Requiem for a library

By Gary Topping–

As faithful readers of The Boy Monk now know, Mike O’Brien and I have become the unplanned custodians of several hundred books from the now-defunct Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, the Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah from which this blog takes its name.  As I say, we did not seek this role: as it became apparent that the monastery was going to have to close, the monks began shopping around their approximately 25,000 volumes, hoping to place them wherever they would be appreciated and used.  The remainder went to Weber State University in Ogden, the closest major library.  The university placed the books on sale, but there were few buyers, and my friend Jamie Weeks, the head librarian, asked me if the Diocese of Salt Lake City, of which I happen to be the archivist, could use them.  I did not tell her that the diocese does not maintain a library, but I did indicate that I would like to take a look at what she had.  To our astonishment, before Mike and I could even get out of the parking lot, a courier from Weber began unloading big boxes with hundreds of books in my office—the first of two such deliveries.  Mike was generous enough to accept the second group, which we shelved in an unused room in his law offices.

It is a sad end to a happy episode in Utah Catholic history.  That library had been carefully assembled to meet a need, the development of the spiritual and intellectual life of the monks (they shared the library occasionally with outsiders as well).  But now that there is no role for the monastery, there is no role for their books, and Mike and I are the reluctant agents for the liquidation of their magnificent library.

Although we have been able to find recipients for some of the books, I see no future for most of the ones in my custody but recycling.  Almost all of them are in French, and they deal with heavy issues of philosophy, theology and scriptural study.  One of Mike’s law partners did select several dozen titles for his Francophile son, and three of us Boy Monk bloggers—Mike and I and George Pence—each found three or four volumes that we will use and cherish.

The rest of the volumes still languish in huge boxes in one corner of my office, awaiting the time when I can summon the will to begin the sad task of recycling.

But permit me to end on a happy note.  One of the books I studied and came to love in one of Glenn Olsen’s medieval history seminars at the University of Utah was the history of medieval monastic culture by the great Benedictine scholar Dom Jean Leclerc, translated into English as The Love of Learning and the Desire For God.  I was fortunate at the time to find a copy of the first English edition in a used bookstore.  Imagine my delight when I discovered among the monastery books a first French edition, L’Amour des Lettres et le Desir de Dieu.  Imagine further my delight when I noted on the title page the inscription (my translation of the French), “In memory of my trip to N[otre]. D[ame]. of the Trinity, Huntsville, Oct. 1962.  Jean Leclerc.”  The book is in library binding, which indicates that the monks already had this copy, which they asked Dom Jean to sign at the time of his visit.

So a small piece of the monastery library will live on in my own library, as the monastery itself lives on in my heart.