The much-awaited young scientist finally arrived in Detroit on a hot day in August 1838. His hosts were the organizers of the barely-born University of Michigan, a tight little band of movers and shakers that included the governor himself, Stevens T. Mason. They lined up to shake hands with Asa Gray, the man they had chosen to be the first member of the university’s faculty.

They saw a smallish man of just 27, “quick in his actions,” alert-eyed, handsome in the studious vein. They toured him around the city, talked of their ambitions for the university, then packed him off on the three-hour journey to Ann Arbor — 30 miles by rail, ten more by stagecoach.

Gray instantly liked the site for the campus. “The grounds...are very prettily situated,” he wrote to a friend, “and in a very few years it will be the prettiest possible place for a residence.”

More meetings...more details of his appointment...then his instructions about what to do next.

Since the university so far had neither buildings nor students, Gray was to be on leave with a year’s salary of $1,500 and essential work to do.

He was to tour the intellectual capitals of Europe.

He was to see what the best European universities were up to.

Most important, he was to take along $5,000 to purchase a collection of books. They would be the foundation and sustenance of the new university — food for research, teaching, and discussion.

The key figures among the regents knew what sort of books they wanted. Gray was a botanist, as they well knew, but they wanted him to make his purchases across a broad range of knowledge, in keeping with the university’s broad mission — “Standard English Works in history, biography, voyages and travels, poetry, statistics, science and one copy of the most approved British Annual Register,” a standard reference work.

Before he left town, Gray squeezed in a little botanizing, collecting a specimen or two of Michigan flora for friends, then hurried back to New York. He was delighted with the turn his life had taken and impressed by the enterprise he had joined.

“The board [of regents] are determined to prescribe a course of studies and training which shall bring the school up at once to the highest standard,” he told a friend. “I do not think that there exists another board of regents in the country that will compare with this for energy and capability.”

He put his affairs in order and boarded the packet ship Pennsylvania for its regular run to Liverpool.

For the moment, the regents could congratulate themselves on a promising start toward their goal of establishing a great university on the American frontier.

But none of it would turn out quite as planned.

Just as the regents had hoped, Asa Gray would become the preeminent American botanist of the 19th century — but at Harvard, not Michigan.

And sure enough, a wonderful collection of books, the core of a world-class library, would arrive a year later in Ann Arbor.

But it was another man who bought most of them, not Gray. And while Gray’s name is revered in U-M lore, the other man’s work has been all but forgotten. He was the real founder of the library, and thus the key figure in laying down the intellectual infrastructure for the university to come.

Getting started

One year earlier, in the summer of 1837, the regents had set the university in motion, a legal step authorized by the state’s new constitution. Then they chose a site for a campus — the 40 acres, more or less, that would become the Diag.

But now they had to bring the enterprise to life. They needed professors, students, buildings, equipment, and the lifeblood of learning — books.

Several members of the board, plus close associates interested in the university, were learned, curious men with an instinct for the cultivation of knowledge. Zina Pitcher, Detroit’s leading physician, was an accomplished amateur botanist. Henry Schoolcraft and Douglass Houghton were geologists and explorers. C.W. Whipple was a prominent lawyer who would soon be the new state’s chief justice. Governor Mason, chairman of the regents ex officio, was committed to a broad, democratic system of public education.

They meant to get the university up and running, but they were busy men of affairs. They needed real educators on the ground doing full-time work. Who best to do that job?

That was one question.

Another was how to get books.  

Regent Schoolcraft, educated at Middlebury and Union Colleges, knew that if they took the usual method of assembling college libraries — begging private donors for gifts from their own stock; buying a few volumes a year with skimpy appropriations — it would take forever for Michigan to assemble a respectable collection.

Another problem: Many important books in the Western canon were available — at affordable prices, anyway — only in Europe.

Pitcher and Schoolcraft were friendly with John Torrey, a highly regarded botanist-chemist in New York. He might give advice on both of their pressing questions. He knew many of the best young minds on the East Coast, and had, just a few years earlier, toured Europe to purchase 7,000 books for the University of Vermont’s library.

