The Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection
Sandra Stelts, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts The Eberly Family Special Collections Library
Illustration from Symzonia:
A Voyage of Discovery,
by Captain Adam Seaborn [pseud.].
New York: Printed by J. Seymour, 1820.
What does the 19th-century mania for polar expeditions have to do with utopia? That’s a question that occupies Hester Blum, assistant professor in Penn State’s English department, as she grapples with the compelling and under-analyzed utopian narrative Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery [1820], which describes a land inside the earth’s core ruled by the Good, the Wise, and the Useful. The narrative relies on the theories circulated by Captain John Cleves Symmes, who believed that holes in the North and South Poles could be used to travel through the hollow center of the earth to a habitable core. Symzonia’s evocative image of a distant polar world, perhaps America’s first utopian narrative, helped drive literary and commercial interest in polar exploration.
Blum is one of many scholars whose research has led them to the Special Collections Library, which is reputed to have the best collection of utopias in the world. The collection, named in honor of Arthur O. Lewis, associate dean emeritus of the College of the Liberal Arts and professor emeritus in the Department of English, acknowledges Lewis’s many contributions to Penn State’s collection and to the field of utopian studies. The pursuit of a definition of utopia still occupies Lewis, as does the topic of hollow-earth civilizations and how they got to “the hole in the middle.”
Cover of The Human Drift
by King Camp Gillette
(Boston: New Era Pub. Co., 1895).
The Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection contains nearly 4500 titles and is valuable for the study of communal societies, fabulous voyages, imaginative fictional utopias and dystopias, and the work of utopian theorists. A forthcoming endowment from Lewis will provide the means for further expansion of the collection, ensuring that it will remain a valuable source for future scholars. Researchers can learn more about the collection at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/speccolls/
new/rbm/collections/utopia.htm.
Most recently the collection was the focus of a Penn State lecture series and symposium, “Imaginary Cities: Fictions of Space in the Early Modern World,” sponsored by the Committee for Early Modern Studies (http://www.earlymod.psu.edu/index.html). An exhibition called “Imaginary Cities: Selections from the Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection" will be on display in the Special Collections Library, 104 Paterno Library, on April 13 and 14, and again from July 1 to August 31, 2007. The exhibition will feature fanciful descriptions of utopian cities, often situated on the edge of the known world, ranging from such examples as a 1563 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia to Bradford Peck’s The World a Department Store [1900].