Conversations
with Dr. Gail Staines

A Conversation with Dr. Paul Shore

Gail Staines: Welcome to this edition of “Conversations.” This is Gail Staines, Assistant Provost for University Libraries at Saint Louis University and today I am talking with Dr. Paul Shore, Professor of Educational Studies at Saint Louis University.  Dr. Shore, thank you for joining me today.
Paul Shore: Thank you for having me.
GS:  It is my understanding that your particular research focuses on the Jesuits with a special focus on their educational and missionary activities in the early modern period. Last summer, you visited the British Library which is, a lot larger than Pius Library. I am wondering if you could explain to the audience a little bit about your research and what the experience was like at a national library.
PS: My research spills across a lot of international boundaries. Eastern European boundaries move around a lot so I can’t just say that I just look at Poland or Romania or Hungary. I am looking at a swath of the borderlands between Catholic and non-Catholic Europe, would be a way to describe it. Some of those borderlands touch on Islam, some of them touch on Orthodox Christianity and everywhere throughout there are Roma, or gypsy people, there are Jews and other groups. It’s a mixed spectrum that does not fit on a particular shelf of library books and does not fit any research library exactly that I know of. I go looking here and there for things that relate to what I study. The reason I went to the British Library is that it’s one of the most amazing, world-class, if I can say that, collections of materials on many, many subjects. I came up with a very rare title of a 19th century book in Hungarian that the Hungarians do not have, which sometimes happens with wars and other things. There were probably not many copies printed. So I wrote to the British Library and a person answered back (laughter), who said when are you coming and I told them, “There is an interview process and we will get you the book.” I knew the dates that I would be in London. I went over and the British Library used to be in the British Museum. When people talk about Karl Marx seated in the British Museum Library Reading Room, that’s in the old 19th century building. This is a brand new building from the 90s and it is a cultural center. There is art; there are exhibits that are not just exhibits on scholarly things. It’s an inviting physical environment with fountains and a courtyard as you go in and the café. It is right in the middle of the city.
GS: You had to be interviewed to actually enter and use the collection?
PS: Yes I did. It was kind of like going to get your driver’s license renewed in the world’s fanciest driver’s license facility. You went in and there were other folks of course and there are students and everyone else. Eventually you are called to the desk and someone looks at your papers and wants to see your passport and wants to know…we are in a post-9/11 world so there are more questions than what used to be. Basically what you are looking for and why you are looking for it and what you plan to do, if and when you get it. They create an online record of you, which the Vatican does and lots of other places do now. Pretty quickly and pleasantly I got processed and got my card, which is good for three years. It was late in the day and I had just come in, so I requested the book, came back the next day, and worked my way through this old Hungarian. When I got weary of that, since it was in the Reference Room, I got up, wandered around, and looked at their great collection of reference works that are rare and unusual.
GS: So you were allowed to go and actually browse the collection?
PS: This book probably came from an off-site storage location, that’s pretty common. So you need hours for the book to arrive. No, I was not browsing the stacks or anything like that, but there is a large reference room which is pretty extravagantly appointed.
GS: Describe it for us…
PS: The recent encyclopedias of most of the languages that you have heard of and some that you haven’t heard of. Cross-indexing of other reference works in multiple languages, surveys of things like the history of witchcraft and other things that in another library, it would be in the stacks and not regarded as a reference work. I just sort of went browsing and…oh I’ve heard of this book, but I never took time to stop and look at it, but I really need to take a break from Hungarian for a few minutes (laughter) and look at something in English. You’re assigned a desk and you’re supposed to stay there.
GS: Are you allowed to bring a laptop?
PS: You could, I chose not to. No pens. They’ll sell you a pencil, a rather expensive pencil…
GS: You can’t bring your own?
PS: I didn’t think to do that, but I should of. I’m sure they probably would have allowed it. My particular issue with this book is that no one had ever looked at it. It was from the 1860s so the tops of the pages had not yet been split. So there was a real practical question. I could return the book and they would arrange for the appropriate person to split the pages, but that probably would not be done until I was on a plane to Switzerland, the next day. So I said, “how do you feel about me going through the pages that are un-split and then try and determine if I need to peek into any of the others,” and they said that’s ok. So about, maybe 8 or 10 were still folded at the top, so I went through the book and pondered what I really wanted to do. I decided I could peek in between. As it turned out I did not need too much that was inside. The two things I got from that was that this is amazing. This book has been somewhere for 140 years and I am probably the first person to ever look at it.  Secondly, they have a procedure for splitting pages. They have an actual procedure because they are trying to…
GS: …preserve and maintain…
PS: Right, preserve and maintain.
