ASU Research E-Magazine: Patten Collection Takes Root at Hayden Libabry

Students and scholars looking for historic medicinal plant books called “herbals” used to find slim pickings at ASU’s Hayden Library.

Until 1994, Special Collections had only a few herbals on its shelves. Since then, the library has sprouted a lush collection of about 150 herbals and early gardening books dating as far back as 1485. The collection was donated to ASU in November 1994 by the family of Duncan Patten, former director of the Center for Environmental Studies. Patten retired June 30 after three decades on the ASU faculty.

“This is the largest single gift collection that Special Collections has ever received,” says Marilyn Wurzburger, head of Hayden Library’s Special Collections. It is the most stellar, as well. The Doris and Marc Patten Collection was the most valuable private collection of herbals in the country, and it was probably the last.

Herbal collections at other libraries are larger, such as one at the Huntington Library in California. But the Patten Collection is tightly focused on benchmarks and contains some volumes that even the Huntington lacks.

“It’s like a crown jewel,” says Wurzburger. As Duncan Patten noted, his parents collected with a purpose. “They knew what they were doing.”

The Patten Collection is conservatively valued at $1 million. Even so, the collection would be virtually impossible to replace. Many of its volumes are no longer available.

Only a few copies of Le grant herbier en francoys are known to exist. This was the first major herbal published in French. ASU’s edition, published in Paris in 1521, may be the only complete copy in North America.

Duncan Patten, his sister, Joan, and his brother, Jonathan, donated the collection to ASU because their mother wished to place it in a public institution. "It doesn't belong on a shelf on a ranch in Montana," Patten said.

The Pattens began to assemble their collection after World War II. Books that would sell for thousands of dollars today sold for hundreds in the 1940s.

Marc Patten was the general manager of a family confectionery business in Detroit. Doris served as the superintendent of a Sunday school among her many volunteer activities. They eventually moved to a ranch near Bozeman, Mont., but while living in Michigan they cultivated herbs and other plants in extensive, European-style gardens.

Wurzburger characterized the Patten Collection as "just stupendous." She was impressed when Patten first showed her the collection bibliography, but only later did Wurzburger appreciate its full significance. "I really had no idea some of the items were all that rare,” she said.

Academic interest in the Patten Collection will span a variety of disciplines, including art and cultural history as well as botany and medical history. Researchers often use such collections in unexpected ways, Wurzburger says.

The Patten herbals snared Wurzburger’s own imagination long ago. Contemplating the color plates or the tooled leather binding of a 15th-century tome are enough to transport her to another time. It was a time when the apothecaries and barber-surgeons who originally consulted the herbals were little more than quacks. But the printers of the period had reached a pinnacle of bookmaking rarely matched today.

Others both on campus and off share Wurzburger’s enthusiasm for the collection. Art Professor John Risseeuw brings his printing students to Special Collections to view the Patten herbals. Risseeuw is director of ASU’s Pyracantha Press, which is devoted to practice of fine bookmaking.

Donald H. Dyal also remarked on the artistry of the herbals in his introduction to the collection’s exhibition catalog. Dyal curates a sizable herbal collection at the Texas A&M University library.

Dyal said, “If the scientific information value of the Patten Collection were a full-bodied orchestra, the tangible representative evidence of bookmaking artistry is as a flute soaring lightly above a hushed and reverent audience.”—Steve Koppes