The Newberry Library

The Newberry Library was founded in 1887 under the terms of Walter L. Newberry's will, which left a substantial fortune to establish a free public reference library for Chicago, built and endowed independently of city or state government in a pattern common among major American cultural institutions of the Gilded Age. From early on the library specialised in the humanities and rare materials rather than attempting to compete with public lending libraries, building particular strength in cartography, genealogy, and the history of the Americas.

Its Everett E. Ayer Collection, one of the library's foundational special collections, came from Edward E. Ayer, a businessman and collector who spent decades assembling material on Native American life and the European colonisation of the Americas before donating the whole collection to the Newberry in 1911. This gift gave the library, almost as a side effect of one collector's personal interests rather than any planned acquisition strategy focused on Mesoamerica specifically, one of its most significant single holdings: a manuscript containing the fullest surviving version of the Kiche Maya creation narrative, the Popol Vuh. That single gift shapes the library's Mesoamerican holdings even now, a strength traceable to one collector's taste rather than to any institutional plan to build a Maya studies collection from scratch.

The manuscript's journey to Chicago began with Francisco Ximenez, a Dominican friar serving in the Kiche town of Chichicastenango in Guatemala in the early eighteenth century, who transcribed the Kiche text in parallel columns alongside his own Spanish translation, almost certainly working from an earlier written or oral Kiche source that has not itself survived. His manuscript remained in Dominican and then Guatemalan academic custody for over a century, eventually held by the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City, before the French traveller and cleric Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg acquired it in the 1850s and took it to Europe, removing the manuscript from Guatemala in circumstances the country had no practical means to prevent at the time.

From Europe the manuscript passed through private collectors before Edward E. Ayer purchased it and, with his wider collection, gave it to the Newberry in 1911, where it has remained since as a heavily used research resource for Maya studies rather than a public display piece. Guatemala has no active legal claim to the manuscript, but some cultural heritage advocates in the country have pointed to its nineteenth century departure as part of a broader pattern worth revisiting, alongside other Mesoamerican manuscripts and objects that left Central America for European and American collections during the same colonial and early national period.