University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Magazine Fall 2016 | Page 22

A Journey Both Comedic and Divine
Long-lost Volume Returned to Memorial
via Little Free Library After 84 Years

By Julie Arensdorf
There’s nothing terribly unusual about
finding a copy of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine
Comedy in a library. A particular tome,
though, has an interesting tale to tell—one
that spans decades. In December of 2015,
library school student and self-proclaimed
“book nerd” Elle Rogers contacted Memorial
Library reference librarian Laurie Wermter,
via our chat service, to alert us that a copy
of The Divine Comedy belonging to the
University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries
had been mistakenly returned to her Little
Free Library. Given that the Little Free Library
movement was begun here in Wisconsin, that
didn’t seem surprising—until Rogers revealed
that she lived in New Hampshire.
Elle Rogers created the Little Free Library
outside her home in Dover, NH, to make her
“neighborhood more neighborly,” according
to a 2012 interview with her published in
the Foster’s Daily Democrat. After all, love of
books and libraries runs in Rogers’ family:
“When my paternal grandmother died, my
father made sure to have a bench with her
name on it donated to her library. When my
maternal grandmother died [in 2011] at 100,
she had a book buried with her!” So, it’s no
wonder that this east coast bibliophile wished
to return the book to its rightful home. But
how did the book end up in New Hampshire?
This, dear readers, is where the plot thickens.
Judging from the circulation cards tucked
in a pocket on the book’s back cover, this
copy of The Divine Comedy was last checked

22 | LIBRARIES Fall 2016

out on February 10, 1931 to an A. Serwer.
A careful perusal of the UW–Madison
yearbook The Badger (which has been
carefully digitized by University of Wisconsin
Digital Collections), revealed that the only
student with that last name at the time
was an Arnold Serwer. The Badger yearbook
staff distinguished Serwer as one of the
University’s “Interesting Students: Not due
to what they’ve done so much as to the fact
that they’re the kind of people that you like
to know.” A “prolific writer of satire, humor,

and ironical prose,” Serwer
was also noted to have been
active in writing scripts for
Haresfoot, the student drama club.
He graduated from UW–Madison with
an undergraduate degree in journalism
in 1933.
After his time at UW–Madison,
Arnold Serwer worked as a legislative reporter
for the Wisconsin State Journal and served in
the Army Reserves Air Corps during World
War II. He also worked as a correspondent for
the Reports Division of the War Relocation
Authority (WRA), documenting terrorism
incidents committed against returning
Japanese-American soldiers. After living in
New York City for a time, Serwer moved
back to Madison with his family in 1962 and
became heavily involved in both local and
national politics. In fact, an August 10, 1979
article in the Capital Times, entitled “State
Loses a Conscience,” lamented Arnold and
Dora Serwer’s impending relocation from
Madison to Reston, VA, to be near their son
David, proclaiming that they “constituted
the strength of a regiment to the progressive
causes.” Throughout the decades, Serwer
worked on the campaigns of Harold Stafford,
Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and
Morris Udall and was a strong supporter of
Adlai Stevenson.
While ordinarily a rather quiet person,
in 1968 Serwer was put in the remarkable
position of leading a crowd of delegates
and demonstrators seven miles through
the streets of Chicago at the Democratic
National Convention, negotiating with

police, city officials, and the National
Guard after they attempted to block the
demonstrators from continuing on. In an
August 31, 1968, interview published in the
Capital Times, Serwer, who was serving as
a McCarthy delegate, recalled, “The women
were crying and some of the hotheads were
getting restless. If we had all left them some
would have tried to go on and been beaten,
some would have sat down and been beaten
anyway.” Serwer’s actions were credited with
preventing further violence and ensuring
the safe passage of the demonstrators and
delegates to the gates of the convention.
In addition to his political involvement,
Serwer was also exceptionally active as a
journalist, serving as the associate editor of
The Progressive during the tumultuous years
of 1967 to 1976 and as editor of The Wisconsin
Democrat. Serwer possessed a witty sense of
humor, as demonstrated in this March 22,
1963, letter to the editor of the Capital Times:
“I have had trouble with my last name,
mostly when they teased me about it in
school. Later, I courted my wife-to-be under
the pretense that my name was ‘Bruce
Galloway,’ breaking the news to her the
day before we went for the license. It has

University of Wisconsin–Madison | 23