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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector
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Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover became a
confirmed bibliophile during his student days at Stanford University,
1891–1895. His personal bookplate reflects a lifelong interest in the
history of mining which he developed at the same time. An orphan, short of
funds, Hoover secured a part-time job working in the office of Professor
John Casper Branner, his mentor in the geology department. When Branner
joined the faculty in 1892, he brought an entire boxcar of books to the
newly opened university. At the time Branner’s private library was far
richer then the university’s holdings in his field. Hoover studied the
books in Branner’s collection, which probably included information about
the landmark treatise De Re Metallica written by the German
physician Georg Agricola (1494–1555) and published posthumously in 1556
by the illustrious firm of Johannes Froben in Basel. Because of Hoover’s
intense research on this book, it is often assumed to be the source of his
bookplate. The actual image comes from an older work that he studied as
part of the background research on Agricola. Hoover’s future
wife, Lou Henry, was also a geology major at Stanford and took classes
from Branner. It is very likely that she was familiar with this Latin text
that had a reputation as being untranslatable. Agricola had adapted
classical Latin to the requirements of describing sixteenth-century
metallurgy. The neologisms which Agricola coined were considered very
obscure. Lou Henry was adept at languages and also fascinated by geology,
so it is no surprise that a book like De Re Metallica would engage
her interest. From the first
edition De Re Metallica was considered both a luxury item and a
major scientific work. The content is remarkable for its scientific
accuracy. Agricola largely freed the field of mining from the
superstitious assumptions of alchemy. The work influenced the mining
industry in Europe for over two hundred years. In order to make the
difficult text easier to understand, Agricola commissioned hundreds of
woodcuts that depicted then state-of-the-art mining technology. Images of
crucibles on page 229 and scales on page 265 are astonishingly similar to
the tools still in use by Stanford geologists when Herbert Hoover was a
student. Other woodblock prints show methods of constructing mine shafts
and smelting ore. Equipment is labeled with letters, then identified in a
caption under the illustration. The real triumph of the diagrams is the
successful way they indicate with cutaway diagrams what is happening both
above and below ground level. Scurrying in and out of the tunnels are
armies of busy miners in protective clothing, often pointed caps or
wide-brimmed hats. They wield shovels and ladles, and look rather like
Snow White’s dwarves. Surviving records indicate that the time devoted
to creating these carefully made illustrations delayed publication of the
book. These woodcuts are much more sophisticated than the even older image
in the center of Hoover’s bookplate, which was an early attempt at
depicting miners working on a cutaway mine shaft. In his
reminiscences Hoover emphasized that as students he and Lou considered
such fine books as De Re Metallica financially out of their reach.
Once he graduated and entered the field of international mining, his
fortunes improved dramatically. Hoover had already developed a reputation
for identifying potential gold mines in Australia when he returned to
California in 1899 to marry Lou Henry. Together they traveled to various
mines in China, Burma, and Russia. They established a home base for
themselves in London, then the center of the international mining
community. Turn-of-the-century travel by steamer and train provided ample
opportunity for the Hoovers to indulge in their love of scholarly books.
En route they would read up on the countries they visited. They acquired
an excellent library on China and one on Australia; both sets of books
eventually came to Stanford’s libraries. In about 1903 while
in Italy, they located a copy of De Re Metallica for sale. They had
reached a time in their lives when they could afford to collect rare
books. The challenge of translating the book became a joint hobby of this
successful young couple in 1907. Evenings after dinner, they would pore
over dictionaries and recruit friends and assistants to help. In
reconstructing the old techniques that Agricola described and the woodcuts
depicted, Hoover needed to consult other mining books from the era. His
fascination with ancient technology resulted in lengthy and erudite
footnotes, often colored with a touch of humor. It seems that Mrs. Hoover,
as the better Latinist, did most of the translation, while Mr. Hoover
wrote the majority of technical footnotes. They began buying
rare historical mining and metallurgy books during the translation work.
