The Reisner Collections: Frivolity in the Stacks

Walk a few steps past the American history monographs on the fourth level of Widener's stacks and you will find yourself amid such engaging titles as The Vice Czar Murders, Death in the Wheelbarrow, The Corpse Wore a Wig, and Who Cut the Colonel's Throat? You are looking at some of the nearly 2000 detective novels from the 1930's and early 1940's that the University shelves with other fiction in the PZ section. And although Widener's librarians are doubtless more comfortable thinking of these books as the George A. Reisner Collection, official terminology cannot disguise the irredeemable frivolousness that fairly shines through enveloping mists of scholarship.

Chephren's Secret

The source of this effulgence--or, more prosaically, the man who bequeathed his thrillers and shockers to Harvard--was George Andrew Reisner '89, an eminent: Egyptologist who won fame by "solving the mystery of the Sphinx." (He showed that its head is a portrait of Chephren, a fourth-century Pharaoh who built the second Pyramid.) Born Nov.5, 1867, in Indianapolis, Reisner was graduated from the College summa cumlaude and then earned a Ph.D. here in Semitic Languages.

After serving as instructor in Semitic Languages (1896-97), assistant professor of Semitic Archaeology (1905-10), and assistant professor of Egyptology (1910-1914), he was named professor of Egyptology (in 1914), and occupied that chair until his death on June 6, 1942, at the Harvard Camp in Curo. Reisner spent nearly all his adult life in Egypt as director of expeditions sponsored by Harvard, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Egyptian government. Photographs show him as a portly figure with wire-rimmed glasses and a bristling mustache; he looks strikingly like Theodore Roosevelt. To his co-workers, it is said, he was known as "Papa George."

A Surprise

Despite the demands of his work, Reisner was able somehow to build, and bequeath to the University, his extensive mystery collection. Because his secretary asked that British and American troops in Egypt be allowed to read the books, Harvard did not receive Reisner's bequest until 1945. Although the story that it was expecting a shipment of soberminded treatises seems dubious, Widener's cataloguers were surprised to discover that about a fifth of the novels had been graded, much as term papers are graded by professors in Cambridge.

The grades, which are in pen, pencil, or crayon on either the flyleaf or title page, clearly represent Reisner's judgment. Many are in his handwriting, but some seem to have been set down by someone else--possibly a person who read the mysteries aloud, for Reisner's eyesight failed in his later years. An example of a dictated grade may be found in Night Express Murder by L.A. Knight: "A (he says B plus, but he enjoyed it until the end, which was poor)."

The grades range from "A" to "D," but Reisner seems to have marked a few of the worst mysteries with an "X"; an extended search recently turned up two of these--Murder Island, by Wyndham Martyn, and The Screaming Skull and Other Stories, by Sidney Horler. Almost as rare were "A plus" novels: He Could Here Slipped, by Frances Beeding, Murders Force Fours, by David Hume, and The Happy Highwayman, by Leslie Charteris, were the only ones unearthed. The majority of the books received some variety of "A" or "B", however, and students who have read portions of the Reisner collection report that the grades are reasonably accurate, erring, if at all, on the side of generosity