Robert William Glenroie Vail

Background

Vail was born on March 26, 1890, in Victor, New York. He was the son of James Gardiner Vail and Mary Elizabeth Boughton.

Although as an adult, he signed himself with the initials of his given names, or less often as Robert, Vail was known as Noah or Glen in his youth.

Education

Curiosity about the American past spiked Vail's ambition and shaped his career. As a student at Cornell University, he started compiling scrapbooks for the centennial of his hometown. He collected physical and literary items, such as a little-known account of an 1850 cross-country trip; this he edited and published in 1920 as his first work. After receiving a B. A. from Cornell in 1914, he enrolled at the Library School of the New York Public Library and began work there as a reference assistant.

Career

While keeping up his bibliographic pursuits by visiting bookstores, he met Wilberforce Eames, who had begun his career as a bookseller in Brooklyn, New York. Eames, impressed with Vail's knowledge of Americana, acquainted him with a vast, unfinished bibliographical project initiated by Joseph Sabin in the 1850's.

Sabin's goal had been the compilation of a complete bibliographic record of all the titles in American history and literature. He had published the first volume shortly after the Civil War, at which time he estimated that he would finish the project by 1880. When he died in 1881, however, he was only up to the letter P in what he had called the Dictionary of Books on American History.

Eames took over the project, reaching authors surnamed Smith before he abandoned the effort in 1892. Procedures had become complicated, and some scholars concluded that the attempt had been impossible even when Sabin had designed it.

Eames and Vail nevertheless used the dormant Sabin files to check unusual imprints that Vail was discovering. Vail's work was interrupted in 1916 when he entered the army. He spent his tour of duty at Fort Totten in New York. After military service, he returned to the New York Public Library for a short time, until he was hired as librarian of the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul.

In 1921, Vail moved back to New York City to join the Roosevelt Memorial Association, which was trying to publish in a single edition a complete collection of Theodore Roosevelt's works. As librarian of Roosevelt House, Vail produced the Memorial Edition of the Works of Theodore Roosevelt (1923 - 1926) in twenty-four volumes, of which Vail edited the final twelve.

Harvard Library later acquired the collection. Although Vail never finished a planned bibliography of Roosevelt's works, he did include separate bibliographies in some of the volumes of the Memorial Edition, and he published several of Roosevelt's writings that were hard to find, including Who Should Go West (1927) and The Value of Athletic Training (1929). In 1928, the New York Public Library rehired Vail as Eames's coeditor in completing the Sabin project, which the Bibliographical Society of America had revived with donations from the Carnegie Corporation.

The immense undertaking was progressing through Smith surnames when Vail began to sift through thousands of catalog slips from bookstores and auction houses. In 1930, as publication resumed, Vail was appointed editor of the project. Vail soon gained repute for writing an article that solved a long-standing bibliographic mystery. Patrons had been beseeching librarians to appraise a January 4, 1800, issue of a New York county newspaper that featured a notice of George Washington's death. Vail's article demonstrated that the issue had been reprinted many times throughout the nineteenth century.

Indeed, thousands of copies had been distributed at the centennial exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. That thorough establishment of provenance prompted the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester, Massachusets, a group devoted to the collection and publication of American history, to hire Vail as their librarian. He continued working on the Sabin project and completed it in 1936, when it was published as Bibliotheca Americana. The work comprises twenty-nine volumes, the last nine by Vail. It includes references to more than 250, 000 publications and identifies libraries throughout the world that own copies of these books.

In 1940, Vail became director of the New York State Library in Albany.

He remained there as state librarian until 1944, when he accepted the directorship of the New-York Historical Society in New York City, a position he considered the pinnacle of his career. He also encouraged librarians to learn about book acquisition and printing in order to answer questions about book production from its earliest stages.

He retired from the society in 1960 and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he died.

Achievements

• Vail's unusual talent for finding and listing every possible descriptive detail of rare works led to his reputation as a bibliographer's bibliographer. Vail's knowledge and ability flowered at the New-York Historical Society. He continued discovering manuscripts, one of which, to his delight, proved to be the original document that Napoleon signed authorizing the sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States. In 1954, Vail published a sesquicentennial history of the society titled Knickerbocker Birthday. Although the volume was criticized for focusing too intently on the society's officers, it did succeed in attracting financial contributions. A practical function of scholarship among librarians, Vail explained, was to raise funds and acquire material.

Works

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  • American Jewish Historical Quarterly: Organized at New York, June 7, 1982 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from American Jewish Historical Quarterly: Organi...)

  • Knickerbocker birthday;: A sesqui-centennial history of the New-York Historical Society, 1804-1954

    (Celebrating 150 years of the New York Historical Society ...)

  • Journal of a trip to California, across the continent from Weston, Mo, to Weber Creek, Cal, in the summer of 1850

    (Leopold Classic Library is delighted to publish this clas...)

  • Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Soci...)

  • Portrait Of The Old West: With A Biographical Check List Of Western Artists

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • The voice of the old frontier

    ( This volume contains the three lectures R. W. G. Vail d...)

  • A guide to the resources of the American Antiquarian Society : a national library of American history.
  • Bulletin of the New York Public Library
  • This Way to the Big Top!
  • The Ulster County gazette and its illegitimate offspring

Personality

Although a dedicated scholar, Vail demonstrated the broad range of his interests by becoming an authority on the American circus. He frequently brightened the libraries he administered with circus paintings and exhibitions. He liked to clarify his philosophy of librarianship, manuscript curatorship, and archival administration by employing metaphors of circus life. No master of synthesis, as a writer Vail usually failed when attempting a sustained, smooth narrative but nearly always succeeded in his bibliographies.

Connections

Vail married Marie Rogers on August 4, 1919; they had two children.

Father:

James Gardiner Vail

Mother:

Mary Elizabeth Boughton

Wife:

Marie Rogers

References

• A Dictionary Of Books Relating To America, From Its Discovery To The Present Time, Volume 3
• Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, from Its Discovery to the Present Time, Volume 2
• A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, From Its Discovery to the Present Time Vol. XVII