The words “famous” and “librarian” seldom show up in the same sentence. But Belle da Costa Greene was emphatically both.
Greene, who lived from 1879 to 1950, built the preeminent collection of rare books, manuscripts and art for New York’s Morgan Library, and was the most trusted purchasing agent of the financier and collector J.P. Morgan. She was an expert in illuminated manuscripts. And she was lionized for her negotiating skills.
“She knows more about rare books than any other American,” said the Chicago Tribune in 1912. “She runs to Europe on secret missions, and [she’s] the terror of continental collectors’ agents.”
Greene acquired too many extraordinary works to name. In 1949, the Morgan held a show of her 250 most renowned purchases. She helped make the Morgan the world’s third largest collector of Caxton works, buying 15th-century editions of Chaucer and beyond, first produced by English printer William Caxton. And she pushed to bring the Morgan’s largesse to the greater public, not just to scholars. One of the shows she put on, in 1924, brought 170,000 people to the library to see these stunning works up close.
Greene was covered often and fawningly in the day’s media, in the New York Times and elsewhere, and her likeness was photographed, painted and sculpted by various artists. With her arch quips and air of mystery, she cut a swathe through Manhattan’s high society.
Theodore C. Marceau (1859–1922), Belle da Costa Greene, May 1911
She was also a person of mixed racial heritage who passed for white.
That story—which is full of deflection and nuance and hiding in plain sight—has taken on greater depth as new knowledge has cropped up.
And this is where Amherst College, literally, enters the picture. Mike Kelly, head of Amherst’s Archives and Special Collections, recently unearthed a photograph of Greene—which turns out to be the earliest known photograph of her in existence. It predates others by at least a decade and shows her in a transitional moment before she fully changed her name in order to pass as white.
The image was taken in front of Amherst’s Morgan Library (now Morgan Hall) in July 1900. Greene, then 21, is shown standing with her classmates in the College’s Summer School of Library Economy, which ran from 1893 to 1911 and offered courses in the burgeoning field of library science. The group learned the latest techniques in cataloguing and indexing that summer and were also taught “library hand,” a more legible style of handwriting than cursive. On the back of the class photo, Greene has signed her name in library hand.