Torrey said he knew just the man — Asa Gray, a brilliant young botanist who was working with Torrey.

Torrey’s letters to the Michiganders haven’t survived, but we have his endorsement of Gray to a colleague at Princeton.

“He is a first rate fellow & is good both in Chemistry & Natural History,” Torrey said. “He would do great credit to the college, for he must make a noise in the world — and he will be continually publishing. ... Keep your eye on him.”

A scientist in the making

Born to a tanner’s family in central New York in 1810, Gray had shown early promise in school, and as a teenager he became fascinated by plants. But in the 1820s, a youngster with scientific interests had only one realistic career path — medicine. He duly entered a little medical college where he discovered he had no appetite for dissecting cadavers. But he struggled on to hang out his shingle as a doctor, doing botany in every spare hour.

Then he began to scent opportunity.

In Jacksonian America, education was spreading. Textbooks would be needed. New states were commissioning scientific surveys of their natural features and resources. The advent of microscopes was revolutionizing the study of biology. The new Linnaean system was fueling a quest to classify all living things, especially in North America, with its vast reaches of wilderness.

So Gray took a leap. He cast off from medicine to teach, then found a position as librarian-curator of the New York Lyceum of Natural History.

This was a fortunate turn. Lyceums might be seen as modest forerunners of research universities. They were collections put together by amateurs in the sciences. Members made their living in other fields — medicine, law, the clergy, teaching. In the lyceum they pooled their books, scientific specimens, and equipment; published papers; and gathered for discussion. A lyceum provided what a university would soon provide to full-time scholars and scientists — an environment for the pursuit of new knowledge.

In his spare time, Gray began to assemble the first American textbook in botany. In a storm of work in a Greenwich Village boarding house, he completed The Elements of Botany in the fall of 1835. Publication (for $150) put him on the map in American science.

But he was still looking for a paid position as a full-time scientist.

The botanist-chemist John Torrey, another scientist making his living however he could, had invited Gray to help him develop a definitive reference work, Flora of North America. He began to spread Gray’s name around.

Gray had set his sights on the biggest thing going in science — the United States Exploring Expedition, commissioned by President Andrew Jackson to survey the flora, fauna, geology, and geography of the Pacific Ocean. He won the appointment as the expedition’s botanist. It was a chance to help make scientific history. But bickering in Congress was causing endless delays, and Gray was losing hope the thing would actually happen.

That was when Michigan heard about him.

The regents moved fast. Douglass Houghton offered Gray a job as botanist on his survey of Michigan. Then the regents asked him to come out to Michigan to discuss a position as their university’s first professor.

When they said they wanted Gray to spend a year in Europe, the deal was sealed. He coveted that chance even more than the Exploring Expedition. He could meet Europe’s best scientists, assemble his own collection of botanical books, and study the Europeans’ collections of North America flora, which were much richer than America’s own.

He accepted the job.

Oh, and buy books? All right, he said, he could do that, too.

* * *

Back in New York, hurrying through his preparations, the young man jotted a list of books and equipment to buy for his new employer. It was heavy on science. He seems to have left Ann Arbor without clear instructions about just what sort of books he was supposed to buy.

Luckily, Governor Mason reined him in.

In New York to get married, Mason set Gray straight. His charge was to buy books in many fields of study, the governor said, not just in science.

Suddenly Gray understood he had been given a task beyond his competence. He was well read, yes, but well read enough to stock a university library? He was determined to use his year abroad to build his career in botany. How could he find the time to buy $5,000 worth of books?

The hand-off

Gray soon reached London, where he made contact with an even younger American with ambitions just as large as Gray’s.

This was George Palmer Putnam. At 15 he had fled a puritanical Boston family to make his fortune in New York. In a Broadway book store he learned the book trade just as America’s great age of print was getting underway. Literacy was spreading. The penny press was rising. Books were selling.

Barely 20, Putnam, a voracious reader, spotted a burgeoning market for general knowledge in the literate middle class. In 1833, based on his own intensive reading, he wrote and published a reference work called Chronology, or an Introduction and Index to Universal History, which would go through many editions and bring him a significant pot of money.

