Community Partners

The Hampshire College Center for the Book was founded in the belief that its role in the community can be as important as its role on campus. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise, given that we are privileged to be located in one of the most favorable settings imaginable for studying and promoting the culture of the book. The Pioneer Valley of the Connecticut River is home to

• one of the richest intellectual environments in the United States:

The Five-College Consortium comprises Amherst and Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst; Smith College, in Northampton; and Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley. At the beginning of the new century, the five institutions enrolled more than 25,000 students and employed 1,900 faculty in the teaching of 6,000 courses. Taken together, the five college libraries hold some 5.5 million volumes, equivalent to the 16th-largest university collection in the United States. The Pioneer Valley is moreover home 30 museums, 19 art galleries, and 54 bookstores.

• a distinguished tradition of literary life:

Among the many authors associated with the Valley are theologian and evangelist Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), the abolitionists Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87) and Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883), the lexicographer Noah Webster (1758-1843), and the poets Emily Dickinson (1830-88), Robert Frost (1874-1963), and Sylvia Plath (1932-63). The Library of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst is named after a distinguished son of Western Massachusetts, pioneering scholar and African-American political activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1877-1963). The papers of Du Bois and several of the preceding figures are also housed in local collections. The Valley continues to be a home to authors in all fields of literary and scholarly endeavor.

• a vibrant community of makers of fine books:

The Pioneer Valley and neighboring areas of Western Massachusetts can boast of an impressive array of practitioners of letterpress printing, typography, calligraphy, book art and design, papermaking, and bookbinding. Indeed, this is arguably the richest concentration of book-arts resources and enterprises outside New York City. The region is now also attracting and generating considerable activity in the fields of electronic publishing and digital design.

We aim to serve as a clearinghouse and an incubator of ideas in the community. Attractively positioned between large public institutions (with their numerous and sweeping missions) and the private sector, we draw our inspiration in part from the Five-College consortial model: We seek to facilitate the pooling of resources and efforts, bringing various parties together and helping each to do what it does best.

We enter into varying degrees of collaboration with a core group of partner organizations and rely informally on a host of local friends and resources. We are very grateful for the warm welcome and many gestures of support that the community has displayed in the course of our short existence. We hope that our activities in the coming years serve to repay this debt.

Contact information: Prof. James Wald