Murder in the Stacks

When famed Egyptologist George Andrew Reisner's eyes became dimmed with age, he spent many of his last hours at the pyramids of Giza listening to detective stories read to him by assistants. They placed standing orders in England and the U.S. for new books.

Last week Harvard's omnivorous library (second largest in the U.S.) got ready to clear a place in its stacks for the 2,000 luridly titled, gaudily wrapped books, willed in 1942 to the university by George Reisner, who had been a Harvard professor for 37 years. The war had kept the collection in Egypt, where an officers' club gave the books a thorough thumbing.

The Reisner bequest will fill out Harvard's haphazard collection of detective stories, started by such mystery-loving professors as the late George Lyman Kittredge. History-conscious Harvard keeps them for research purposes, buys a half dozen new titles every year because they reflect "part of the American scene." It 'makes no attempt to circulate them widely. Says Librarian Keyes D. Metcalf uneasily: "We are a research library, and I should think that anyone who wanted a detective story would go to some other library."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.