GS: Because that is how books were published during that time. The pages were attached and you actually had to physically split them.
PS: Right, this was the equivalent of a paperback book in that day. It is a very specialized topic and probably very few copies published because this was the only copy I could locate. The other thing I wanted mention about the British Library is that George III was one of the original founders of it. He’s known for a lot of things, but what many people don’t realize is that he had a very sizeable library, some of which was at Windsor Castle. At some point it became the property of the British Library and it is now housed in a climate controlled, glass column that is almost three stories high that you walk around at look at the outside. You can also order books if there was something specifically he had that you wanted. Just as an image of the sort of preservation of this heritage, they have kept it together as sort of a unit. It’s called the King’s Library. It’s a site. To me it is like going to a waterfall or something. It’s a visually stunning thing.
GS: It is so interesting because, you may know, here at Pius Library, we have a lot of older materials: 14th and 15th century and on. We are looking to preserve those materials in a climate controlled facility. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see what the British Library has done to make, if not the entire collection, but part of a collection a destination so people can see and be able to view…?
PS: It’s an aesthetic event. Even if you do not know too much about books from that period, it visually forces you to consider, wow, 200-plus years ago, this book was a core collection and it really stacks up this high and looks like this. Some are Moroccan calf and some are vellum and so on. I’m pretty biased, but I think it’s a great ad for the whole project that you can actually go and look at this like you would go and look at a cathedral. It must have cost a great deal of money.
GS: Oh, I’m sure.
(laughter)
PS:   I am reminded of the Beinecke at Yale, which you can look at their climate controlled collection and the sunlight comes through the marble, but this is so much higher. This is one man’s collection which really makes it remarkable.
GS: That’s fascinating.
PS: He has other books still in the British Museum that were natural history, and he was really interested in farming.
GS: Amongst other things…
(laughter)
PS: It’s a must see if you walk in and have your cup of tea and look at the other exhibits and just sort of enjoy the facility and you have to look at the King’s Library.
GS: So as you did that research, or before or after, you also explored very small libraries in Eastern Europe. How did you find out where they were and what was in them?
PS: Well, you don’t know what’s in them until you go and look sometimes, which is what I did. Increasingly, there are online connections, but it depends on the country and other circumstances. In one instance I was trolling the Internet, typing in keywords related to Jesuits in several languages and just seeing what came up. I came across an online magazine, which is also published in paper, where a librarian in a small town in Serbia was talking about the greatest treasure of their town library, which was this book, a Jesuit book. All my bells when off because it was much older and much stranger than what it should have been for the location. I thought is this a typo; is this really what they are saying it is? I wrote to the librarian who wrote back and said, ‘yes this is in fact what we got.’ I asked if I could come and take a look at it and take pictures and they were thrilled because that meant publicity for them. So I did, and it was a journey to go there. I had to ride in what was basically a trolley car across a swamp. (laughter) It is very interesting how you get to this particular place. But anyway, it’s actually a very nice library, and utterly unknown to most Western scholars. It’s in a town called Subotica, frankly that I never heard of previously, and they had the book.
GS: Would it be considered, like in the US, a small public library?
PS: It sort of like, if you had a good sized county seat in a Midwestern city that also had a historical society connected to it. I mean, there was the lending library for the community, but because it was a very old place and at the crossroads, there was this other historical piece. Although it was clear how this particular book, which was not locally produced, it was produced in what is known as Slovakia, a couple of countries over. I do not know how it got there.
GS: Where they able to shed any light on it?
PS: No, not really. They know roughly about how long they had it, but wars, particularly the Second World War, left the trail sort of cold back around there. I’m guessing it was a learned resident, like the town doctor or something. The book was a comparative grammar: Latin, Hungarian, and Slovak. As far as I could tell, the only existing copy in the world. And a very interesting book in terms of Jesuit studies because it shows the Jesuits taking seriously the Slovak language at a point in history. Seriously enough to construct a grammar when lots of people did not consider it to be a language, and that’s kind of a typical Jesuit thing, to stumble upon a speech pattern and immediately construct a model to explain it.
