Tucked away on the third floor of the Indiana Statehouse, the Indiana Supreme Court Law Library boasts a robust collection of rare historical books that inform past and present legal research.
Maintained by librarian Cathrin Verano, the library’s rare book collection gives visitors a glimpse at legal documents and decisions in Indiana, the United States and around the world.
Titles in the collection include everything from an early print of the Indiana Constitution to an account of Queen Marie Antoinette’s execution. The titles serve a major goal of the library’s mission.
“It’s very important to us to provide access to these materials that are pretty scarce, in some cases, for people to be able to come in and see them and use them,” Verano said.
Preserving history
The rare book collection holds around 200 titles, including individually bound titles, titles that are bound together, and titles that are spread across several volumes. Fitzherbert’s Abridgement, the oldest book in the collection, is divided into two volumes, though Verano typically only brings out the second volume because it’s in better physical shape than the first.
Visitors can make an appointment to see a title, but Verano also rotates them out in the supreme court’s display case, which is situated in the third-floor courtroom. Right now, the display case features books on laws from the 1600s regarding pirates, an idea the library’s intern came up with ahead of the summer season.
Verano said having direct access to the collection is a huge benefit for visitors.
“There’s just kind of the immediacy of being able to touch the object,” she said. “It makes a much deeper impact, too, than sitting and listening to somebody talk to you about it.”
When Verano first came to the law library in 2021, the rare book collection was more or less scattered around the Statehouse. While some books were in the library’s general collection already, others had been stored elsewhere in the building or were on permanent display in the courtroom.
One of her tasks has been to consolidate the titles into one allotted section, both for organizational purposes and to preserve the books’ conditions. While she does not have access to extensive preservation tools, she is able to keep the rare book collection in a section of the library with the lowest light levels to maintain their integrity.
In 2023, the law library received a $4,500 Preservation Assistance Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant was used to purchase archival supplies to help Verano not only organize and store items from the library but also pay for a condition assessment from a professional conservator.
The conservator wrote a detailed report of each book in the collection, which will eventually be used as a guide to physically preserve the books.
Funding will still need to be obtained to carry out those treatments. While grant money on the national level is difficult to come by at the moment, Verano said she plans to apply for funding as it becomes available.
Opinions on how books should be preserved vary in principle: while some believe books should be fully repaired to preserve their contents, others believe it’s best to keep them as they are and prevent them from getting worse.
One of the titles in the collection, which details Native American law from the 1800s, is no longer bound together, but Verano keeps it in an acid-free container, so its contents are preserved.
