HYLAND
when I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate
at Kiev Economic University. I decided to
commemorate the event by donating several
hundred books on economics and business
to the University. Nancy and I scurried along
the bookshelves, judiciously choosing the
volumes.
One imagines Nancy, albeit today with
some assistance from computers, making a
Jefferson pilgrimage along the tall shelves—
akin to library stacks—of the Strand, noting
one volume after another, some discovered
surreptitiously, to add to her thoughtful list.
Notably, Nancy is intimately connected to the
political realm that Jefferson realized: she is
married to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon,
from a region Jefferson imagined in his wildest
dreams as part of the new American nation's
sphere when he sent Lewis and Clark to
reach the great western seas, the Pacific.
I imagine Nancy's library of contemporary
books that Jefferson would have acquired
as ideally residing in Oregon, in a pavilion
dedicated to Jefferson, such was the physical
breadth—land and sea—and intellectual
depth, the Declaration of Independence and
Constitution—of the man. Nancy understands
this spectrum; her choices resonate. Jefferson
would be pleased.
Nancy Bass
Wyden is
just such
a curator.
Nancy
possesses
an eighty-
seven year
family
lineage of
curating
books,
literally
three
generations
