George Winship

July 29, 1871 (age 80)

Bridgewater, Massachusetts, United States

Upon graduation he remained at Harvard as an assistant in history, working with Edward Channing - lecturing a bit at Harvard and Radcliffe, and delving into American historical cartography. In 1895 Winship moved to Providence as librarian of the great private collection of pre-1800 Americana assembled by John Carter Brown and maintained by his widow in the family home on Benefit Street. He expected to spend a few years in Providence as a librarian in preparation for a career as a historian. Instead he stayed for two decades and became a librarian for life. While caring for the books and collecting Spanish Americana in Mexico for the Brown family, Winship steadily increased his knowledge as a historian. In 1896 his The Coronado Expedition was published by the Smithsonian Institution; his Cabot Bibliography (1900) established his reputation as a bibliographer of early voyages to America. A few years later the collection - and a new building to house it -was given to Brown University by the family. The library was dedicated on May 17, 1904. Winship remained as librarian until 1915, when he returned to Cambridge as librarian of the Harry Elkins Widener Collection in the newly opened building of the Harvard College Library. By bold and intelligent collecting, he secured for the John Carter Brown Library books and maps of great bibliographical importance, doubling the holdings. Winship maintained a network of intimate relations with bibliographers throughout both Americas and in Europe. Through his membership in the Club of Odd Volumes, which he joined in 1898, he placed that small group of bibliophiles in the advance guard of the revival of fine typography by inspiring the printing of books designed by Daniel Berkeley Updike, Bruce Rogers, and T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. With Winship's return to Harvard, his years as an aggressive acquirer of early Americana were over, for he became librarian of the personal collection of Harry Elkins Widener, a young Harvard graduate who had drowned in the sinking of the Titanic. As the shelves of the memorial room were already filled and nothing was to be added, Winship devoted his energies to collecting friends for the Harvard Library. At Providence in 1907 he had recruited a Pembroke College sophomore, Margaret Bingham Stillwell, to become an assistant at the John Carter Brown Library upon her graduation. Similarly at Harvard, by means of a highly idiosyncratic course in the fine arts department, "History of the Printed Book, " Winship enticed into the world of books undergraduates who became collectors and, in some cases, important benefactors of the Harvard Library. Winship left the Widener Collection in 1926 to become assistant librarian of Harvard College in charge of the Treasure Room, where he remained until his retirement in 1936. In 1927 he organized the John Barnard Associates, a lighthearted and bibulous blend of book collectors from the Harvard faculty, alumni, and undergraduate classes. Its initial members included Arthur Amory Houghton, Jr. , then a sophomore, who later gave the Houghton Library to Harvard as an expansion of the Treasure Room. A few years after returning to Cambridge, the Winships bought a farmhouse with a dozen acres of land on the Charles River in the town of Dover, where they were able to sustain the illusion of the older New England that he passionately loved. Although in later life his health was not robust, in 1941 he gave the Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. They were published four years later as The Cambridge Press, 1638 - 1692. George Parker Winship died on June 22, 1952, in Dover, Massachusetts.

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