The McGill Library’s Blacker Wood Natural History Collection stands alongside London’s British Museum and the Field Museum in Chicago as one of the preeminent repositories of natural history material in the world. That’s in part thanks to its former librarian, the late Eleanor MacLean, BSc’67, MLS’69.
MacLean’s first and only job with the McGill Library was as the Blacker Wood librarian. She spent nearly 40 years stewarding the collection, which has amassed over 20,000 volumes and includes rare materials unavailable anywhere else in the world.
“She was a librarian in the truest sense of the word,” says Colleen Cook, Trenholme Dean of Libraries. “She was a leader and mentor to her colleagues and was greatly embedded in service to the profession.”
MacLean retired as Librarian Emerita in 2011 and passed away in 2018. But a generous gift, made through her estate plans, means she’ll continue to shape the McGill Library. She left a remarkable bequest – totalling $1.5 million – to support the Blacker Wood Collection in perpetuity through restoration, preservation, and acquisition of materials.
“Eleanor MacLean managed and amplified an extraordinary natural history collection,” says Dean Cook. “She was generous with her expertise and time, often spending hours with researchers from around the world. With this incredible gift, the McGill Library will honour and carry forward the legacy left by Eleanor by enhancing and preserving the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection for many generations to come.”
Originally founded in 1920 as the Blacker Library of Zoology and the Emma Shearer Wood Library of Ornithology, the two collections later merged to become one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of natural history works in North America. Its volumes include over 20,000 books and manuscripts, and over 10,000 pieces of original artwork. They range from rare editions by Charles Darwin and John James Audubon to oddities like a stuffed falcon – all sustained for decades by MacLean’s tireless work.
Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The Blacker Wood holds a first edition, as well as the third, fourth and sixth editions of this milestone work.
Dionisio Minaggio's Feather Book, which may represent the oldest collection of bird feathers in existence.
The Feather Book on display.
Purple-rumped sunbird (Leptocoma zeylonica), a watercolour painting by Elizabeth Gwillim.
Gaur, Indian Bison, a watercolour painting by Peter Paillou included in the Taylor White Collection.
An ambassador for natural history
MacLean majored in Biology as an undergraduate at McGill and worked in various science libraries before landing at the Blacker Wood. She was known for her unwavering dedication and her depth of knowledge related to the libraries she worked in, regularly perusing journals to remain current.
“Trying to keep up with the basic information is an enormous challenge, both in biology and in librarianship,” said MacLean, speaking to the McGill News alumni magazine in 2002. “You have to be on top of it to know where to go to look for information.”
She had an obvious appreciation for the rare and odd items put in her care, and she spent hours fielding questions from McGill students, faculty, and researchers around the globe. “The local birdwatching community is in here quite a bit, and we had a gentleman from ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] come in to research the behaviour of birds that fly into jet engines and cause crashes,” she told the McGill News.
The collection includes the only known paintings by Elizabeth Gwillim. Consisting of 164 artworks of birds, fish, and flowers created from 1801-07 in Madras, India (modern-day Chennai), her life-sized works are notable for pre-dating Audubon’s famous Birds of America. MacLean arranged for Gwillim’s paintings to appear in an international exhibition at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum.
“Eleanor’s original interest in the Gwillim material allowed for a great expansion of research interest in the Gwillim watercolours. [Her] research, curation and promotion of the collection continually sparked the interest of scholars from around the world,” says Dr. Victoria Dickenson, professor of practice in the McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections and the former director of the McCord Museum in Montreal.
In addition to her librarian duties, MacLean was active in the Biomedical and Life Sciences Division of the Special Libraries Association for over 40 years. She contributed prefaces to exhibition catalogues and monographs featuring the Blacker Wood’s historical treasures and mounted important historical exhibits for display both at McGill and abroad.
A living legacy
MacLean (pictured above in her McGill yearbook photo) and her late mother, Dorothy, BEd’78, were both loyal McGill donors during their lifetimes, regularly contributing to Library restorations and acquisitions.
MacLean’s $1.5-million legacy gift will be equally divided among three separate endowment funds: the pre-existing Kafer Boothroyd Endowment Fund, which is used to acquire Library resources, and the creation of two new funds benefitting the Blacker Wood Collection: the Dorothy MacLean Memorial Fund for purchases of rare materials, and the Eleanor Anne MacLean Memorial Fund for rare book conservation and restoration.
“The world should know how genuinely altruistic she was,” says Mike O’Hearn, a MacLean family member. “We often read news stories about huge bequests that result in naming buildings, collections, or hospital wings. In Eleanor’s case, she really loved her work, and McGill.”
Celebrating the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection
The Blacker Wood Natural History Collection was founded by Dr. Casey A. Wood, a Canadian ophthalmologist and ornithologist with ties to McGill. Wood travelled extensively, and spent decades acquiring journals, monographs and increasingly rare treasures. The collection has continued to grow ever since with works relating to vertebrate zoology, in particular ornithology, and with significant materials in mammalogy, ichthyology, and comparative anatomy. It also holds important works in the history and philosophy of natural history, evolution, botany, zoogeography, and the records of scientific expeditions.
The collection is housed in McGill’s Rare Book and Special Collections. Its crown jewel is The Feather Book, created in 1618 by Dionisio Minaggio, Chief Gardener of the State of Milan. At once beautiful and grotesque, the 156-page picture book is constructed entirely of bird feathers, and many of the reproductions of birds come complete with the actual skin, beaks and feet of the species represented.
The McGill Library will host a virtual event, Celebrating the Blacker Wood; A Tribute to Eleanor MacLean, on April 27 to honour MacLean’s living legacy and the Blacker Wood Collection. It will feature colleagues and researchers who worked with MacLean, current Blacker Wood curator Lauren Williams, and a peek into some of the newly restored treasures of the Collection.