Published: October 04, 2008 09:16 pm      

Baum takes over as Jeffersonville's Remnant Trust’s visiting scholar

Last Wednesday David Baum was kicked out of an office he only weeks before inherited.

Baum, the new visiting scholar at Jeffersonville’s Remnant Trust library, was forced out of the downstairs space to make room for vice presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Biden was scheduled to stump at Warder Park that afternoon and Baum’s office seemed to be a secure area which could be used as a “green room” of sorts.

When Baum left his office to make room for Biden, there were stacks of Xeroxed manuscripts sitting on his desk. Topping that stack were two pieces of writing — one was on 1960’s era radicals; below that was one by a man in his 40s who could no longer suit up for afternoon basketball.

“When I got back in, the two were switched” and the story about the aging man not being able to play basketball was on top, Baum explained.

“Biden was probably more interested in that one than the 60’s era radicals,” he said with a laugh.

Biden is one of the most noteworthy visitors to the Remnant Trust since Baum took the reins as visiting scholar about five weeks ago.

A history professor most recently at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., Baum is the second person to fill the position. He replaces Philip Vogt, who recently left the job. Baum will oversee the rare books collection at the Remnant Trust until late next May, for what amounts to an academic year.

The library is not so much of a scholarly collection. If Baum wanted to research one of his areas of interest — renaissance history and questions of personal liberty and dignity — the trust’s library would not be the place to come to do it.

More so, he believes, it’s a place that can facilitate average people’s access to rare manuscripts.

“They can handle them, pick them up,” he said. “That’s a special thing. It’s not so much the words on the page — it’s the physical artifact” that is significant, he said.

And there are plenty of artifacts for those interested in such history — an original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, a leaf of the Gutenberg bible, a 15th Century Ethiopian copy of the Book of Enoch and others.

Generally speaking, the trust acquires these rarities and then lends them out to colleges, universities and other institutions and organizations. At any given time, a fifth of the trust’s collection is out on loan.

In addition, he said, local residents and groups who are interested in viewing some of the artifacts can call ahead and arrange a tour of the Jeffersonville location.

During the next several months one of Baum’s goals is to make sure the collection is being utilized. He’s setting up partnerships with educational institutions and doing outreach activities like giving talks for local groups, such as the Alexander Hamilton Society of Kentucky.

Baum also plans to continue with a program that Vogt started, Socrates Café — a weekly discussion of philosophy taking place at Perkfection, a downtown Jeffersonville coffee shop.

There’s also talk of expanding the collection to include works from the 20th Century.

Modern works, including autographed copies of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, are being considered for the collection, he said.

The Remnant Trust is located at 129 E. Court Ave. in the more than century-old Carnegie Library building in Jeffersonville. Visit www. theremnanttrust.com or call 812-280-2222 for more information.