TURN the Page

For more than 200 years the Boston Athenaeum has been a gathering spot for writers and intellectuals. Now a thoughtful renovation aims to preserve it as a place for future generations to become part of history simply by walking in the door.

- MARK ROZZO

It's said to be as Bostonian as the Common. Ralph Waldo Emerson's father was among the original trustees who launched the place in 1807. It's where Nathaniel Hawthorne blew off editing work at the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge so he could discover the books, paintings, and sculptures that stoked his writerly imagination. The 19th-century intellect Margaret Fuller spent untold hours there with the goal of alleviating her "poverty of knowledge" and succeeded wildly. Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, was a shareholder. After achieving celebrity status with Little Women, Louisa May Alcott borrowed piles of books that fed her subsequent novels. When you visit today you can look over Alcott's "charging records" and then ask a librarian to point you to the actual volumes that Alcott savored. They remain on the shelves, part of a collection of more than 600,000 books and objects at the venerable, beloved, and utterly indispensable Boston Athenaeum.

"Alcott was very into trashy novels, Leah Rosovsky noted at the Athenaeum (which is generally pronounced Ath-a-NEE-um), on a recent sunny morning. Since May 2020 she has been the Stanford Calderwood Director of this neo-Palladian jewel of a private library near the apex of Beacon Hill at 10% Beacon Street, a half-block from the gold-domed Massachusetts State House. The two institutions make a natural pairing, the one being the seat of Massachusetts politics since 1798 and the other being a kind of greenhouse where New England's cultural life sprouted more than 200 years ago.