A Mystery Solved?

For the past fifteen years, the monthly newsletter of Webster Groves Public Library has been called Page 61. This is because of a mystery that has puzzled us for a while. Almost since this library has been in business, whenever a new book is added to the collection, our name and address is stamped on page 61 of that book. Why page 61? Just because it’s the way it’s always been done, and traditions die hard in a public library.

I came to Webster Groves Public Library after spending five years as the Adult Services Librarian at the Richmond Heights Memorial Library. At that library, whenever a new book is added to the collection, their name and address is always stamped on page 61. Coincidence?

A while back we learned that one of our former directors, Marguerite Norville, had also worked for Richmond Heights Memorial Library. (Or, to be accurate, Richmond Heights Public Library. It was rededicated as a Memorial Library in 1976, as a tribute to those who served in Vietnam.) It was most likely that Ms. Norville had been the link between the two, and had carried the practice of stamping page 61 to both. But which was first?

Last year, we had our run of old Webster Groves newspapers digitized. Decades of the Webster Times, Webster Groves News-Times, and Webster Groves Advertiser are now searchable by key words. So we looked up Marguerite Norville, and learned that she actually began her career with Webster Groves Public Library way back when it was moving from the Monday Club, where it had been housed since 1911, to the High School, where it moved in 1928. She worked part-time there until 1935, when the Richmond Heights Public Library was founded, and she became their first Head Librarian. Later, in 1949, just before Webster Groves Public Library moved into its new building at 301 E. Lockwood, Ms. Norville became Head Librarian here.

Clearly she had been back and forth. But we still did not know for sure which library first had the practice of stamping books on page 61. Finally, though, we uncovered a book in our back room called The Missouri State Capitol, which was published in 1928. It bears our name and address stamp on page 61. Assuming we added the tome in its year of publication, the Webster Groves Public Library was doing it years before there was a Richmond Heights Public Library, and most likely, Marguerite Norville carried that practice from here to there–not the other way around.

Oh, dear reader–forgive me, but this is the sort of thing that makes the pulse of a librarian race. A mystery solved, after all these years.

Or is it? As another staff member pointed out to me, there is a penciled inscription on the front flyleaf of The Missouri State Capitol, the simple word, ‘Donation.’ It means that the book could well have been donated at any time. Perhaps someone had it in their own collection until well after 1935, when they decided the library could use it. And so we will never know, for sure, to an absolute certainty, which library first stamped books on page 61.

Marguerite Norville

And so we will continue to call our newsletter Page 61, as it represents to us the mix of tradition and mystery, of art and science, of mind and soul, that a library is and will always be.