Earlier this week, a group of English 14 students visited Archives & Special Collections to receive instruction on different editions of Shakespeare’s works, with a focus on his famous sonnets. The materials included books from the main stacks curated by Humanities Librarian Leanna Goodwater, as well as books from Special Collections curated by myself… No offense to Leanna, but the Special Collections books stole the show, especially the Henley Shakespeare.

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What’s the Henley Shakespeare? Oh, just one of the most luminescent and singular jewels of our collection. This is because it’s not just the edition of Shakespeare’s works edited by W. E. Henley, it’s the Artist’s Bibliophile Edition of the Henley Shakespeare: bound in gold-tooled calfskin with green silk end papers, letterpress printed on hand-made paper (the top edge is gilt, while the fore-edge and bottom are uncut deckle edges), hand-decorated with watercolor painting and gold illumination, and replete with tipped-in images of various portraits and classical works of art. This is an edition of fifteen, of which SCU owns number one. Even the edition the Folger Shakespeare Library holds, the Connoisseur’s edition, is an edition of twenty-six, making the Artist’s Bibliophile Edition more rare.

All this alone is enough to cause one to manually remove their jaw from the floor, but the provenance of the work is a blockbuster as well.

The provenance goes back to SCU’s first dedicated library, as well as the deep bonds the Jesuits managed to form with almost everyone who came into their contact. Dr. Gallwey, a San Francisco physician, was the owner of the Henley Shakespeare before SCU: there is a bookplate in the front of each volume of the set marking it as part of Dr. Gallwey’s personal library. In 1930 he treated Father Henry, a Jesuit member of the faculty and one-time librarian here at Santa Clara, as evidenced in the article on the left from The Santa Clara student newspaper. At this point in time, the Adobe Lodge had been serving as the library, which apparently “disgusted many of the students” (“Notables Praise [Varsi] Library,” The Santa Clara, October 15, 1931), and construction on a new library, named after the 6th president of SCU, Aloysius Varsi, S.J., had begun. Once Varsi Library opened in October of 1931, school leaders launched a campaign to fill Varsi Library by donation. Enter Dr. Gallwey.

As evidenced in this 1933 article from The Santa Clara at right, Dr. Gallwey donated a 12 volume set of the “General History of the World” (which the library still owns as well); the year before he also donated a mulberry chest “among [other] treasures” (“Casaba Men To be Feted at Pep Rally–Gift to the Library,” The Santa Clara, December 1, 1932); the mulberry chest was supposedly made from a tree planted by the hands of Shakespeare himself (“Precious Books Given Recently for V. Library,” The Santa Clara, September 1, 1932). From these facts we know Dr. Gallwey was a Shakespeare scholar of sorts, and that he was a philanthropist to the University in addition to the Jesuits’ doctor. Later, in the 1936 article penned by a student below, the Henley Shakespeare is described, but not directly attributed to Dr. Gallwey’s generosity. The Santa Clara goes on to document other donations from Dr. Gallwey in other articles from the 1930s.

While we are unable to locate a “smoking gun” that directly documents Dr. Gallwey’s gift to the University of the Henley Shakespeare, we have a lot of evidence describing Dr. Gallwey’s involvement with the University, and we can certainly make a strong case that Dr. Gallwey donated the Henley Shakespeare as part of the “fill Varsi Library” campaign, narrowing the date range of its acquisition to sometime between 1931 and 1936. In the fields of descriptive bibliography, archival science, and rare books, the documentation of previous ownership and how it connects to the current owner of an item–the thing’s provenance–enhances value through establishing authenticity. It also makes a cool backstory, supplying many-a-student with “biblio-bio” assignments with something fun to talk about in their paper.

If you would like to view the Henley Shakespeare or conduct further research using the archive of The Santa Clara issues held in the archives and online, please make an appointment. We would be happy to welcome you to Archives & Special Collections.