The Mercantile

Buried deep below the ground here at the University of Missouri-St. Louis is a time machine. This machine has the capability to take students and researchers alike back in time to the St. Louis 1904 World's Fair, or any and all presidential elections of the 19th century, and it is available for public use every day of the week. The time machine even has a name: The St. Louis Mercantile Library.

The Mercantile Library, established in 1846, is located beneath the Thomas Jefferson Library on North Campus.

Many famous lecturers have visited the library since its foundation, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Susan B. Anthony, Oscar Wilde, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Called the "Mercantile" because it was founded by merchants, rivermen, bankers and clerks the library is used internationally by scholars and holds hundreds of thousands of rare books, paintings, newspapers and much more.

"It's like time travel a little bit," Julie Dunn-Morton, curator of Fine Art Collections at the Mercantile Library, said.

The Mercantile is not only a library but an art gallery and museum. The Mercantile has display cases and rotating collections of its thousands of rare and valuable objects ranging from political campaign buttons to "Birds of America," John James Audubon's seminal collection of lithographs.

"There is much more here than meets the eye," Charles E. Brown, assistant director and curator of African American collections, said. "A door that could look like a broom closet might open up to be a massive movable shelf of rare objects."

The centerpiece of the Mercantile's display space is the Reading Room. "The Reading Room is where a lot of the library's treasures are," Brown said. "Some of the oldest books in the library are retrieved by staff members and used there."

The Mercantile Library's collection does not stand in splendid isolation, however. The service that the Library's staff provides is designed to enhance the effectiveness and utility of the books and objects that form the collections.

A student entering the Library to consult its resources would find that "One of the archivists would not only help them discover what we have that would be helpful for their research, but through their knowledge they could say, 'Oh, you are looking into Jesse James, here's what we have,' and then go find them those materials," Dunn-Morton explained.

Dunn-Morton and Brown regularly encourage students to simply call the Mercantile or stop by to ask if they need materials for a research paper or a project. If the Mercantile has it, one of the archivists will find it.

"If that student is outgoing enough to come and use the Mercantile Library resources in their bibliographies their instructors will be impressed and their papers will be a lot better. Dissertations have been written here, people can come here to write that master's thesis, that doctoral, or that book. The Mercantile Library's name is flashed all over [book] acknowledgements world wide."

Apart from the resources available at the Mercantile for the deep-mining scholar, there is a wealth of artwork that lines every wall in the Library's space.

"We have had an art collection really since the time of our founding," Dunn-Morton said. "We were one of the first places in St. Louis where artists could put their work on long-term exhibition, and we were the city's first art gallery."

The Mercantile's oldest artifact is an ancient Assyrian slab that is over 2,000 years old. The "book" is in a case and available to view in the atrium area of the library.

If anything, a visit to the St. Louis Mercantile Library is the closest way to travel backwards, and the doors to this time machine are open wide for anyone willing to learn a little more about the past.

"People need to come see our things," Dunn-Morton said. "I say 'our things,' but they are really their things. This is St. Louis' cultural heritage right here, and you might be walking through the first floor looking for a history book but you can't help but see paintings and books and artifacts and prints [too], so you get that exposure without really having to make any extra effort on your part. It is just there for you, and we love that."

"This is truly the place to visit if you want to go back in time," Brown said.

"And we want to keep that word 'private' out of here, everybody is welcome, the key word is open doors."