Candler's Coup

The top five theological libraries in the U.S. have for decades been within a day's journey of one another--at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary and Connecticut's Hartford Seminary Foundation. More recently Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union and the Chicago Divinity School have been correcting the imbalance in the West, but there has been no collection below the Mason-Dixon line to match the luster of those in the Northeast. Now that has changed. Last week the final shipment of some 220,000 volumes--nearly 4% shelf miles of books--from Hartford's superb collection went South, bound for the library of Candler School of Theology, part of Emory University in Atlanta. Added to Candler's own library of some 117,000 books of more recent vintage, the Hartford collection makes Candler's one of the nation's best.

Emory University paid $1,750,000 for the collection, which Hartford decided to let go after it ceased training candidates for the ministry in 1972. The library was a stunning bargain; included are 1,239 individual writings by Martin Luther, printed in the 16th and 17th centuries, a considerable collection of Puritan writings from colonial New England, scores of rare hymnals, and a broad collection of Asian and African materials--though not Hartford's prestigious Islamic collection, which it is keeping. Average cost per book: $8.

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