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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector
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Frank E. Midkiff Learning Center
The
Frank E. Midkiff Learning Center is believed to be the only school library
in the United States for which the books of a princess formed the nucleus.
Through her will the Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop
(1831-1884) founded the Kamehameha Schools, now one of the largest
private schools in the United States. The school was first opened to
students in 1887, and its special purpose is the education of children of
Hawaiian ancestry.
The
school's library, which was housed in one room of a classroom building, is
first mentioned in documents dated 17 July 1888 according to Uldrick
Thompson's 1922 typescript "Reminiscences of the Kamehameha Schools."
Princess Pauahi's personal books provided the initial core of the school's
library. Her books were of a general nature, with titles such as New
Games for Parlor and Lawn (1882) and Pictorial History of the
United States (1854). Bernice Pauahi Bishop's books included works of
literature, such as Poets and Poetry of America (l852), which she
learned to like while a student at the Chief's Children's School, a
boarding school run by the American missionary Amos Starr Cooke and his
wife, Juliette Montague Cooke. Thirty-five of Princess Pauahi's books
still remain at the Kamehameha Schools and are now housed in the school's
Heritage Center.
Bernice
Bishop was also a collector of Hawaiian and Polynesian ethnology. She
willed her collection to her husband, Charles Reed Bishop (1822-1915), and
with it he founded in her memory the noted Bishop Museum, which opened in
1891. The Kamehameha Schools was at first located on its own grounds in
Honolulu, grounds on which the Bishop Museum was soon built too, but the
school has now moved to a six hundred-acre campus that overlooks the
city of Honolulu.
Princess
Pauahi was the last of the line of King Kamehameha I (ca. 1758-1819). He
conquered and joined the Hawaiian islands together in 1795 and was their
first king. A statue of Kamehameha I was erected in downtown Honolulu in
front of the Ali'iolani Hale in 1883. That statue is pictured on the
bookplate of the Midkiff Learning Center. The bookplate, based on the
official school seal and printed in blue ink, is 3 1/2 inches by 3 inches;
the plate carries the name of the library; the name of the school with its
founding date, and the word IMUA, a Hawaiian word meaning forward.
Kamehameha
Schools today has several special libraries, such as that of the Hawaiian
Studies Institute, as well as the more traditional levels of school
libraries, including elementary, intermediate, and high school. The high
school library at Kamehameha Schools contains a Hawaiian collection of
over 10,000 items. The library is now named the Frank E. Midkiff Learning
Center in honor of a trustee and past president (1923-1934) of Kamehameha
Schools. Midkiff (1887-1983) was a well-known civic leader in Hawaii; his
varied activities included serving as a trustee of the Bishop Museum, as
Commissioner for the Trust Territories of the Pacific, and as head of the
Barstow Commission which established the first Western school in American
Samoa. The library currently contains 75,000 volumes, 10,000 Hawaiian
slides, a media production center for students, a television studio, and
seating for 700 students. Judith
A. Overmier School
of Library and Information Studies University
of Oklahoma
[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 26, no. 4 (Spring 1991): 608-610.]
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| Last updated June 30, 2001 |