In 1908 they purchased six books, the following year thirteen, then
twenty. By 1911 they were buying over one hundred books annually. What
began as a reference library for a translation project changed character,
and later the books were purchased for their own sake. It is only natural
that they would want to acquire the very first printed works in the field
of mining. These practical pamphlets began to appear anonymously shortly
after 1500 as introductory textbooks. Ein Nützlich Bergbüchlein (A
Practical Little Book on Ores) is considered the very earliest of such
texts, and Agricola used it as a reference for his more thorough and
polished treatise. Agricola attributes the authorship of the little book
to Calbus of Freiberg, probably Ulrich Rühlein von Kalbe, who died in
Leipzig in 1523. Herbert Hoover
acquired a copy of the Bergbüchlein which had been published in
Erfurt in 1527 by Iohan Loersfelt. (This volume has been carefully
preserved along with the entire De Re Metallica Library by the
Norman F. Sprague Memorial Library at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont,
California.) Although the book was not intended as a luxury edition, it
does contain a delightful illustration on the title page. The image shows
a cutaway hill that reveals a miner in a tunnel chipping away at ore that
is lifted by workers at the surface by means of a bucket on a rope. The
image was reproduced in Hoover’s historical appendix (see page 610) for De
Re Metallica, to show the ancestry of the wonderful cutaway diagrams
commissioned by Agricola. In fact, Hoover himself wrote a mining text with
updated versions of such tunnel illustrations (Principles of Mining [New
York: Hill, 1909]). The finished
translation, replete with a learned but still charming scholarly
apparatus, was printed and published privately by the Hoovers in 1912
while they were still living at the Red House in London. Great care was
taken to use appropriate paper and type to give the feeling of the
original De Re Metallica, and the woodblock prints were reproduced
with precision. The Hoovers’ close friend Edgar Rickard was entrusted
with the task of supervising the publication because of his background in
technical publishing. The printer and binder was Albert Frost, who
selected a fine vellum for the binding. Three thousand copies were
printed. Some were sold, but the majority were sent as gifts to the
Hoovers’ friends and associates. It was Edgar
Rickard who commissioned the bookplate as a Christmas present for the
Hoovers at about this time.* The artist Henry B. Quinan made the original
drawing for Mr. Hoover’s bookplate and incorporated into the design the
wonderful title page image from Ein Nützlich Berg-büchlein. Quinan
retained the antiquarian feel of the early-sixteenth-century mining scene
by adding architectural elements in the frame with gnome-like miners at
work. Hoover’s initials can be seen in the monogram HCH at the bottom of
the design. Less than two years
after the publication of the translation, war broke out. Hoover’s
attention was diverted from historical scholarship to the human
catastrophe of the Great War, and the rest of his life was spent in public
service. After 1914 he no longer added to his remarkable collection on the
history of mining. He did manage to combine his concern over modern
warfare with his book-collecting interests and founded the Hoover War
Library in 1919, a library that has continued to grow over the years and
now contains more than a million books on serious economic and political
problems. But it is the mining and metallurgy library that shows the sheer
joy that Hoover felt in the pursuit of rare books. Elena
S. Danielson Note *I
am grateful to Dwight Miller of the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch,
Iowa, for solving the mystery of who commissioned the bookplate. I would
also like to thank James Otto of the Norman F. Sprague Library for his
helpfulness in locating Hoover’s own copy of Ein Nützlich Bergbüchlein. Select
Bibliography Agricola,
Georgius. De Re Metallica, translated from the first Latin edition
of 1556 by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover. London: The
Mining Magazine, Salisbury House, 1912. In 1950 Dover Publications of
New York issued an inexpensive facsimile of the Hoovers’ translation
that is periodically reissued. Honnold Library
for the Associated Colleges, Claremont, California. The Herbert Clark
Hoover Collection of Mining and Metallurgy, annotated by David Kuhner,
catalogued by Tania Rizzo, introduction by Cyril Stanley Smith. Claremont:
Libraries of the Claremont Colleges, 1980. Hoover, Herbert. “Translating De Re Metallica.” Bohemian Club Library Notes, May 1958. Bookplate courtesy of Hoover Institution Archives.
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| Last updated June 8, 2001 |
