26,000 antique Italian books and assorted "shards of micro history"

UW-Madison Libraries, recipient
William "Jack" Fry, donor

From out of Italy

Examples of letters and religious devotional cards left with children abandoned at Italian churches. Herman Rauschning's Confidence di Hitler disguised as Collodi's Adventures of Pinocchio, as it was in 1939.

Lying among the aging papers, like the abandoned children they represent, are the oddly cut pieces of devotional cards--only halves or thirds--never wholes, and no matching pieces to complete the puzzle. These are the mementoes mothers kept for the children they could not.

Early this century in Italy, when a woman could not keep the child she bore, she could leave it anonymously with a Catholic church. She could place her child in a semicircular turnstile in the church wall, turn the revolving window, and leave her child inside as a ward of the church. In the hope of a future reunion, a mother could cut a religious devotional card into two pieces, usually at multiple angles, keeping one piece and tucking the other in the baby's blanket. If mother and child ever reunited, they could confirmed identities by matching the two oddly cut sections.

These shards of micro history as William "Jack" Fry calls them are what has made the last forty years casting about the shops of Italy all worthwhile. The emeritus professor of physics recently gave the libraries more than 26,000 documents on Italian history. He seems to know a bit of history attached to every piece.

"He has an eye for things that are going to have research value," says Ken Frazier, director of the UW-Madison Libraries. The Fry Collection has already provided the basis for a master's thesis.

The collection ranges from an Italian family archive of the late Middle Ages to increasingly rare twentieth century pamphlets circulating after World War II. Among the unusual finds is a book of anti-Nazi propaganda disguised as a piece of conventional literature believed to have been published in 1939. A partisan dust jacket advertises the book as an edition of Collodi's Adventures of Pinocchio. Yet, the book is actually Herman Rauschning's Confidence di Hitler, an Italian-language version of the often translated Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler and His Real Aims.

Fry began to collect old books in 1957 while still a new faculty member at the UW-Madison, about the time he started his collaboration with Italian colleagues at the universities of Padua and Milan. Fry made his first acquisition when he saw a man selling books and spotted something he thought would be nice to own. The man named a price. "I argued with him for half an hour and declared it was too much. I went back the next morning and argued some more. I paid $4." Here started his love of collecting.

"They were cheap; they were beautiful. And I had never seen centuries-old books before. I was so happy. As a child I had few books; I grew up in a rural community on a farm. The local school had no library. This was a new world for me. It was a discovery in many ways."

This joy of discovery accounts for the breadth of the collection. "It is the micro history that's interesting," he adds, "not the big things. The common life captured in letters, small town government, the bread baker and shoemaker."

Sometimes the occasion for the find is as fascinating as the find itself. In one astounding moment, Fry saved more than four centuries of local government papers that were being hauled to the dump with a forklift. Apparently city administrators were getting rid of the archive because they were building a new administration building. The material dated from as far back as 1570.

"The place for such documents is here," Fry says, "in a library where they can be preserved and used."

"The joy of serendipity . . . of discovery," says Fry, "is a powerful force."