Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy

Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy is a 303-page catalog for the Morgan Library and Museum’s exhibition of the same name, which ran from October 25, 2024, through May 4, 2025. Both the catalog and exhibition explore the life and professional contributions of Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950), the museum’s first director upon its establishment as a public institution in 1924.Greene was a celebrated and highly visible librarian who served as J. Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian from 1905 to 1913 and, upon his death, worked closely with his son J. P. Morgan Jr. to continue to build the collection and make it accessible to the public as well as to researchers. In recent years, she has recaptured contemporary attention and imagination with the revelation that she was a Black woman who passed for white from her teenage years until her death. Greene’s life has been interpreted in recent historical fiction, such as Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray’s The Personal Librarian and Alexandra Lapierre’s Belle Greene, both published in 2021.A Librarian’s Legacy is comprised of nine essays, a foreword, and an afterword, written by expert curators, librarians, artists, and art historians. The introductory essay states the book’s goal to highlight Greene’s “identity, collections, and leadership” (23) while being a companion to the exhibition and inspiring further reading on her. The book is successful on all fronts. The catalog is not to be read in one sitting and is best enjoyed by reading an essay and exploring the ample notes provided at its end. There are approximately 700 notes in total; additionally, the 175 illustrations include photographs and artistic renderings of Greene and reproductions of her personal and professional collections. The reader is not constrained by the order of the essays as presented in the catalog and can navigate between those focused on Greene’s personal life and professional activities.A Librarian’s Legacy’s strength is that it delves into Greene’s deep contributions to and passion for the field of librarianship and sensitively addresses her reasons for and repercussions of passing. While the book tackles the issue of passing head-on, it focuses equally, if not more, on Greene’s extensive collection-building, outreach and curation activities, and mentorship of other female librarians. One obvious reason for this is that much evidence is still in existence of her professional life, while Greene intentionally destroyed most of her personal documentation, such as diaries and letters.At one point, Greene was one of the most well-known and highly paid librarians in the United States. Paradoxically, concurrent to being profiled in national publications such as The New York Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune, Greene had constructed a new identity. This was not a woman who adopted a false background and then faded into obscurity.The catalog’s contributors offer nonjudgmental examinations of her passing for white. More specifically, she publicly identified as “not Black” by adopting a Portuguese ancestry. Julia S. Charles-Linen’s essay presents Greene’s passing as performance, not deception. Deborah Willis’s essay emphasizes the modernity of how frequently and stylishly Greene posed for contemporary photographers.A Librarian’s Legacy provides an evenhanded attempt to place Greene within the legacy of Black librarianship and questions if she would want to be so placed. Essayist Rhonda Evans compares Greene to contemporary Black librarians and curators such as Vivian G. Harsh, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, and Catherine Latimer, some of whom could also physically pass but chose not to. These individuals established Black branches of libraries, built collections to document Black history and culture, and created opportunities for their communities. Greene and many in her family intentionally severed their connections to this community, and she certainly reached professional heights that her Black librarian peers did not. But at what cost? A Librarian’s Legacy attempts to answer this question in its final essay, Philip S. Palmer’s “Belle Greene as Director: Endings.”The introductory essay describes the many ways Greene’s leadership of the Morgan Museum and Library is still felt by its staff today. Similarly, Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty’s moving afterword sketches the similarities of her twenty-first-century career as a Black female librarian, collector, and administrator to Greene’s path one hundred years prior. Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy leaves the reader with a curiosity to learn more about her, a healthy opportunity to do so via the catalog’s extensive resource of notes, and the optimism that there is more to be discovered about Greene. Although she destroyed her personal archives, in recent years, letters and photographs have appeared in external sources.To conclude, this book makes a fitting addition to the developing canon of research documenting the contributions of Black librarians, including Laura E. Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (2024) and The Black Librarian in America: Reflections, Resistance, and Reawakening (2022), edited by Shauntee Burns-Simpson, Nichelle M. Hayes, Ana Ndumu, and Shaundra Walker.