Stephen Tabor: Curator of Rare Books at the Huntington Library Shares Vision for the Future of the Field

As Curator of Rare Books at the Huntington Library, UCLA alumnus Stephen Tabor (’77, MLS) is in a unique position to share the library’s trove of incunabula, literature, and other early printing with the world’s scholars, researchers, and writers. As such, he is also taking part in the changes that cultural institutions are making to provide more inclusive and broader narratives of society.

Prior to arriving at the Huntington Library, Tabor was the Catalogue/Reference Librarian at UCLA’s Clark Library and senior bibliographer with the English Short-Title Catalogue at the University of California, Riverside. His first job after graduating from UCLA was at Dawson’s Book Shop in Los Angeles. 

Tabor has published descriptive bibliographies of Sylvia Plath (1987) and Ted Hughes (1983; expanded ed. 1998). The latter publication, co-authored with Keith Sagar, was honored with the Library Association’s Besterman Medal. Tabor’s catalogue of the work of Los Angeles’s Plantin Press (co-authored with Tyrus Harmsen) appeared in 2005, and he has published articles in PBSA, The Library, and Studies in Bibliography. Tabor serves on the faculty of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.  

Tabor spoke with Ampersand about the ways that the Huntington Library is adapting to the new virtual normal of sharing its holdings with academia and the public, the institution’s re-envisioning of its collections, and the challenges – and hope – facing the future generation of information professionals in the pandemic and beyond.

Ampersand: Typically, the study of rare books and manuscripts would be a hands-on experience. How have you been able to continue to provide that experience for students and scholars while working remotely?

Tabor: It’s been a real adjustment, and not just with the books. I find myself a curator of an invisible collection … helping people that I can’t see, relying very much on memory of what sort of resources are available, and storing up questions [to answer] on the rare occasions when I’ve been able to go [to the Library].

There has been a corresponding drop … in the number of requests for information. People are just sort of in lockdown mode, so requests haven’t been as numerous as I would have expected. And we compensate for that by becoming social media stars, to the extent that we can …, doing lectures and webinars and interviews and this and that.

This morning I’ve been helping an acquaintance of mine edit an article that he’s going to submit, and reading other articles [and viewing] webinars as they come across my desk. It’s part of [my] professional development, which, of course, never ends.

&: The ability to digitize materials is a boon to the archival and library fields at this time – has the Huntington expanded the availability of digitized material for its users?

Tabor: [Digitizing the collections has] been ongoing, but has also been impacted by the pandemic. But our photo department is busy doing it, as fast as they can; one example is an outside-funded project to digitize our medical incunabula. We’ve got several programs in the hopper, ready to go. And then there’s the post-processing of the metadata and so on, which has to be done by our cataloguers with limited access to the material. 

I should say that a lot of my reference [queries] have to do with photographing [materials] with a smartphone, selected pages that people are curious about in rare books. These ad-hoc, non-professional snapshots can be as useful to researchers as the big expensive projects.

&: What genres are typically researched at the Huntington Library by scholars, writers, and the public?

Tabor: The current collection is kind of a big baggy glove on the hand of Henry Huntington, who determined the original outlines of it. He collected what was fashionable in the early 20century for gentlemen collectors, and that was Shakespeare and more broadly, the English Renaissance – actually, English and American literature and history, pretty much up to the present, but with a concentration in the earlier periods. 

Exploration and travel, especially Americana and Western Americana, inevitably was part of that. Late in his collecting career, Huntington decided he needed a lot of incunabula, which are books printed in the 15th century, within 50 years of Gutenberg. And so, he kind of snapped his fingers and … a couple of booksellers stepped up and built the second-largest collection in the U.S. in the course of four or five years. That’s kind of an outlier in the broader collection, but it’s a very important outlier, and it was driven by his evolving institutional vision for the collection and the fact that he was going to leave it as a research library for the use of the public, and a research library should have incunabula. 

