Among the objects held by the University of Idaho Library is a 30-inch globe supported by a four-legged walnut base, currently located in the Library’s Data Hub (previously known as the Map Room). A little digging into Special Collections and Archives’ holdings has uncovered the origins of the globe, which the Library acquired in the middle of World War II and has maintained ever since.
On October 9, 1940, M. Belle Sweet, then the Head Librarian, wrote a letter to the Weber Costello Company in Chicago Heights, IL. “We are interested in securing a really large geographical globe for our University Library; one that will be of lasting value and easily consulted,” she wrote. She added that the Library was interested in a globe with geographical features, including elevation, and not one with “all of the latest political developments” – an understandable preference, given that the upheavals of the early 20th century were still reshaping borders around the world.
B. Van Deusen, the Weber Costello representative who corresponded with Sweet about this purchase, did his utmost to impress. In his response to Sweet, he included a photograph of the company’s 30-inch model, “which we are sure will prove interesting to you – even though [the photograph] will fail to [convey to you] the massiveness and the beautiful coloring of the actual globe.” He stated that while the model was usually listed for $650.00, he was willing to sell the University of Idaho an existing showroom model for just $345.00, later lowered to $275.00 – the globe’s base showed some damage, and so the company was eager to let it go. Despite the damage to the base, however, Van Deusen insisted that “the globe ball is indescribably beautiful and I think, too, it is a little bit difficult to understand the magnitude of such a ball without having had an opportunity to see it.”
It is here that the ongoing turmoil of world affairs became relevant again: Sweet proposed this purchase to the president of the University of Idaho, Harrison C. Dale, noting that the Library had previously ordered a relief globe (depicting terrain elevations), but that order could no longer be fulfilled because that model was made in Europe, which was consumed by war in 1940, “and the supply in [the United States] is now exhausted.”
On November 28, the University of Idaho Board of Regents approved the purchase of a globe from Weber Costello, which President Dale communicated to Sweet via telegram: “BUY THE WHOLE WORLD.”
Although Weber Costello entered the Library’s order on December 2, almost four months passed before the Library received its globe. Weber Costello informed Sweet on December 17 that it had in fact already sold the showroom model intended for the Library, and the construction of a new globe would take two months (the company agreed to maintain the deep discount promised). After a number of unexplained shipping delays, the globe arrived at the University of Idaho Library on March 28, 1941. Although it did, in fact, depict the latest geographical developments (it includes the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for instance), Sweet wrote that the globe “surely is very good to look at.”
The written records of the globe’s history seem to end there, but the globe appears in photographs from several other Special Collections and Archives collections, indicating that it accompanied the Library in its many transformations over the following decades: the move to a new building in 1957 (no small feat, as it weighs hundreds of pounds), the Library’s large-scale renovation in the early 1990s, and other modernization projects that have tracked the evolving role of libraries in the modern world. Although the use of globes (and other physical sources of information) as educational tools has declined in the Digital Age, the Library’s globe has endured as an artifactual embodiment of both the university’s priorities in 1940-1941 and the broader historical context in which the globe was produced.
Resources
University of Idaho portrait collection, 1885-1981