La vieille garde dans les Carolines

December 7th: the anniversary of the death of Marshal Ney. Ney was Napoleon's saviour at Eylau, the heroic commander of the French rear guard during the retreat from Russia, and a man who had five horses shot out from under him during Waterloo.

Unless, of course, it isn't the anniversary of the death of Marshal Ney. One of your loyal blogger's favourite Southern legends contends that Ney was not executed by firing squad in Paris on December 7, 1815, but instead faked his death, and, with the help of his Freemason brothers, successfully fled France for America.

In this version of the story, the supposedly "dead" Ney arrived in Charleston late in December of 1815, and lived here clandestinely until 1819. After being spotted by French agents in Charleston, the Masons again were forced smuggle him away. He moved around the Carolinas -Georgetown, Columbia, Brownsville- before eventually settling near Salisbury, North Carolina (today about an hour's drive north of Charlotte).

So Marshal of France Michel Ney, the man who took Madgeburg and trapped the Austrians at Elchingen, lived a quiet life in small-town central North Carolina as Peter Stuart Ney, schoolteacher. Neighbors and pupils left accounts of a man who matched the Marshall's description, down to matching scars; spoke perfect French; and was all too happy to draw richly detailed maps or share vivid stories from Napoleon's campaigns. Peter Ney died quietly, far from Paris, late in 1846. Those who were around him attested he claimed to be the Marshall with his final words.

True or not, it's a fantastic piece of regional folklore. And what's absolutely true is that while the Library's events calendar is almost dead and gone for 2011, it will have another life in the coming year! The last Wide Angle Lunch and the final concert of the year take will take place tomorrow. Our last Backgammon Night of the year is next Tuesday... but we're working on the Annual Meeting cards right now... it's been a great 2011, but we can't wait for all that's in store in 2012!

More important than the following blather: happy birthday Pat Conroy!

It's always interesting to browse the minutes of old CLS board meetings.  262 years of mostly boredom interspersed with virulent fighting.  Perhaps my favourite: a particularly heated record of one late 1950's meeting at which a trustee suggested smoking be allowed in the Main Reading Room. 

As every television/film Eisenhower/Kennedy period piece has taught me, in the late 1950's, EVERYBODY smoked.  Grandmothers, titans of industry, Blue Collar Joe, Presidents of the United States, newborn babies...  from the offices of Sterling Price, to NASA's Mission Control, to the office of your very own doctor, everybody smoked.

But not at the Charleston Library Society.  Thanks to the valiance (and vehemence) of trustee Mrs. I'on Rhett, it was not to be.  The motion went from near passage by acclimation, to a long, (one-sided) bargaining for "half the room" to "part of the room" to "one smoking chair", to the cold hell of being infinitely tabled.  The anger and the yelling of the whole affair really does come right through all the stuffy, formal language of board meeting minutes...

So that's why, sixty years later, the Main Reading Room doesn't reek of cigarette smoke.  Kudos, Mrs. Rhett.

 

Remember, smoking is not attractive.  Except on Mad Men... then it's cool.

Another interesting thing from the minutes is the hours of operation the Library has held.  While I've never seen a record of us being open on Sunday, the other 144 hours of the week have been fair game.  Open at five, open at six, open at eleven in the morning; closed at three, closed at six, closed at nine at night... as customs evolved  (and indoor lighting, and air conditioning, and the standard 9-5 business day came into existence), we've changed our hours of operation.

And as of tomorrow, we're doing it again.  Every Wednesday through the end of cotillion season, the Library Society will remain open after 5:30 until 8:30.  Circulation will remain open, through research services- i.e., trips to the vaults - will not be available.  We hope you'll stop by and grab a book, have a cup of coffee, and enjoy the peace and quiet of the South's oldest cultural institution during our new "after work, during cotillion" hours.

They're so old, we're thinking about naming them "Strom" and "Thurmond"...

The Library Society is now about 260 years old.  That makes us the oldest cultural institution in the South; it impresses the heck out of visitors from out West who seem to think anything predating the Carter administration is ancient; and it secures us a spot near the front of the Carolina Day Parade line.  Being 260 years old is kinda cool.

But our collections include a few manuscripts from as far back as the 15th century, and some Indic statuary from as far back as the 10th.  Absorbing that level of historicity is always amazing- to pick up a document and think, "This book was written the year Lorenzo de' Medici died", or "That little statue was around before the Normans conquered England".  Everyday, you're gobsmacked by the elastic nature of time on a grand scale: how can I call George Washington's letters as "old" when something created eight centuries prior sits a few yards away?

