The recent New Yorker (April 28, 2008 ) has a great article (”Restoration Drama” - not available online) on the Edith Wharton Restoration project to preserve Edith Wharton’s country house, the Mount, in Lenox, MA. The organization received a Preserve America Presidential Award in 2005 or so and hosted “librarian and lover of literature” Laura Bush (”I read, I smoke, I admire”) a year later to celebrate the coup of purchasing Edith Wharton’s Library with $2.6 million in borrowed - not raised - cash.

There are some great quotes in this article about Wharton’s sense of a library’s place in a home from her book The Decoration of Houses (”Plain shelves filled with good editions in good bindings are truly more decorative than ornate books lined with tawdry books”). And I incited no small sense of internal indignation with the realization that historic preservation, i.e., the preservation of the built environment (and namely Proper Name houses) rakes in so much more cash and accolades over other equally admirable preservation endeavors of a smaller literal scale (a painting, or a collection of books or papers or films) that endeavor to preserve information containers rather than lawn ornaments.  I’m not saying historic preservation isn’t worthwhile … I just envy their donor base and merit program.

The takeaway in this article is how the Edith Wharton Restoration organization let “creative programming” - such as an adopt the book programs (adopting one book = $50,000!) intended to fund the $2.6m purchase of the Edith Wharton library that met with minimal success - get ahead of the actual budget. With debts of well over $6m as of late March 2008, the article ends with the former director “really wish[ing] them luck.” The article is a great examination of the dynamics between a board of directions that can’t seem to raise promised funds versus an enterprising (and uncontainable) organization director, and a lesson for someone like me occasionally brought out of the basement to do a preservation dog and pony show for donors and then locked back up to tend the books and vision.