GS: So it was a Jesuit that actually composed….
PS: Right, it’s a very complicated situation because the Jesuit in question was actually Portuguese. He wrote the Latin grammar that could be used to teach Latin to people of many languages and some anonymous person, probably almost likely a Jesuit, took this tool and re-tooled it for this bilingual situation of Hungarian and Slovak, which were the dominate local languages when the book was actually produced. We don’t know who that…I do have some theories, but I can never prove exactly who that person was who sat down and tried, and they are very unlike languages, very different from one another, particularly Hungarian with the Latin.
GS: So, how does that particular work, work into the research that you are doing?
PS: In a couple of ways. One, there are fewer and fewer native-born North American Jesuits today. There are a lot of Jesuits worldwide, but the order is aging in the United States. So there are real questions about its legacy, and about how its narrative will be told when it is mostly told by non-Jesuits. Historically, Jesuits have told their own story, at least the Jesuit priests, the brothers have kind of…but that’s another story. In any case, among the strands of the story that I’m involved with telling, ‘is how do the Jesuits of one ethnic or racial origin deal with another group?’ That is a very St. Louisian story because Jesuits in St. Louis owned slaves, on the other hand, there were Jesuits who were very involved with the desegregation movement. Relations across race and ethnicity are germane to St. Louis, but when you look at the bigger picture, there are many interesting stories of Jesuits in Japan learning Japanese and incorporating Buddhist philosophy into the curriculum way back. So part of the story, for me, happens when Jesuits, probably ethnic Hungarian or ethnic German speaking, encounter Slovak with the tool of Latin, and they took it seriously. How seriously did they take it? Well seriously enough to make a book out of it. What did they do with it and did it influence the curriculum? In another direction, Jesuits are part of the big history of the book. Here’s a book that basically no one has seen before. It does add another piece to the mosaic. Jesuits burned some books too.
GS: Did they really?
PS: They did. Not all Jesuits, and not all the time, but there were Jesuits who worked very hard to repress non-Catholic books.
GS: Is that in a specific time period?
PS: Yes, it was. Actually, it was very close to the time period of this book. Though on the one hand, you could make a case for intolerance, on the other hand there is some tolerance. That is a very Jesuit story too because there is a lot of individual choice within this order that is sworn to obedience. Actually, obedience is not as straightforward as it might seem, it is quite complicated what constitutes the limits of obedience. So, there were some Jesuits who were not native Slovaks, in a culture that looked at Slovaks in sort of the ways that stereotyped hillbillies that would be viewed in 19th century American culture, but took them seriously. And there is the whole question of the Jesuit production of books. Finally, there is a question of Jesuits in a multi-ethnic empire, the Hapsburg Empire, which becomes the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their role in promoting the agenda of the government, or in some cases, the undermining of the agenda of the government, but their relationship to this powerful, non-democratic monarchy. Sometimes hand in glove, sometimes lukewarm, sometimes backing the other team. I think it’s a germane story too because to this very day, the Jesuit relationship with secular power is complex and notable.
GS: It’s not black and white.
PS: No, not at all and that would be even true here in the city of St. Louis, I would argue.
GS: So once you made this trek to see this book, in a place you’ve never been before, let alone heard about, did you find any other material that was interesting to your research, or not really. Did you have to go to other places? 
PS: My problem was there was a ton of things that were moderately interesting, not my targeted grant goal. Of course these librarians are very proud of what they have. “Would you like to see this?” and the clock is running, an airplane is going to be taking off from an airport in another country very soon that I need to be on the trolley on to go back to. So there is this very intense question of how much time do I spend on any one thing. They had a catalog of their rare books, but it was one of three copies, which is sort of a typical situation, so I kept looking sheepish and they finally gave me a catalog so I know what is in Subotica. There are lots of lovely things. I didn’t see anything that was flat out unique and as rare. I think the librarian is correct when she said this was their most valuable object. But, yes, if you like incunabula, or books a little bit later than that, then yes there’s lots of fun stuff.
GS: Do you think you’ll visit again?
