Celebrating 50 Years: Spotlight on the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor

Nat Schmulowitz reading in the Rare Book Room,

Old Main Library, circa 1960s

This week the spotlight is on the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor (SCOWAH), which is actually sixty-seven years old! One of the earliest special collections to be included in the newly formed Department of Rare Books and Special Collections in 1964, SCOWAH began with ninety-three jest books, presented to the Library on April 1, 1947 by attorney and Library trustee Nat Schmulowitz, as a measure of his interest in the library and the people of San Francisco. His bibliophilic activities began considerably earlier, though, perhaps by chance. In a letter to the Saturday Review's Jerome Beatty (2 June 1958), Nat wrote: “You have asked how I happened to get involved in ‘this business of humor.’ It started with a reading excursion in which I was engaged about thirty years ago, when I happened to note in Much Ado About Nothing that Beatrice said “I had my good wit out of the Hundred Merry Tales.” --(Act II, Scene I).

 

Nat Schmulowitz letter to Jerome Beatty, June 2, 1958

"I became curious about the reference and decided to discover whether Shakespeare was engaged in an inventive literary allusion or whether there really was a book of anecdotes entitled Hundred Merry Tales.”  

Indeed there was, and so the Hundred Merry Tales was practically the first book in Nat’s collection and among the first to be presented to the San Francisco Public Library. Throughout his lifetime, Nat took a lively interest in the collection, acquiring for the Library more than 13,000 books on the many facets of wit and humor. By the end of 2013, the collection numbered more than 23,600 items, and is considered the largest collection of its kind in the world.

Comedian Phyllis Diller and Nat Schmulowitz, circa 1962