BOOK-HUNTING TRAVELLER

Press, Volume C, Issue 29402, 3 January 1961, Page 2

BOOK-HUNTING TRAVELLER

Woman Searches In Europe

I met this week a woman who has the pleasant and exciting job of travelling around the cities of Europe searching out valuable books, writes a London correspondent. She is Miss Eleanor Pitcher, a good-looking. well-groomed American of 52, who works for the Folger Library, Washington. During the last 10 years on her trips to London, Paris, Zurich, Basle, Vienna, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Turin, The Hague, Brussels and Munich, she has acquired about 60,000 books for the library. One of her most thrilling experiences was in Basle. In the bookshop in the house where Erasmus once worked and wrote, she discovered first editions of his books that had been printed on that very spot. Jobs Hard To Get Born in Illinois, Miss Pitcher trained as girl for a business career. Then, one day in California at the time of the American industrial depression in the 1930’5, when jobs were hard to get, she heard of a secretarial vacancy at the Huntington Library. She got the job and stayed 18 years, working up to an administrative position. “I was learning all the time. I still am,” she says. When at home in Washington she spends six days a week at the Folger, and lives in her own small house near the library. Any spare time she spends gardening. “I grow roses,” she says.