Lawrence Clark Powell

Lawrence Clark Powell was an author, librarian and bibliographer. In his lifetime, Lawrence Clark Powell supported and expanded the libraries he was involved with and understood how changes in technology could affect libraries. He wrote

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed; it is the same as it has always been, since Callimachus administered the great library in Alexandrea.

This sentiment will hold true for the next thousand years, no matter what new technological advances are produced.

Lawrence Clark Powell 1964
Photo by Robert Eisenbach

Personal Life

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1906, Powell moved as a child to Southern California, where he developed a deep love for the Southwest United States. In 1932 he married Fay Shoemaker (the year she graduated from Occidental College). In 1978 they moved to Tucson, Arizona. Lawrence Clark Powell died in Arizona on March 14, 2001.

Education

Graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California in 1928.

Received a doctorate of letters from the University of Dijion in France in 1932.

Completed Certificate of Librarianship at the University of California at Berkley in 1937.

Professional Career

From 1932-1936, Powell worked in the private sector, mainly book stores and publishing houses. In 1937 he began his library career working at the Los Angeles Public Library.

In 1938 Lawrence Clark Powell joined the staff at the University of California at Los Angeles as a junior assistant in acquisitions. A mere 6 years later he was the University Librarian for UCLA, a post he would hold until 1966. During this time he served as the director of the Williams Andrew Clark Memorial Library, founded the Library Services Department and served as its Dean from 1959-1966. Powell also found time to be president of the California Library Association, the Bibliographical Society of America, and was a California Historical Society fellow. In 1950 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to Great Britain to study and search for manuscripts and books to add to UCLA’s library.

Referring to his time at UCLA, Powell wrote:

I saw the University Library’s stock of 285,000 volumes increase to 2,000,000, the Clark Memorial Library transformed from a bookish mausoleum to a center of biblio-scholarly activity, a staff of 35 grow to 300, a library school come into being, and UCLA become known internationally as a dynamic place of books and learning.

When Powell resigned from the UCLA Library in 1966, the undergraduate college library was renamed the Powell Library in his honor.

By 1970 Powell was back at work, this time at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Powell motivated the university to build a new library and to gain accreditation for its library school.

Powell was also an avid writer throughout his life. He wrote biographies and essays on a variety of topics; some of his most famous writings covered the people and the places of the American Southwest. Most of his books were about books or authors, but Powell did write fictional novels and a play. Powell collaborated with Ansel Adams to create a book, supplying essays to Adams’ pictures on their shared favorite topic: the Southwest.

Sources

Occidental College Campus News and Events, March 16, 2001

UCLA Special Collections Exhibit, "A Tribute ro Lawrence Clark Powell, June 23, 2002

California Library Newsletter, April 2001, page 2

Tucson Weekly, Best of Tucson Issue, 1997

Additional Quotes

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