Featuring rare and precious manuscripts, paintings, photographs, and other objects, many of which have seldom been on public view, The Bancroft Library at 100 both celebrates this UC Berkeley institution's distinguished past and envisions its future. The centennial of the core collections' arrival on the campus provides an occasion to showcase the variety and richness, scope and depth of the Bancroft collections and to bring them to a wider community. Hubert Howe Bancroft's library on Valencia Street in San Francisco was the only library of any note that did not burn to the ground in the days following the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906. Although the University of California purchased Bancroft's library in 1905, it was not until May 1906 that the contents of the library were ferried across the bay to Berkeley. The purchase of the library signaled the beginning of the University as a research institution. At that time, The Bancroft Library consisted of the Western and Latin Americana collections, which to this day are its core collections. One hundred years later The Bancroft is a far more complex institution, which also encompasses the campus's Rare Books Collection, University Archives, Mark Twain Project, History of Science and Technology Collection, Pictorial Collection, Regional Oral History Office, and Center for the Tebtunis Papyri. The Bancroft has evolved into the most accessible and busiest special collections library in the country. The exhibition, on view in Gallery 4, highlights such seldom-seen objects as the Codex Fernández Leal, perhaps the single most valuable item in the Bancroft collection. Produced in the mid–sixteenth century, although possibly based on a pre-Columbian predecessor, this codex is a pictographic scroll almost twenty feet long, written on native amatl fiber paper, that describes warfare, conquest, and sacrificial ceremonies in the region of the Cuicatec, a small indigenous culture in what is now the state of Oaxaca. The “Wimmer” gold nugget, the one found by James Marshall that set off the California Gold Rush, is well known to users of The Bancroft but much less so to the broader public. The earliest known drawings of San Francisco and the Yosemite Valley and the first photograph of Mark Twain, as well as a rare volume from the first publication of the complete works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, are among the other treasures featured in the exhibition.
