Vallejo’s McCune Collection features historical treasures

VALLEJO — In the heart of downtown Vallejo, in a little-known room on the lower floor of the John F. Kennedy Library, resides the McCune Collection, which includes valuable rare books, old printing presses, the biggest assortment of binding materials west of the Mississippi and much more.

The collection was bequeathed to the library by Dr. Donovan McCune, who collaborated with the architect on the room’s design. McCune was a physician who worked at Kaiser Permanente Hospital, where he became chief of pediatrics. He died in 1976.

McCune loved Latin, rare books, and the art of book production, specifically printing and binding. 

Throughout his life he purchased a wide and varied collection, including incunabula (books, pamphlets and broadsides printed in movable type in Europe before the year 1501, most in Greek and Latin), Californiana (books about California history), children’s books from the 1800s, and fine printing by American and British publishers, among other treasures.

He also loved old printing presses, and the McCune Collection includes several examples, such as the Albion press, manufactured in 1852 in London. 

According to Henry Beecher, the longest current serving volunteer of the McCune Collection, McCune outbid a university to acquire the press and paid to have it shipped across the Atlantic. “It weighs 2,000 pounds,” Beecher said, “so he had to have his kitchen floor reinforced.”

Beecher said  the most precious gems in the collection are a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible, a collection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works printed in 1896 known as “the Kelmscott Chaucer,” and a geometry textbook published in 1847, “The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid.”

The Gutenberg Bible, produced in Germany between 1450 and 1455, was the first book printed with movable type in Europe and the start of the mass production of books.

“There was a book dealer who got a damaged copy of the whole Gutenberg Bible, so he broke it up into individual pages and sold them,” Beecher said. “That’s the oldest item we have.”

The Kelmscott Chaucer, printed by William Morris, took four years to complete. It is considered a masterpiece of book design, because it contains 87 woodcut illustrations based on drawings by pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, a friend of Morris. 

“It’s over the top,” Beecher said. “When you get to a new section of the book, across both pages perhaps 30% of the page is actual printed words, the rest is graphic illustrations.”

The 1847 geometry textbook is impressive because it’s printed in four different colors, which at the time required printing one color, letting the page dry, and setting the page to print again for every different color. “It’s just remarkable as an early example of multicolored printing,” he said. 

Beecher explained that the McCune Collection has a different status than the rest of the Vallejo public libraries. 

In the 1980s, all the libraries in Solano County, which had been owned by individual cities, became property of the county to cut costs, with the exception of Benicia Public Library, which had more resources and stayed independent. 

Yet Vallejo City Council decided to keep the McCune Collection as city property. “The county could choose to keep it, sell it, or whatever else,” Beecher said, “so the merger went forward with that exception.”

Keeping the collection as city property, however, had its problems. Whenever the county upgraded the libraries, such as the phone and computer systems or even the lights, the McCune room didn’t get those improvements, because the city didn’t have a separate budget to maintain it.

In 1985 Vallejo City Council authorized auctioning off a portion of the collection in order to permanently provide some financial support for it. 

“The decision was to have it appraised and make a determination about what were the key core materials versus peripheral,” Beecher said, “things that could be easily found or didn’t have the same merit.”

Those peripheral materials, which were about 60% of the collection, were auctioned and raised $65,000, which became a city-owned endowment fund specifically earmarked for the McCune Collection.

“The McCune Collection really belongs to all Vallejoans,” Beecher emphasized. “The Vallejo City Council and administration act as stewards on behalf of the community. However, the public would not have access to the collection or be able to benefit from it without the generosity of individuals willing to devote their time and energy [as volunteers].” 

In the mid-1990s, the McCune Foundation was established to help support the collection through fundraising and by providing other needed resources and services. For over 10 years the McCune Foundation has served as fiscal agent for the McCune Collection Commission.

“The foundation acts as a checkbook,” Beecher said. “The McCune Collection creates a budget for hospitality, supplies, publicity and so on, the foundation pays all the checks, keeps all the receipts, and twice a year presents them to the city’s finance department to get reimbursed from the endowment fund.”

Another change was introduced by Beecher himself after the Library Board was eliminated in 2014, leaving the McCune’s unpaid volunteers with no one to report to. 

Beecher proposed that the city create a commission to manage the collection and established the McCune Collection Commission. Its seven members serve four-year terms and can be reappointed.

The Commission is also seeking volunteers for several pending projects like organizing and cataloguing loose materials and creating a computerized index. 

The collection is open to the public on the first and third Tuesdays of the month from 2 to 4 p.m., Saturday mornings from noon to 2 p.m. and during the monthly Art Walk event. “We are considered one of the anchors of Art Walk,” Beecher said, “because we’ve been one of the longest continuous sites.”

During Art Walk, volunteers set up signage outside, coffee and cookies inside, and they display the work of local artists on two-month rotations.

Visitors can do a self-guided tour following a brochure that lists different parts of the collection. There are even interesting materials for kids, such as pop-up books from the 60s to the 1990s. 

“The most rewarding part of my involvement with the McCune Collection,” Beecher said, “is seeing the delight of visitors, especially first time guests, when they discover something they never knew about or they are able to enrich themselves by actually holding rare objects, like the Gutenberg leaf, which often isn’t possible elsewhere.”