This month's museum pick...

Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

Metro Los Angeles has its own version of East Side/West Side and the implied rivalry between them. The West Side in this instance is Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, the abodes of LA’s creative and artistic elite, many of them in the entertainment industry. This is the geographic area where E! and People and Variety set their sights and prowl, looking for celebrity shenanigans.

If the West Side is often seen as a raucous, out-there, in-your-face social scene, its traditional antithesis has been the East Side communities of San Marino and Pasadena, quiet enclaves of WASP-y privilege, the kind of places where corporate lawyers and captains of industry lived sober, private, privileged lives.

Of course both these stereotypes have taken a beating over the past few decades. Pasadena’s restoration of its west-end Old Town has produced one of the liveliest, jumping-est pedestrian hangouts west of the Potomac River, and the WASP-y burghers of San Marino have quite obligingly accommodated a growing number of Asian newcomers.

On the West Side, the presence of UCLA and the Getty Museum has always leavened the perception of the area as one of shallow, nouveau-riche sensibilities.

Still, the East Side has one institution that will always mark it as the calmer and more deliberative of the two rival sides of town: the Huntington Library in San Marino, which houses one of the literary world’s most significant collections of books and manuscripts.

(The Huntington, situated on 150 acres, is also a significant art gallery – the collection includes Thomas Gainsborough's masterpiece, The Blue Boy, and Sir Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie ) – and an acclaimed 14,000-species botanical garden that includes camellia gardens, a Japanese tea garden and a 12-acre desert habitat.)

But it is the Huntington’s priceless book and manuscript collections – 5 million pieces in all – that give this place a worldwide reputation among scholars. Its most important works, which are on display to the public, include a 1455 Gutenberg Bible, a 1410 Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, a 1623 first folio of Shakespeare plays and Audobon’s Birds of America.

Other significant documents, all of which can only be accessed by academic researchers, include the second largest collection of 15^th-century English literature in the U.S. (behind the Library of Congress), half of all the book titles printed in England before 1641, and extensive collections of manuscripts and letters by Wallace Stevens, Jack London, Christopher Isherwood, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, William Butler Yeats and Ford Madox Ford.

Although much of the library’s world-famous collection is off-limits to direct viwing by the public, the Huntington has a well-earned reputation as an institution that engages the public enthusiastically, offering an ambitious program of exhibitions and workshops that span everything from classes in Chinese art techniques and kids’ nature programs to chamber music concerts and botany classes.

Two special exhibits that are currently on view are “Christopher Isherwood: A Writer and His World,” continuing through Oct. 3. Isherwood (1904-1986) was best known for his semi-autobiographical work, The Berlin Stories, that inspired the later hit movie, Cabaret. The second exhibit, “The Bible and the People,” running through January 5, 2005, uses 170 of the library’s collection of Bibles and related manuscripts to show how the sacred text was adapted to changing needs through the ages. For instance, the exhibit includes a copy of the first Bible ever translated into a Native American language as well as various early English translations from the Latin that pre-dated, but also helped lead to, the Reformation.

Their web site.  

By Patrick Totty