What the Archive Forgets: Montclair Students Visit the Morgan Library

“A friend who never changes” was the bookplate motto of Belle da Costa Greene, the legendary New York librarian who built the Morgan Library’s collections and shaped its identity as an institution for over four decades. It is a motto that says everything about Greene’s devotion to books, and nothing about the secret she kept for a lifetime.

Founded as the private collection of financier J.P. Morgan and opened to the public in 1906, the Morgan is home to one of the world’s great collections of rare books and manuscripts and famously called the “Bookman’s Paradise.” Students from the cross-listed course American Archives (ENG 501 / HIST 463), taught by Professor Steffi Dippold, recently visited its collections as part of the semester’s immersive exploration of how archives are made and what they conceal. Each student also researched a primary document from a local New Jersey collection, practicing hands-on how to work and write with archival materials.

At the Morgan, they stood before one of its Gutenberg Bibles, confronting the material origins of the print culture they had been studying all semester, and learned that the trailblazing Belle da Costa Greene chose to pass as white for her personal safety and professional survival during a deeply segregated time. The Bookman’s Paradise, it turns out, had its own hidden chapter. Both encounters spoke directly to the course’s central question: how archives preserve and forget — and whose stories are remembered, and who is cast away.