Collecting Natural Philosophy: The Thordarson Collection
In December 1926 the American magazine, a glossy monthly produced by the Crowell Publishing Company, profiled Chester Thordarson with an article by Neil M. Clark entitled“ The flare of the northern lights started Thordarson on his quest.” Readers learned that Thordarson, as“ a child in Iceland, … began asking questions about the aurora borealis— Later, he came to America, where he could no longer see the lights in the sky; but his habit of seeking information remained with him, and made him a world-famous inventor in the electrical field.” Thordarson, a largely self-educated inventor and business owner, stood as an example for those who wished to improve themselves:“ Lack of schooling is a handicap an earnest man can overcome.” Although Thordarson often credited his reading— and his books— in helping him overcome a lack of formal education, Clark’ s article mentioned only briefly Thordarson’ s appetite for books:“ We were sitting … in the magnificent library Mr. Thordarson has collected.” 1
But Thordarson was not only surrounded by his books at the time of the interview: his collecting must have been much on his mind. His papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives contain bill after bill from antiquarian book dealers, and autumn 1926 found him especially busy building his collection. In his collecting he enjoyed the advice of J. Christian Bay, then librarian at the John Crerar Library in Chicago, and the services of dealers like Walter M. Hill of Chicago, who often served as intermediary with antiquarian book dealers elsewhere. Thus a statement from Hill dated
November 1, 1926, reveals numerous purchases from dealers like Bernard Quaritch and Maggs Bros., both of London. From their wares Thordarson had selected scores of titles, many from the realm of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy. In such volumes Thordarson learned( in the words of Francis Hauksbee, demonstrator or curator of experiments at the Royal Society of London under Sir Isaac Newton’ s presidency) that“ there’ s no other way of Improving Natural Philosophy, but by Demonstrations and Conclusions founded upon Experiments judiciously and accurately made.” 2 Such sentiments resonated with Thordarson’ s own approach to learning physics, sparked by an elementary textbook he had read as a boy, 3 as he explained to Clark:“ An experiment, the book says, is a question that we place before Nature; and she always answers in a most direct way.” 4
Although the Thordarson Collection, now at the heart of the Department of Special Collections in Memorial Library, is perhaps best known for its holdings of illustrated natural history— Edward Donovan’ s charming fishes and insects, Audubon’ s magnificent volumes, exotic parrots as illustrated by Edward Lear, the long-running Curtis’ Botanical magazine— Thordarson’ s acquisition of works on experimental natural philosophy came naturally to someone fascinated by electricity and experiment. Many such titles found their way to his shelves in the latter months of 1926. From Bernard Quaritch in London came William Gilbert’ s important Latin treatise on the magnet( 1600), an exception to Thordarson’ s
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