Guarded by scarlet leather-bound doors and bordered inside with gilt-lettered books and marble busts, the Boston Athenaeum for decades was the province of the city’s elite families. The Cabots and the Adamses and the Coolidges all claimed membership in the private library on Beacon Hill, handing down their membership “shares’’ through the generations.
To belong to the Athenaeum – to have license to troll through the personal library of George Washington and a rare collection of Confederate documents and memorabilia – was to belong to Boston’s highest society, or at least have access to it. Entree was coveted, sought after, and not always granted.
“Any barriers that surround it have been high enough to keep out nuisances,’’ the Athenaeum’s library director from 1946 to 1973, Walter Muir Whitehill, once said.
Yet in an age when elite institutions are no longer built on last names, and in the face of new technology and a battering recession, the Athenaeum has found itself confronting new realities. With its membership of several thousand slipping and an endowment that plummeted by a quarter since 2007, trustees have been forced to embrace what once would have been unthinkably gauche, or simply un-Athenaeum-like: an out-and-out membership drive.
The library has begun advertising in Boston Magazine and the Improper Bostonian. It has hired a marketing director, and traded the demure name-only sign on the front of its building for one with a come-hither photograph of the luminous fifth-floor reading room. It has reduced the number of references required for new members from four to two, opened up select lectures to the public, and created a fan page for itself on Facebook (after the concept was explained to trustees by a young member). As part of its pitch, the library is making known that it has wireless Internet access and recently purchased five Kindles that can be uploaded with some of the its collection.