He was soon made junior partner in the publishing house of Wiley & Putnam, and he promptly crossed the Atlantic to be the company’s agent in Europe. One of its first contracts was with Gray and John Torrey to print Flora of North America. That was doubtless the reason Gray and Putnam met up in London. They dined together and saw the sights, looking in from the visitors’ gallery on the House of Lords.

Here, Gray realized, was his deliverance from the job of buying thousands of books in fields he knew little about. He promptly handed off the Michigan job to Putnam, who was surely delighted to earn a commission while touring the best bookstores in England.

For the next 10 months, Gray visited universities, conferred with scientists and studied botanical specimens from London to Paris to Bologna to Vienna to Munich. He bought lots of books. But only a relative handful were meant for Ann Arbor. Most were works of botany and biology for his own use, paid for with the $1,500 the regents had advanced as his salary for the year.

Meanwhile, George Putnam did the delightful work, for a book man, of filling Gray’s order for the far-off University of Michigan.

* * *

In September 1840, a year after his arrival in London, Gray spent three final weeks in the city, where it appears that he and Putnam had to scramble to complete U-M’s purchasing in time for Gray to make the Atlantic crossing before winter.

Finally the botanist packed off ten cases of books on the sailing ship Ontario — mostly his own, it appears — then arranged to bring all or most of Michigan’s books along with him on his own voyage home in October. “I have been busy enough in purchasing books for the Michigan Library,” he wrote his father, “and shall have my hands full until the end of the month.”

The books sat in storage on the East Coast for a time, then were shipped to the Detroit warehouse of Chester & Stringham at the foot of Woodward Avenue. In the early spring of 1840, they were hauled to Ann Arbor and stored in one of the brand new buildings — probably one of the four houses built for professors, possibly the one that would become the President’s House.

The books

It was a fine collection, certainly sufficient to serve as the core of a great library to come.

According to Russell Bidlack, the first dean of Michigan’s School of Library Science (1969-1985), who studied the early library in depth, Putnam’s and Gray’s purchases broke down as follows:

• Bought by Putnam: 1,284 titles, 3,122 volumes
• Bought by Gray: 129 titles, 279 volumes
• Total: 1,413 titles, 3,401 volumes. (Bidlack said these figures were approximate, since some may have been books that Gray bought for himself. The records are not entirely clear. Others estimate the total at closer to 3,700.)

Of course the regents had not picked the books themselves. But they heartily approved of Putnam’s selections, and that was a signal of the sort of university they were planning.

Clearly they did not envision professors and students droning through ancient philosophers or tomes of theology for clerical trainees — the standard fare of traditional college training. Rather, the collection embraced new branches of inquiry, chiefly in the humanities, and a broad definition of what it meant to be educated. Nearly 80 percent of the titles had been published since 1800, and nearly all were in English. It was a modern, accessible collection.

The largest categories, in keeping with the regents’ instructions, were voyages and travel (169 titles); biography (154 titles); and British history (129 titles). Poetry, literature, and drama accounted for 185 titles in all. The fewest purchases were in classics in the original Latin or Greek (nine); and agriculture (ten).

It must have pained Gray to learn there were only 59 titles in the sciences, just six percent of the total. But again, that was Putnam following the regents’ wishes, and their main wish was to lay a foundation to build on. The sciences were flourishing. So the regents may have thought to save their science spending for books that were still being written. (Gray sent just one book on botany back to Ann Arbor.)

Putnam made sure Michigan would have essential works of the Western canon such as Goethe’s Faust (in five translations); two complete editions of Shakespeare, plus commentaries and a two-volume biography of the Bard; and Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. (Only a smattering, including the Qur’an, came from the world beyond Europe and North America.)

But he also bought a miscellaneous treasure of contemporary works from across the branches of knowledge. A scattershot sampling: James Buchanan’s Sketches of the History, Manners and Customs of the North American Indians (1821); The Steam Engine: Its Invention and Progressive Movement, by Thomas Tredgold (1838); Andrew Ure’s Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines (1839); Poems by William Sotheby (1825); William Cooke Stafford’s History of Music (1830); Mrs. A. T. Thomson’s Memoirs of the Court of King Henry the Eighth (1826); The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, by Joseph Strutt (1801); H.H. Wilson’s Select Specimens of the Theater of the Hindus (1835); and the bestselling Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott.