But then, then!, there are the twinned doyen of our collections: the ginkgos that flank our Main Entrance.  While ours were planted Garden Club in 1922 - practically yesterday, right? - the ginkgo is a survivor from the Permian Era - 270 million years ago.  Our Society might predate the United States; but ginkgos were around before flowering plants.  Before birds.  Before mammals.


That is old.  That is awesome.

And now, best of all?  That awesomeness has been formally recognized!  Our ginkgos are not just living fossils, they are the Charleston Horticultural Society's 2010 Outstanding Trees Award in the "Nonprofit" category.  We've even got a nifty trophy to boot.  There are a lot of great trees in the Lowcountry, and we're in really good company with our sister organizations that have won this award before: we really couldn't be prouder that the great organic members of our collections have been recognized in this manner.





Other reasons to stop by soon: "Dixie", Denim, and Drinks is this Monday night, it's going to be terrific, and tickets are going fast.  Call us and buy yours today.  Circa 1748 is just over a fortnight away (May 29).  The Piccolo Spoleto Literary Festival is the weekend after that (June 3-5).  Tickets for 1748 and the Festival are all available through Piccolo Spoleto.  Also, Toddler Tuesday is going on summer break, as of June 1.  It'll be back this fall, having failed to do its summer reading but sporting a wicked tan.

Deo Vindice...

Your loyal blogger has acquired a new work computer after about three years of begging, so please pardon any delays in blog posting or updating the website.  It's taking some time to transfer years of photos, fonts, bookmarks, address lists, applications, etc. from The Underpowered Compaq From Hell to my shiny new Mac, hallowed be its name.

And since there's Young Professionals tonight, and a new brochure that needs to be mocked up, and event photos to tag, and in a few minutes, it'll be Children's Storytime downstairs, I'll just share a quick anecdote about work at a 262 year old institution:

This morning, your loyal blogger was called upon to help satisfy the need of a certain federal agency to prove that the Charleston Library Society is, truly, an ancient and venerable eleemosynary library, and not a sinister terrorist front.  And to be fair to the diligent fellows of the DHS, the Society has held a copy of the Qur'an for longer than we've been "Americans"... our Qur'an dates from 1762, twelve years before the founding of this country.

So we get a call this morning that we need something- anything really- that shows our organization's legal incorporation, and proves we're real, live, nephews of our Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July.  Which would be easy enough, if we weren't chartered by the monarch of another country, Mr. George the II, King of Great Britain and Ireland, Duke of Hannover, Prince-Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.

This little issue required going back and finding out if His Highness's Royal Charter is still good enough to prove we're not terrorists.  Apparently it is (I suppose it does indicate we're not IRA members, at least).  So now that it's approved, your loyal blogger must make a copy of the document to send in.  One doesn't just stick a Royal Charter in the Xerox machine, especially since the chances of getting a new one from ol' Liz Windsor are slim-to-none.  So I also got permission to use "the first reprint of the charter that is in good enough shape to photocopy".

So the (fully approved) document now on file, the one that shows we're no threat to the "homeland", is the Library Society's Act of Incorporation... printed by A.J. Burke, 40 Broad Street, Charleston, C.S.A, 1861... NHS, osculare pultem meam.

That's it.  Young Professionals tonight, library's closed on the 15th, and check us out in the latest issue of Charleston Magazine!

(It's also Osama Bin Laden's birthday... but let's not get into that.)

Happy Purim! We here at Shh! would like to thank the City of Charleston for bringing some non-traditional ra'ashan... er, noisemakers, in the form of jackhammers and Sawzalls and front-end loaders and the like. These guests should still be around long after the holiday has passed...

We hope you've been able to make it to one of our late-winter events: both the Ken Burger and Marjorie Wentworth book signings proved entertaining, interactive, and very well-attended. If you haven't been able to make it to an event recently, we hope you'll join us Monday (yes, Monday- not Thursday) the 16th (St. Pat's eve!) for Jack Bass and W. Scott Poole as they discuss and sign copies of their new book, The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina.

Also on the horizon... a major event celebrating Edgar Allan Poe, mid-April murder mysteries, and, yes- the Spring Book Sale (April 4th-5th... get the word out now)!