For an older library possessing relatively large holdings plus a busy and demanding patronage, its bookplate can serve not only for decoration, but also to describe either verbally or symbolically many varying library functions, indeed becoming the institution’s philosophical calling card and one of its main policy statements. This has certainly been evident in the long history of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association. A succession of scholar-librarians in the nineteenth century, bent on collecting the region’s and the nation’s history, as well as under the charge of providing the most current and popular reading materials for a subscription library, found it necessary to reconcile these two collecting trends in order to provide suitable access and adequate security for these collections, the bookplate becoming a useful tool in the process.

            The Mercantile Library, founded in 1846 and operating since that date, was one of the first cultural organizations in the rapidly expanding St. Louis of the period, the city then establishing itself as the terminus of the fur trade in the West and becoming the central outfitting point for all expansion into the unexplored regions of the upper Missouri River valley. The Mercantile has the distinction of being the oldest library still in existence west of the Mississippi River, and as one of the last remaining great subscription libraries in the United States, it has served generations of St. Louisans in much the same way as when it opened its doors to young merchants, apprentices, and others engaged in the early booming business of the city. Many of the young men who formed the first group of members were seeking an education that they could not have afforded otherwise on the Missouri frontier, due to the inaccessibility of most established schools and colleges farther removed to the East. And in the busy life of the young entrepreneur in those days, formal daytime advanced studies, had they existed, would normally have taken a backseat to the daily concerns of the shopfront or the counting house. It is not surprising that all early mercantile libraries had late evening hours and even Sunday hours to accommodate their readers after business hours elsewhere—and it is no small wonder that such libraries were concerned with perfecting artificial lighting systems at the time when the standard library reading room of the age was still mostly dependent on daylight for illumination.

            For many years after its founding, the Mercantile served St. Louis not only as the city’s first strong public library, but also as its first permanent art museum and exhibit hall, its first “college” or public lyceum, and its first historical society. As other cultural institutions were established, it actively and enthusiastically participated in their growth, spreading its wealth of primary source material and art to newer organizations such as the St. Louis Medical Society and the Missouri Historical Society. From the Library’s Great Hall, the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1865 abolished slavery in the state. As if it were a town hall forum, the Library participated in many of the greatest events in the history of the city. It hosted the first seasons of the country’s second oldest symphony orchestra, and presented one of the most widely attended of the traveling lecture series of nineteenth-century America between 1850 and 1880, allowing the Mercantile in turn an opportunity to build an important collection of correspondence with the notables of the period.

            The library’s growth was rather phenomenal for the time. In 1847 it possessed 1,600 volumes. By 1876 it had acquired 50,000 volumes and was growing at a rate of 10 percent annually for the immediately subsequent period. It was at this time that Washington University, which held seventy-eight memberships for faculty and students in the Mercantile, saw no pressing need to enlarge its own library except for its professional schools, feeling that the strength of the Mercantile would be adequate for their needs for a long time to come!

            By the period of the greatest expansion of library services, the Mercantile settled on the cover illustration for ten of thousands of new accessions. For a rapidly growing collection, this plate offered many features that would have aided both patron and librarian: length of loan was noted, as were the fines for “detention,” gift notation, and the Library’s historic and almost unique service of book delivery, proclaimed, appropriately enough, by a bust of Mercury. Earlier plates had employed Minerva as well for correct classical authority. One further feature that has been retained by the Mercantile’s current plate is color-coding—a brown plate today denotes a noncirculating book; a black one, two weeks or one month borrowing privileges. The early conscious desire to keep some of the collections from circulating by retention of a dictate on the bookplate itself was eschewed in later plates in favor of the full use of color.

            The “modern” plate—at this writing in use for over half-century—is far more concerned with representing symbolically the special collection for which the Library is most famous—the history of the Middle West and trans-Mississippi West. These collections were assiduously built at the time of the great migrations into these regions and continued to be developed, especially at the turn of the century. The copious letterbooks of John Napier Dyer, a native Virginian who came to St. Louis as a young man and ran the Library for three decades thereafter, show the extreme diligence with which he and others before and after built the collections into what they perceived would be a valuable chronicle for the rousing days of the nation’s western expansion. Dyer died in the heat of a notorious St. Louis summertime after a prolonged illness brought on by overwork during the establishment of the Library in its present edifice shortly after its opening. These books, maps, and manuscripts form fully 40 percent of the entire holdings of the Mercantile, the collection having become one of the most comprehensive in the United States.

 John Neal Hoover

St. Louis Mercantile Library Association