The Leader

Tucked away, high up on the fourth floor of the Golda Meir Library, lies a little known room which you may only need to use once or twice during your entire time at UWM. The special collections room houses some of the oldest books you may ever see in your lifetime: including ancient leather-bound bibles, early edition literary works and more military history books than you can shake a stick at.

Although the title suggests that only exclusive and elite individuals may enter, this notion couldn't be further from the truth and is a preconception that head librarian Max Yela wants to dispel. The special collections room is open to everyone, for whatever purpose. Although access to the library shelves themselves is restricted to staff members, they are happy to provide you with any book you request, to browse within the comfort of the reading room. Some of these books are so sensitive to light that they are kept in a temperature controlled environment, housed in a locked darkened vault for most of the time (Mission Impossible, anybody?).

Special collections librarian Max Yela is happy to encourage more people to visit special collections and emphasizes that the department is not a museum, but a resource to be used whenever necessary by both students and non-academics alike.

"I feel that the nature of the Special Collections Department is misunderstood by many people," said Yela. "Our aim is really to emphasize that this is a public collection and that the public should be encouraged to use it. The only think we ask is that any person wishes to browse the collection must provided photo ID and treat the books with respect so that they may be preserved, in theory, forever," said Yela.

But what really make the books here as "special" as the name of the department indicates?

"The books we house here are really books which we feel have long term historical significance. Our main focus is books on the arts and social sciences, which really covers a broad range of things, for example, we have recently acquired a large collection of DC comic books."

Yes, here nestling alongside the 2nd Folio Shakespeare and early 19th century tomes about why contraception is morally wrong, you can also find an extensive comic book collection, mostly comprising of DC comic books, but also featuring more edgy artists such as Vertigo and adult comics Cherry's Jubilee (porn, to you and me). There is somewhere in the region of 5,500 comic books, mostly donated by collector Gary Pearl, and although all are not catalogued as of yet, there is more than enough to satisfy an avid comic collector and distract a student from the midterm they should be studying for. Max also indicated that he is looking into securing a collection of Marvel comic books and hopes to extend the collection further.

"I think that comic books are a valid part of book history, in that the rise of the graphic novel in its many forms is vital in terms of social history," Max said. "Although I have no intentions to purchase any comic books, I have had some offers from interested collectors who wish to donate their large collections to the department, and I certainly welcome them."

So next time you have a few hours to kill, why not spend them on the fourth floor of the library browsing through 30-year-old editions of Superman? Do this before returning to the real world without feeling too guilty about doing nothing, because, after all, you have just spent the afternoon in the library.

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