PS: I might. I was there twice. I was there to do this photography, and then about six months later I was back because at that point the U.S. State Department was paying bills enough to do some research, but they wanted something in return. What they wanted was for me to give talks at what they call the “American Corners”, which are paid for with our tax money. They are basically information agencies in provincial cities all over the world that are run by the embassies. They are partly propaganda and partly genuine connections between citizens who would never get to the capital city and go to whatever the embassy has to offer, and people who are contemplating emigrating or visiting, and they have speakers. The State Department said we’ll take you to Subotica, but you’ll have to do something. But I may go back. I’m actually just today working on a grant to return to Serbia, Belgrade in this case, but I might be in Subotica too.  The landscape never stops changing because you learn of other collections, some of which are not stable. They might be moved or changed so I could never tell you absolutely there is never going to be anything ever at this one place. Tomorrow there could be this news article a book as been auctioned off and is now in a place.
GS: So as you go on your hunt for these materials, it could be a Google search, it could be serendipity, oh you just happen to open the paper and read an article…
PS: There’s a lot of serendipity or what I call intuition. It’s strange, but I’ve walked into bookstores and the owner will say what are you looking for and I’ll say I want that book and out of the corner of my eye I’ll see the book that I need. It does not happen every time, and it probably happens less times than I think it does, but it does happen. So you get where you recognize the shape, color, size, and likely attended circumstances of something old and valuable.
GS: You know in library that you can, and Pius Library for example, we talk a lot about in our profession about the electronic versus the print. Is it an either/or, but it is really a but/and.  When you walk into Pius or any library, the act of just browsing the collection some people talk about the smell of the books, the feel of the books, the way they look on the shelf, the experience. But scanning the shelves and not knowing what you are going to find. My problem is that I find twenty things to read. As you were saying before, as a researcher, time is of the essence and it takes a tremendous amount of time not only to find the material but to then go through it, translate it if you need to, track down other sources. Is that what you find in your research?
PS: Sure. Don’t believe everything you read. Even if it is old, you often need to verify or compare. Jesuits were very optimistic folks the way they reported events. So you do need to verify.
GS: Everything was grand and wonderful and effective…
PS: In fact, my current research is about, I’m calling it “Narratives of Adversity” because I want to look at when things didn’t go well. How they dealt with it, or didn’t deal with it. Say there is a plague sweeps Belgrade, which it did, which was really bad news, and how the Jesuits report on these events and how other non-Jesuits report on them and how historians report on them. So yes, with verification you are never done. I mean there could always be another witness. You have to, at some point, say I’m going to take a chance and claim that this is pretty accurate.
GS: This is the way it was…
PS: I’m going to crawl out on a limb, but it’s not like you put the crystals in the beaker and they turn green so you know. You are playing with percentages here often.
GS: You never really know because there could be another account of what you are looking at that disclaims what you have just reported on.
PS: Yes, and since everyone who is writing in Latin is using Latin as a second language, what does detrimenta mean to one person as opposed to another. Is it something annoying or something catastrophic? So there are many levels of sifting through and trying to understand, not the least of which is the secondary sources which are written in various times and places by people with agendas and circumstances as we all are. It’s quite complicated. It’s the Rubix Cube. It’s 3-D.
GS: This has been wonderful talking with you Paul. I really enjoyed it and hopefully we can do a part two?
PS: Maybe if there is some interest, sure.
GS: I think there will be. I think there is a lot more to say about your research and about finding these resources and where they come up from in the most unlikely places. Who would have thought?
PS: Places like Pius Library, they are not only providing a service to students who are learners, and they are also cultural repositories, but they are also portals to this multi-dimensional world if you know how to work them. Both the electronic piece and just ordering something through Interlibrary Loan, if you wanted to do a graph of how this comes out, it could all branch. It all starts with an electronically accessed interlibrary loan article which references this article, misspelling this man’s name interestingly so you have to deal with that. Then it just goes from there.
GS: It’s incredible. It’s one of the things I love about librarianship is that it’s the hunt for finding what you hope to find and then sometimes it turns out its not what you thought at all.
PS: Often, and that’s ok. It’s a portal and the library to me is like the Harry Potter movies when they jump into the wall at the train station and the world is different. It is an entrance point to way of putting a lot of different information together and understanding it.
GS: Very, very fascinating. Thank you so much.
PS: Thank you for your time.

Last updated October 24, 2007