There are few sights on the East Coast as impressive as Professor Richard Macksey's library.
The 75,000-volume collection in his Guilford home is the subject of a documentary to be released this summer, and it has been recognized by sources as variable as Johns Hopkins Magazine, Baltimore publications and Style. It made Macksey laugh to recall it, saying that he had been surprised to be featured in a magazine he associated with home remodeling. His house was used for a story on libraries and architecture.
"Collecting is a pathological thing," Macksey said, sitting in a big chair in his library and smoking his pipe with deliberation. Any question that the professor was asked invariably turned into an epic story.
Recounting how his collection got started, he began with a description of his childhood in New Jersey, when he would take the trolley into town with a few coins to get lunch and a book. The first novel he bought for what would become an immense collection was Henry James's debut novel, Roderick Hudson.
"Some people have a focused idea of what they want to collect. Focus has never been my strong suit. You know, [books] bring people together and you share them. It's not a totally benign vice, but it's not the worst vice either. " Macksey said he has even collected bad poetry, as well as things he really likes, and describes himself as a pack rat.
Some of his volumes are very rare, such as first editions of Tristam Shandy, books inscribed by their authors, and correspondences of authors as varied as Henry James and W.B. Yeats. He has some duplicate volumes, which includes in his collection Coleridge; authors like Coleridge constantly revised their work and published different editions of their works in their lifetimes, as well as different editions which were released posthumously.
When asked what he wishes he had more of, Proust comes up as a favorite author Macksey seems to want to collect forever. He also loves biographies and said that they often get his attention when he least expects it.
The professor has taught many courses over the years at his home, a staple in the minds of those who have taken his classes at Hopkins. Wishing to have cookies and coffee and to have the books handy, the image of Macksey at the head of the table in his library never changes. He is always there smoking his pipe, speaking effusively both on-topic and about anything else that comes to his mind, often with his fingers interlaced and resting against his lips as he thinks.
Macksey fought in the Korean War and later attended Princeton University, where he studied ancient mathematics. He went to Hopkins for graduate school in 1953 with the intention of studying science and going to medical school. Instead, he earned a doctorate in comparative literature in 1957 and began to teach at the University two years later. He laughs at the reason for doing so - his need to get a job, since at this time he got married.
"At that time, and it's still true, you could mix and match degrees," Macksey said, explaining how he ended up taking humanities classes in Gilman Hall and studying with some of the great Hopkins professors of the era: Leo Spitzer, René Girard, George Boas and Nathan Nettleman, among others. His interests remained wide and varying, and his graduate work, then his teaching, encompassed a great deal of them.
"I've wandered," Macksey said succinctly, describing his path from this point forward. He has taught a wide variety of courses over the years on the Homewood campus and at the medical school. He taught in an experimental program called the History of Ideas and contributed to the creation of the Humanities Center as Hopkins students know it. Additionally, he taught in a program called the Physician in Society at the medical school, focusing on a variety of topics from medical literature to medical history and many things in between.
"The thing that I like about Hopkins is that you don't have to move very far, physically and in some ways intellectually, to find new terrain," he said, reflecting on how expansive his studies and his teaching have been. He has taught everything from film classes to literature to medical history.
In the many years that Macksey has been here, he has seen many social and political changes in the nation, the city of Baltimore and at Hopkins. Many things that have changed he sees as positive.
"There were times when you really had to knock on an administrator's head rather hard to get an answer if it had to do with undergraduates. That's not the case now." Research and opportunities in general have expanded to undergraduates in forms that were never available before.
Macksey had never thought that he would stay at Hopkins, but when he was offered a job by "a California institution that will remain nameless" and realized that he did not want to leave.
"I'm happy here," he said. "Hopkins was extraordinary in many respects."
One of Macksey's favorite stories about Hopkins is how a female friend of his was admitted at the medical school in the 1920s, decades before Harvard and other prestigious American universities started taking women.
Macksey enthusiastically recounted his experiences at the University, including strange ones. The weirdest experience he had, he said, was when he was first teaching here. He had been doing work in Gilman Hall until "5 or 6 a.m." one night and then walked outside to see what he thought was the end of the world. The professor saw a large object in the sky coming towards him, getting bigger and bigger, and he thought it was a comet about to crash into Earth. He soon realized that it was actually a rocket with sodium flares that had been launched off the coast of Delaware.
However, Macksey has never proceeded along the University's guidelines with blind acceptance, and voices his discontent when he believes it is merited.
"It's very easy for things to stall here because we don't have the size of most modern research universities - we are building buildings, but we need to rebuild [departments]," he said, in a rare moment of criticism.
Macksey worries that some departments, particularly within the humanities, are dwindling in size. He used the example of the English department, which he believes is phenomenal in part because of its small size. However, he said it has gotten even smaller over the years, though new appointments have been made, and he worries for the future of the non-science departments at Hopkins.
The ultimate symbol of the professor's fears is the renovation of Gilman Hall.
Macksey agreed that the new building will mean tremendous new opportunities for students and student research, and he is curious as to what will happen. However, he is dearly attached to Gilman Hall as he knew it and worries about what will change.
Expressing his frustration with blanket statements about the new building, he said, "We are told that this is a confirmation of the importance of the humanities at Hopkins.Well, I mean Disney World shows the importance of Cinderella. What kind of statement is that?"
Macksey would like to see the campus's ecological state to keep improving, and he hopes that trees will not keep disappearing. He has been very happy with his life at and around the University but hopes that the current generation will proceed with caution in these new surroundings.
"People will say the amenities have been definitely improved. It's true, except I get a little shiver when I hear somebody say well, you know, I'm never going to go outside Charles Commons - everything I need is there. Well, we might as well have the University functioning in otherwise unused dirigibles," he said.
He bemoaned the fact that many students never attend the art museums or sports games or take advantage of the city's many other opportunities, and he hopes that the expansion of the University does not create isolation from Baltimore itself.
"I don't want to be a Pollyanna about Hopkins. There are a lot of things that worry me, a lot of priorities that aren't fully recognized, but I do think it allows people to change their minds. I hope that the students are going to walk outside, intellectually and physically."