For this bibliography, Asa Gray received fulsome praise from the regents, who apparently knew little or nothing about the credit George Putnam deserved. In their minutes they reported: “The trust committed to Professor Gray has been executed in a manner which reflects much credit upon his judgment and discrimination in the selection and cost... We deem it fortunate for the interests of the Institution that such a basis has been laid for building up a Library which shall do honor to the Institution, and we trust its claims upon the funds of the Board for an annual and permanent increase, may be steadily borne in mind.”

The aftermath

As things were turning out, praise was about all the regents had to give Asa Gray.

In his absence, the university’s fortunes had plummeted. A long recession had deepened. In the Michigan legislature, infighting had broken out over public lands set aside for the university, and the regents had lost out. They had expected land sales to net more than $1 million to fund the university. Now much of that was gone.

The regents had to backpedal and delay. They asked Professor Gray to hang in there and await a turn in the university’s fortunes. For a time he did, but then Harvard University made him an offer he couldn’t refuse — the Fisher Professorship in Natural History. He never taught a class at Michigan.

But the books were in place.

In due time they moved from temporary quarters to the room designated as the university’s library in the building soon named Mason Hall, to honor the governor who had helped to hire Asa Gray. There they joined the first two books the regents had bought — John James Audubon’s multi-volume The Birds of America and Antiquitates Americanae, by the Danish historian Carl Christian Rafn, the first authoritative study to claim that Vikings were the first Europeans to build settlements in North America.

* * *

George Palmer Putnam (1814-1872) went on to found a publishing dynasty.

After returning to the U.S., he broke with John Wiley (whose name survives in another publishing house); launched a popular magazine; and started a publishing house that would bring Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to American readers. (He was also Asa Gray’s publisher for many years.) During the Civil War he took a leave from business to serve as Abraham Lincoln’s collector of internal revenue.

The firm Putnam passed down through several generations survives as G.P. Putnam’s Sons, publisher of such bestselling writers as Sue Grafton and Tom Clancy.

* * *

At Harvard, Asa Gray would establish a comprehensive taxonomy of North American plant life and become the nation’s most highly regarded authority in botany. He was the leading American advocate of the theories of his friend Charles Darwin, whom he had met on his trip abroad for U-M, though Gray believed evolution had a theistic origin. In 1864 he gave his collection of 2,200 books and pamphlets, some of them purchased on his European sojourn, to Harvard, along with 200,000 botanical specimens. The written materials were the basis of the Gray Herbarium Library at Harvard.

Nearly 50 years after his mission on behalf of U-M, the faculty senate sent Gray good wishes on the occasion of his 75th birthday.

“We trust that...you have never ceased to entertain an interest in the university which you aided to inaugurate,” they said, “and have some personal satisfaction in seeing the slender shoot of 1838 grown to the dimensions of the sturdy oak of 1885.”

Gray replied: “I cannot say how deeply I was touched and gratified by [your] congratulatory address... I am indeed glad that I have lived to see the acorn which was planted in my youth develop into ‘the long-surviving oak,’ vigorous and beneficent in its youth, and rich in the promise of future years. May its leaf never wither, nor its fruitage fail!”

He died in 1888.

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Sources include Russell E. Bidlack, “The University of Michigan General Library: A History of Its Beginnings, 1837-1852” (doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 1954); A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810-1888 (1959); Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (2000); Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876 (1987); Harley H. Bartlett, “Asa Gray’s Nonresident Professorship: The Beginning of the University in Ann Arbor,” Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, XLVII (1941), 217-219; Jane Loring Gray, ed., Letters of Asa Gray, vol. 1 (1894). The accession logs of the General Library, 1839-1922, which show the records of many books credited to “Wiley and Putnam,” are available in the HathiTrust Digital Library. See also “Establishing the University Library’s Collection: Asa Gray’s Purchase,” a website created by Eric Morgel, a student in the Michigan Library Scholars Internship Program, in 2017.

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