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Cleveland Public Library

“. . . I would prefer not to have so much ado about the books which I may give the library," implored John Griswold White (1845-1928). He began quietly in 1885 with a gift of four books and 122 maps, and during the next forty years he was successful in donating over 50,000 volumes of folklore and Orientalia to the Cleveland Public Library without much ado. Eventually his contributions of books became too substantial to disguise, and today they are noted research collections. White, a Cleveland attorney, was a member of the library's Board of Trustees for many years and served as its president (1884-1885, 1913-1928). The Cleveland Public Library had only been founded in 1869, and White's leadership on the board helped to put an end to a rough start and to convert the library into one of the largest public libraries in the United States. White's participation on the board and his own intellectual bent also positioned him to take an extraor­dinary role in the development of the library's collections.

White and his father enjoyed playing mental chess games during long walks together; his personal book collecting grew out of this youthful in­terest in chess. Among the collection's archival resources is a letter White wrote to a friend in April 1925 recalling that he had started collecting chess books in 1870. Alice N. Loranth, head of Fine Arts and Special Collections at the Cleveland Public Library, noted in one of her many presentations and articles on the White Chess and Checkers Collection that White collected chess books because he viewed them as an “educational vehicle" that allowed him to travel “in many centuries, through many countries and cultures.'' Perhaps it was his immersion in those chess “travels" that in­troduced and strengthened his interest in his other areas of collecting—Orientalia and folklore. In any case, he collected in all three areas with in­tensity, personally poring over dealers' catalogs and ordering books. He examined them all carefully when they arrived, reading most before he sent them over to the Cleveland Public Library to be added to the collection. That is, he sent them all but the chess books. Those, some 12,000 by his death, he kept at home, and from there he shared the chess collection with researchers, providing the reference service himself and carrying on an ex­tensive correspondence with chess scholars and chess lovers. His collection's reputation was soon established, and by 1913 it had been iden­tified as the world's largest by the noted British chess historian Harold J. R. Murray. The collection retains that distinction today.

Motoko B. Yatabe Reece documents the results of decades of com­prehensive chess collecting, first by White and later by the Special Collec­tions staff of the Cleveland Public Library, in her dissertation (University of Michigan, 1979). The White Collection boasts early manuscripts, including an A.D. 1221 Arabic chess manuscript; incunabula; multiple edi­tions of almost every chess book, among them Ben Franklin's The Morals of Chess (Philadelphia, 1786); and over 1,300 periodicals, of which 192 were current in 1990. The periodicals include the first chess magazine, La Palamède (Paris, 1836-1839, 1842-1847); the first English-language chess magazine, The Philidorian (London, 1837-1838); and the first American chess The Chess Palladium and Mathematical Sphinx (New York, October­December 1846). One also finds bound volumes of clipped chess columns from 1818 to the 1950s, association copies, photographs, and modern manuscript materials that include letters of other collectors, chess masters, and chess scholars. The collection of ephemera, such as advertisements, catalogs, pictures, cartoons, and programs from chess tournaments, is invaluable. The U.S. Chess Federation has provided the collection with tour­nament rating records from February 1971 to March 1977. Chess in poetry is represented, and chess in literature is emphasized. Most recognizable to the average library user is Alice through the Looking Glass; most notable to the scholar are the over 160 editions of François Rabelais's Gargantua et Pantagruel. The John G. White Chess and Checkers Collection, of the Fine Arts and Special Collections, Cleveland Public Library, alone contains over 30,000 volumes, a substantial portion of which were listed in its two-volume printed catalog, Chess Collection (Including Checkers) (Boston: G. K. Hail, 1964).

John G. White had no personal bookplate for his chess collection; the Cleveland Public Library used the chessboard bookplate shown on this issue's cover until 1980. Measuring 3 3/4 inches high by 2 3/4 inches wide, with chess pieces surrounding the board on which the motto “Bequest of John Griswold White, 1845-1928, Devoted to Chess" is inscribed, the bookplate is believed to have been designed by Gordon W. Thayer (1887-1956), who became the first head librarian of the John G. White Collection in 1916. Thayer began cataloging the folklore and Orientalia books, and worked successfully with White until the collector's death. White willed his 12,000-volume collection of chess and checkers to the library, endowed his collections, and incorporated a detailed collection development policy into his will to ensure the future of the collections. Thayer became the first librarian faithfully and energetically to carry on John G. White's collecting traditions for the Cleveland Public Library. 

Judith Ann Overmier

University of Oklahoma

[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 26, no. 4 (Spring 1991): 608-610.]