Special Collections

For me, the best part about trying to write historical fiction is having an excuse to go to the library. I’ve always loved libraries. Not only because of all the books, although they are obviously a big draw for someone who loves to read. And not only because of the lack of distractions, although that certainly helps. Ultimately, there’s something about the energy of other people working in the same space that generates an intense focus I can’t seem to achieve anywhere else.

Then there’s the fun of research.

Inspired by my two Italian American grandmothers, I’m currently working on a novel set in Newark, New Jersey in the late 1920s. An amazing amount of the information necessary to recreate an accurate version of that world is available online, in part due to the efforts of the Newark Public Library, Rutgers University and other repositories to digitize their collections and make them more accessible. For example, I’ve been able to obtain electronic versions of detailed atlases of Newark in 1926 that show, in addition to the expected street layouts and building locations, electric and sewer lines. They even show what material the buildings were made of (brick, wood, plaster or stone).

Even so, large amounts of valuable primary source material can’t or won’t ever be uploaded. Like the dusty ledgers from an old business school that I was looking at this weekend at the New Jersey Historical Society. Sure, the content of those ledgers could eventually make its way to the web through scans of each page (although God only knows who would undertake such a task—or why). But those scans could never convey the critical details needed to experience the ledgers in the same way as the people who created them so long ago. The heft of the books. The fragility of their pages. The texture of their leather covers. For that, you need to actually have the ledgers in your hands.

Of course, even for a library enthusiast like me, research can sometimes be a grind. You can’t find what you’re looking for. Or you can’t figure out exactly what it is that you’re looking for or where you might find it. You wish it was like the good old days when you could simply regurgitate the World Book Encyclopedia or Encyclopedia Britannica for some elementary school report on the life stages of a frog. Now your kids don’t even know what an encyclopedia is.

Then again, there’s something so satisfying about the moment when your research suddenly hits. When you find that tiny historical detail you need in a sociological study of Italian immigrants written by a history major at Princeton in 1940. Or an in-house magazine for employees published in 1925. Neither of which have been read by anyone else in years, perhaps even decades. Just quietly waiting in the archives to be rediscovered.

By you.