MSU Libraries unveils new Special Collections space

Somewhere in heaven, Russel B. Nye, considered one of the fathers of popular culture, is smiling down on his beloved Michigan State University, where he was a professor of English for nearly 40 years.

The reason for Nye’s celestial smile is that MSU Libraries’ Stephen O. Murray & Keelung Hong Special Collections, which contains more than 500,000 printed works as well as ephemera, archival material and manuscripts, is moving from the basement to the third floor of the Main Library, thanks to a $13.8 million renovation project that increases the scale of the collection to 26,000 square feet and adds climate control and fire suppression.

“The new space prioritizes the physical care and security of the collection while simultaneously creating a synergy among the staff who support the research and engagement of our students and scholars,” head of Special Collections Leslie McRoberts said.

The opening of the new space will be recognized with a ribbon-cutting celebration from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Friday (Nov. 22). 

As a co-founder of the Popular Culture Association with Ray B. Browne and Marshall Fishwick, Nye was a leader of a movement that brought respectability to the study of mass culture, which was once considered low brow. He wrote more than a dozen books in his career, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel” and “The Unembarrassed Muse” which was one of the first textbooks on popular culture, covering television, radio, music, movies, theater, fiction and comics.

While at MSU, Nye gifted the school his ever-growing comic book collection and other materials, like copies of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. It became the spark for the Russel B. Nye Popular Culture collection, which today comprises a comic art collection containing more than 300,000 items, including 45,000 foreign comics; a major collection of cookbooks and cooking ephemera; an extensive collection of the papers of Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Richard Ford (“Independence Day”) and Robert Coles (“Children of Crisis”); a burgeoning collection of graphic novels; a major collection of radical literature; an ever-growing collection of Michigan rock ‘n’ roll history; one of the world’s largest collections of almanacs; and some amazing early examples of printing, dating to medieval times.

The collections have been used for research by scores of scholars, authors, students and community members. For example, the cookery collection proved useful for Candice Goucher, author of “Picnics and Porcupines,” about the history and popularity of picnicking in the Upper Peninsula. MSU Associate Professor Helen Zoe Veit utilized the same collection for her books on historical foodways, as did theater Professor Rob Roznowski to write his original play “Comfort Food.”

The new space features a vinyl collage on the outward-facing edge of the aisles.

The collection of materials on radicalism is especially vibrant due to MSU’s active role in anti-war activities of the 1960s. As an example, there’s a collection of anarchistic survivalist literature published by Loompanics Unlimited in East Lansing beginning in the mid-1970s, covering topics such as “counterfeit IDs made easy.” However, Special Collections has also been accumulating material relating to the radical right, thanks to an endowment established in honor of the late Beth Shapiro, a longtime MSU librarian who was an officer in MSU’s Students for a Democratic Society as a student.

Today, Special Collections is the embodiment of Nye’s active mind. He was a heck of a professor — in addition to English, he taught classes on popular culture and every now and then took a run at Civil War history, which I can attest was a heck of a class for a freshman at MSU to stumble into.