Boston Athenæum

November 8, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In the precarious first decades of the Boston Athenæum, no one did more to keep the fledgling institution alive than its first librarian, William Smith Shaw. Slovenly in his appearance and extreme in his politics, Shaw could easily come across as disagreeable to his Boston contemporaries. Yet Shaw was much more than the prickly personality who looks disdainfully down at us from his portrait in the Athenæum Newspaper Room. His character was marked by considerable virtues as well, and it is these virtues that should inspire us today, in the troubled and perplexing twenty-first century. In telling the colorful and tragic story of Shaw's life, we will look behind the portrait to find the glowing strengths that helped preserve the Athenaeum in its infancy, strengths that may help inform the institution's work in its maturity.