered a sales pitch of her own. “Miss Warren was herself
so lively, bookish and so persuasive that I quit my job, borrowed
money, and went back to school to add a library credential to my
other degrees, which were proving useless during (the
depression),” Powell wrote. He left France in 1932 after
completing a Ph.D from the University of Dijon and returned to
California, where he enrolled in Sydney B. Mitchell’s School
of Librarianship in Berkeley. Accompanying him at all times was a
little black book, in which he jotted down ideas and visions he
would enact if given the chance.

Transforming a library into a Library That
chance came in 1938 when Powell left the school to work at UCLA
after a stint of jobs at local bookstores. He began in the
acquisitions department where he assembled exhibitions in the
rotunda, featuring favorites such as Jean Hersholt and Aldous
Huxley. Gradually, his efforts won notice. In 1943, Powell was
offered the position of head librarian at UCLA. With the package
came a position as director of the William Andrew Clark Library,
which he held until 1966. “The whole region looks to the UCLA
library for leadership,” he said at a meeting of the
California Librarians Association in October 1944. “We set
the pace, the region is as good as we are.” Along with the
book boom that marked Powell’s years came the cultivation of
a hand picked staff who would procure his efforts. In 1961, he
passed the torch to his colleague and former-aide, Robert Vosper,
who succeeded him as head librarian. “He converted a small
library into a first class, world class library,” said
Eisenbach. “He could see the world was changing. He knew when
to hire people, he knew when to get out, he lived the life he
wanted to live.”