There are more recent developments [at the Huntington] – history of science is a big one now, science and early medicine, that was driven by the acquisition of the Burndy Library. That was the largest single addition to the collection since Henry Huntington’s day. It really altered the outline of our mission.

More recently, we have been getting into Pacific Rim materials, and we’ve got a dedicated curator for that material, Li Wei Yang. We’re actively collecting the history of Asians in California and more broadly, the West Coast. We are embarking on a re-envisioning of our collection development policy, so stay tuned for that. 

&: You mentioned Huntington’s interest in Americana, at least as far as what that term meant in his time. How is the Library addressing the need today for more diversity in its narratives, to tell the story of America through a collection like this?

Tabor: That’s a huge part of what is driving the redefining of what we do as an institution. Now we’re in the position of looking through this massive collection and picking out the things that Henry Huntington wasn’t really paying attention to, but which are are lurking in there and telling us more about these less visible figures and voices.

Our most heavily used collection today is the Octavia Butler archive. Before [the Library] shut down, that was getting the greatest use and is still very much in demand. We can thank a retired curator, Sue Hodson, for seeking Butler out and asking, “Would you give us your papers?” That was really a proactive move on the part of the Huntington.

&:  How did your education at UCLA prepare you to do this, especially at this time?

Tabor: I had gotten very interested in rare books – I was sort of born with it, to an extent. I took a zoology degree and got out of college and didn’t know what to do with it. In the next two years I started reading Lawrence Clark Powell, among others, and really got fired up on the idea of rare book librarianship, and that sent me to UCLA. 

Now in 1975 to 1977 when I was there, they had Diana Thomas, who taught both historical and analytical bibliography – separate courses – neither of which is offered as such now. The historical aspects are covered by Johanna Drucker in a more modern way, but those two courses were very specialized at the time, and pretty unusual in library education in the U.S. There was also the printing chappel in Powell [Library] basement, and Andy Horn was the instructor. He had retired from the deanship but was still active in the school, he had known the big-name L.A. fine printers, and he helped to lay the basis for a bibliographical understanding you can’t get without diving in and making mistakes and trying to produce a decent product. 

In combination with Diana’s courses, this made for an exposure to the material culture of books that couldn’t be beat except at Columbia. Because of that experience, I designed my own Rare Book School course to begin with total immersion in a task of printing without much preparation, and the students come to recognize and sympathize with the imperfections in early printed books and to learn how they arose.

So, in the seventies, the school was a real hotbed of rare book activity. Then Diana won the lottery and retired, and Andy retired, and the focus moved to information science and a lot of other things changed. 

&: How were you able to dovetail your interest in zoology and rare books?

Tabor:  I was always torn between the humanities and science, and science won out during the college years. But since then, it keeps coming up. I liken analytical bibliography to archaeology, and it really is dependent on observation and gathering data and organizing data, and it’s pretty complicated stuff. And so, the act of presenting it in a comprehensible way to readers draws on techniques of scientific writing, technical writing, engineering, and things like that. 

My recent web lecture [for the Huntington] dealt with the taxonomy of printed books, basically editions, printings, and issues. These terms, how they’re applied, and what they look like “in the wild” – in real books – are very much zoology-based. I’m constantly going back to the scientific mindset in what I do.

&: After nearly a year of remote instruction and in some cases, virtual internships and other work, what words of encouragement do you have for students now, especially for those who are wondering what the information job market will be like when they graduate next year?

Tabor: I’m full of sympathy and bafflement. I don’t know how I would function under those conditions. And I think, these days it is even more important for students to approach people like me, people in the biz who are fortunate enough to retain their jobs, and to talk about what it’s like in good times, what the students would have to look forward to, and possibly, what they can do in the meantime. I wish that I could still give internships. I’ve supervised a number of those, but we were successful enough that we ran out of stuff to give people to do. 

But I welcome inquiries from anybody. And I’m sure that all of the curators at the Huntington – there’s a directory of us all on the website – would would love to hear from students who are feeling their way through these times. 

Above: Courtesy of Rare Book School, University of Virginia