LIBRARY NOTES
Henry S. F. Cooper
In Memoriam: Phyllis Goodhart Gordan
Thursday, September 1, 1994
Phyllis Goodhart Gordan joined the board of our Library in 1959; at the time of her death, last winter, her penetrating and kindly intelligence had guided our activities for thirty-five years.
Many of the Library's decisions were made over tea and cinnamon toast in her book-lined library on East 78th Street, and her wonderfully generous bequest is only one of the contributions, so many of which were of the mind, for which this remarkably spirited woman will be remembered. In her later years, her refusal to be incapacitated by ever-advancing Parkinson's Disease was the admiration of all her friends and colleagues; her indomitable spirit overrode her illness so completely that she caused us all to ignore her infirmities as completely as she did herself.
Her life was devoted to books and the intelligent use of them. In 1931, when she was admitted to Bryn Mawr College, she won the highest examination score in the college's history - a sufficiently joyful event that the Brearley School, wishing to bask in the glory of having educated her, announced a school holiday. In 1938, she married John D. Gordan, a scholar in English and American literature who later became curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.
She herself was a scholar and collector of Italian Renaissance literature - she published an annotated translation from Latin of the letters of a pair of Renaissance book collectors with whom, despite a gap of several hundred years, she must have felt a certain resonance. For clearly in her life and work - and as a trustee not only of our Library but of the New York Public and the Yale Library Associates, as well as of the Brearley School, Bryn Mawr College, the American Philological Association, and the American Academy in Rome - she was a Renaissance woman herself.
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