King of the Road: An Appreciation of Russell Maylone

By Vince McCoy
Russell Maylone, Curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections for the past 37 years, long-time member of Caxton Club of Chicago, and respected Chicago area bibliophile, may be the last person you’d expect to have had a vagabond youth. But one summer when he was a college student at Syracuse University, he and a buddy decided to jump freight cars out to the west coast. They were able to get all the way from Rochester, New York to Kankakee, Illinois for free by riding the rails. In Kankakee they were able to hitch a ride further west to Twin Falls, Idaho. They were two college boys on a quest to reach Washington State, where Russell had a vague promise of a summer job at a small lumber company now known as the International Paper Company. Russell had no idea what the actual job would be, but the opportunity for a cross-country adventure was just too good to pass up. The job turned out to be deep in the forest making telephone poles. Russell loved the work, and he loved the Pacific Northwest. He returned to Washington State the following summer to work for Weyerhaeuser as a choker setter up on Mount St. Helens.

So how does a young man who loved mountain climbing and working outdoors with his hands end up as a rare-book librarian? Russell had an accident one day out in the woods and ended up in the hospital for several months. When he returned to school at Syracuse University, he was still a little fragile, and asked the Dean of the Library School, who was the father of one of his best friends, if he could have a study carrel in the closed stacks of the library. The Dean granted his request and Russell was allowed into the inner sanctum of the Syracuse library where students, and probably most faculty members, were never allowed to go. Russell explained how that experience in the stacks had an impact on his career: “At Syracuse we had the library of Leopold von Ranke, who was a 19th-century German historian who founded modern historiography. This collection of Venetian manuscripts and early printed books was in ruins. I was walking around one day and just walked right into it. I discovered what an amazing place it was and what amazing things old books were because it’s not the sort of thing that everybody got to see.” A bibliophile was born.

Russell didn’t start library school right away. After college he worked for a year for a man named Manny Slutzker whom Russell considers to be his mentor. From Russell’s description, Manny seemed like quite a character. He sold the rather unlikely combination of pipes, suit coats, and books … in that order. After taking one course in Library Science at Syracuse University, Russell decided he wanted to pursue a career as a rare book librarian. The Pacific Northwest again called to him, but this time to go to Library School at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Russell was recruited for Northwestern University Library in 1969 by Richard Press, then head of Collection Development. They met at Russell’s first job in 1965 at the Free Library of Philadelphia, where Russell’s boss had been Ellen Shafer, one of the great doyens of rare books in America. Richard Press was a frequent visitor at the Free Library. Russell recalls that his job interview at Northwestern was in Deering Library in a room in Special Collections now known as the Angling Room, but at that time it was University Librarian Thomas Buckman’s office. Looking out the large window that faces east, Russell could see the plaza and the three towers of the new University Library building still under construction. In his 37-year career at Northwestern, Russell has worked with four different University Librarians: Buckman, John McGowan, David Bishop, and Sarah Pritchard.

The aspect of his job that Russell most enjoys is talking with students and faculty members about materials in the collection. He encourages faculty members to bring their classes into Special Collections to view materials that could not otherwise leave the building either because of their value or because of the size or format of the materials. On the day I was interviewing him, Russell was expecting several students from art history professor David van Zanten’s class. They were interested in seeing materials from the collection about Paris. Russell and fellow staff member Scott Krafft would pull the books from the stacks ahead of time and have them waiting on tables for the students to examine.

During his tenure at Northwestern, Russell has had a major hand in shaping Special Collections into what it is today. When I asked what he considered to be the most significant purchase or collection he acquired during his years at Northwestern, he almost immediately replied: the creation of the women’s collection and the alternative collection. “That collection started out with the anti-war movement against the Vietnam war," Russell said. "You couldn’t walk down Sherman Ave without someone handing you something: leaflets, handouts, or flyers. We now have 8,000 titles of women’s materials. We also have files and files of anti-war materials and sexual freedom materials (gay and lesbian). We have 4,000 periodicals in the alternative collection that were mostly free at the time. After a while we developed a reputation and organizations would send us their materials unsolicited because they knew we would preserve them. So now we have an enormous archive of materials on the 1970s. It hasn’t really been fully exploited yet, but I think it will be as time goes on. It’s a unique documentation of the period.”

Russell is retiring from Northwestern at the end of this month. I first met him in the spring of 1971, when I was an 18-year-old Northwestern freshman. I regularly came into Special Collections to read gay liberation newspapers from the alternative collection. I was such a regular that Russell and the other Special Collections staff, such as Bonnie Jo Sedlak, the first curator of the women’s collection, got to know me very well. I can still make Russell blush when I remind him of the time that he inadvertently outed me in front of a full reading room by yelling across the room, “Hey Vince, have you got the April issue of Fag Rag over there!” I remember blushing furiously at the time but we can both laugh about it now, especially since Kent, the other student who was asking about that fateful issue, ended up becoming my first college boyfriend. So overall that was a pretty good day for me.

I’ll miss you Russell, old friend. Best of luck where ever the road next leads you.

Photo by Mary Hanlon