Alice Gore King | From the Library Notes Newsletter, Wednesday, October 1, 1997

In 1937, the year I graduated from college, my family moved from 11th Street to 86th Street, and the Library moved from University Place to 79th Street—in that order in my mind. My concerns of the summer were centered on myself and my fun-filled days in Woods Hole. It was only years later that I realized and appreciated the enormous work my mother, Marion King, was doing as an assistant librarian at the Library. In Books and People, she tells about unwrapping bundles and the thrill she had making order out of the old papers:

The trustees' Minute Books started with the record of the first official meeting on May 7, 1754. Who managed to guard and preserve these, which covered the period from 1754 to 1832, and included the years of the Revolution when most of the Library's books were scattered and lost in the pillaging and destruction?

There were papers and the deed of the merger of the New York Athenaeum with the Library in 1839. One item was the first sample I found of the different methods of cataloguing. This, undated but probably of the 1760's, consisted of handwritten folio sheets fastened together with a pale blue ribbon. I made the happy discovery that not only did we have the first charging ledger of 1789 but a complete file, with one small break, of these great volumes containing the book borrowings down to the year 1908, when ledgers were replaced by cards. How many libraries have such a record?

So the old records emerged, heart-warming evidence of continuity—two hundred years of readers, eight generations out of three centuries, coming in, as now, for books or a quiet hour, to find solace, information, or diversion at this enduring source.

My mother saw every book into its new setting. That done, she gave her attention to our own move. The company that handled the Library's generously offered to do ours free of charge. She settled our possessions in the new apartment and then came to Woods Hole for a much needed vacation. I look back now and marvel.

Alice Gore King was the founder and Executive Director for thirty years of the Alumnae Advisory Center, an association that advised college women in getting jobs.