A Businessman's Bequest Becomes a Research Library

The Newberry Library was founded in 1887 under the terms of Walter L. Newberry's will, which left a substantial fortune to establish a free public reference library for Chicago, built and endowed independently of city or state government in a pattern common among major American cultural institutions of the Gilded Age. From early on the library specialised in the humanities and rare materials rather than attempting to compete with public lending libraries, building particular strength in cartography, genealogy, and the history of the Americas.

Its Everett E. Ayer Collection, one of the library's foundational special collections, came from Edward E. Ayer, a businessman and collector who spent decades assembling material on Native American life and the European colonisation of the Americas before donating the whole collection to the Newberry in 1911. This gift gave the library, almost as a side effect of one collector's personal interests rather than any planned acquisition strategy focused on Mesoamerica specifically, one of its most significant single holdings: a manuscript containing the fullest surviving version of the Kiche Maya creation narrative, the Popol Vuh. That single gift shapes the library's Mesoamerican holdings even now, a strength traceable to one collector's taste rather than to any institutional plan to build a Maya studies collection from scratch.