WILSON’S QUIET TOUCH
The wonderful things you find
It’s been almost 15 years since H.G.
Jones retired as curator of the North Carolina Collection. He is still in Wilson part
of every week, with the run of the place
to pursue his own research. Asked what his
favorite thing is in the whole library, he
disappears down a tight little staircase into
the stacks. Soon he’s back, and onto the
table drops half of Sir Walter Raleigh’s
two-volume history of the world. This
11th edition, which was owned by Edward
Gibbon, is dated 1736, but the first edition
also is in the house, along with the letter
in which Gibbon explained that he was
abandoning his intention to devote his
career to studying Raleigh to delve into “a
more encompassing
subject,” which
turned out to be
The History of the
Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire.
“That’s, by far, my
favorite,” Jones
smiles. He makes a
point to note that in
1974, the budget for
the collection was
about $16,000 a year
and that the state
doesn’t buy books
for libraries — people give, and historians
go and get, and a great collection becomes
a stronger magnet for more.
I remembered something he said one
day 12 years ago: “The wonderful things
you find in green boxes. The things that
got in other people’s way, we gathered
them.”
It is a place where you can concentrate
deeply, and a place where you can’t find
the one thing you came for but you leave
with six or eight you were more interested in anyway.
Landmark blues and bluegrass recordings. The schoolboy notebooks of
Thomas Wolfe ’ 20, and Nixon’s letter to
Sam Ervin ’ 17. The very words of the
great, and the recollections of the ordinary, era after era.
Down on the first level of the vault,
five shelves, about 20 feet long, lined with
books that bear the designation “O.L.”
‘The wonderful things you find in green boxes. The things that got in other people’s way, we gathered them.’
H.G. Jones, retired curator, N.C. Collection
