By Michaela Corniea 

A glance at the shelves which house the Salerno collection at the East Side Freedom Library evokes images of a great used book store.  Many of the books are older with faded spines, dust jackets that are falling apart, or worn down covers.  Filling nearly half a wall, the shelves are full of old classics, history, anarchy and poetry.  Within each shelf there is a host of new material, and no topic is lacking.  Unique book spines draw your eyes to them as if they are a famous painting, and intriguing titles stand out (my favorites being Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger by Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin, and Gabriel Kuhn, and Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, and please don’t steal that book from the library).  The collection also holds rare books and original materials related to the prosecution and deportation of Italian labor activists.  

Salerno is one of the country’s leading scholars on labor and cultural activism among Italian immigrant workers.  He has taught at many colleges and universities, including University of Massachusetts at Boston, as well as Macalester College and Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul. 

The view into this collection is a window into Salerno’s classes, interests, and works.  What’s more, they are the books he used to research for his own book, Red November, Black November on the history of the Wobblies and pre World War I activism, and related projects.

Salerno’s collection boasts five books about the Haymarket Affair, two on the Teamsters Union, four about Spanish Anarchists, several on American Communism, and several others on civil wars (and more on wars in general).  There are also five books about Joe Hill, who was an activist and songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s.  (Red November, Black November focuses on the organizational structure of the Industrial Workers of the World and their use of art as a tool to organize, as his research into Joe Hill reflects.)  

Many of the authors in the Salerno collection also wrote about related topics, including political activist Upton Sinclair and working-class Irish-American author James T. Farrell.  Salerno has twelve books by or about Sinclair in the collection, and fifteen of Farrell’s works as well as a biography about the author. 

The Salerno collection features several books focused specifically on Italian immigrants, workers, and activists.  One such book is Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892 by Nunzio Pernicone.  Also relevant are the few books focused on the life of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist theorist who wrote more than 30 notebooks on Italian history, Marxism, and political theory, including the multi-volume collections of Letters from Prison and Prison Notebooks (Columbia University Press).  

These books and major events tie in to some of the main themes of the collection — politics and activism, workers and labor, industry, and the lives of people suffering from the greed of others.  

ESFL’s practice of shelving books by collection is beneficial in noticing these themes.  Shelving books by personal collection puts them in the context of that person’s life and allows for broader themes to be examined.  In this case of the Salerno collection, the practice also allows us to put the books in the context of his work, as well as cast a context for the authors themselves.  For example, Farrell writes fiction, and there are so many of his books on the shelves of this collection. What is so striking and illustrative of the importance in the collections is that Farrell’s perspective is shaped by his working-class Irish-American family.  Many of his books feature an individual trying to get through daily life and futilely enduring pitfalls by clinging to belief in patriotism, capitalism, and the American Dream (Burns).  In this way, Farrell incorporated political commentary into his novels, with subtle focuses on workers, labor, and the “political and commercial corruption of values” (Burns).  Indeed, many of the authors on Salerno’s shelves have a political message in their books and/or a background in political activism, which ties into Salerno’s research into these specific topics.

This collection is fun to explore. While there are clearly some educational topics and books to learn from, there is also a variety of fiction and familiar authors. One never knows what one will come across next.  I’ve read several of the featured works by Jack London and James Baldwin, Maya Angelou and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  I recognized Willa Cather’s My Antonia and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.  New to me are Nelson Algren and Paul Goodman, each having several books in the collection.  More familiar is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.  

Salerno has several works by John Steinbeck, and also the works of two of my favorite poets, Gwendolyn Brooks and Dorothy Parker.  There are plays, poems, stories and biographies, histories and essays, classics and more classics.  There is something here for everyone.  However, part of the work of the ESFL is to educate, and so when browsing the shelves for a book to read, I wanted to branch out and pick a book I was not familiar with but still encompasses the collection as a whole.  The clear choice seemed to be  Salerno’s own Red November, Black November (though I had to borrow the book from the Rachleff collection). Red November, Black November focuses on the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) and the culture of the organization at the start of the twentieth century, with a deeper appreciation for how artistic tools assisted in educating laborers about unionizing.  I go into further detail about the book here.

I learn about new topics and discover authors in the collections held at the East Side Freedom Library.  However, the best part is exploring each collection, diving into the shelves and finding commonalities between books and authors, digging into the background of the collection’s namesake to understand context, and taking note of what is familiar versus what is new and exciting.  I can learn so much from each collection without having to read every book on the shelves.  

While history and politics have never been my best subjects, pursuing the Salerno collection has given me a pathway deeper into these topics.  I’ve learned about the authors, the events, and the ideas reflected on the spines of the books.  Each shelf had a new topic for me to explore, from the Haymarket Affair to the biography of Joe Hill, from Emma Goldman and the American Left: “Nowhere at Home” by Marian J. Morton to Letters from Prison by Antonio Gramsci to The Disinherited by Jack Conroy.  I have looked over the whole collection but I am certainly not done learning from it.  Salvatore Salerno has a wealth of political and historical education up his shelves, and no matter which book you may choose to read, the context ensures that you will be learning.

Citations: 

Burns, Jim. “James T. Farrell.” The Penniless Press Online, www.pennilesspress.co.uk/prose/farrell.htm. 

“Letters from Prison by Antonio Gramsci.” Columbia University Press, cup.columbia.edu/book/letters-from-prison-volume-1/9780231075527.