Amid jewels here, the fifth-floor Western History/Genealogy Department is indeed one. Begun relatively late in the chronological Colorado day in 1929, it was kicked into overdrive by no less a personage than novelist Willa Cather, who spent several weeks at the library in the 1930s as she worked to research Death Comes to the Archbishop. Unable to find all the original sources she believed should have been here, she urged the librarians, in effect, to get their bibliographic act together and move forward in creating a Western collection.

And so they did. Staffers working today have fond memories of helping James Michener as he worked on Centennial here, and other notable novelist-visitors include Irving Stone and Mari Sandoz. Best-selling names aside, generations of West-entranced writers of all sorts have gathered here to do research.

The DPL is a fine place and will be for years and years, but let's simultaneously edify and mortify ourselves a bit by thinking about the library's moronic behavior in the summer of 1902.

Mark Twain vs. The Denver Public Library
There's a book most of us have heard of - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - written by a man most of us have heard of, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens.) When it's not busy being a masterpiece, it's sometimes considered controversial for its objectionable, real language from an objectionable, real time.

Although the American puritanical book-banning virus has, for some reason, proliferated nationwide over the ensuing 100 years, for 20 years no American library had, by 1902, tried to ban Huck Finn, making the momentarily tiny-minded DPL into an infamous, dumbed-down institution, at least in the eyes of national newspapers.

In her 1947 memoir of her decades at the library, Helen Ingersoll, then an 18-year-old clerk, clearly remembers the day when an official, a Mr. Dudley, came downstairs and declared the book "not fit for youngsters." In her next sentence, she recalls the reaction: "Articles came out in the paper and all over the country. Harper's Weekly called the barring of Huckleberry Finn a practical joke on the Denver Library, and said it was an offense against our national common sense which ought to be quickly removed."

The Denver Post, which sent its most baby-faced reporter to the library to test the policy of not lending the book to juveniles and found it implacably in effect, wired a telegram to Twain and asked him for a response.

His response is famous : "Huck's morals have stood the strain in Denver and in every English, German and French-speaking community in the world - save one - for seventeen years until now." A savvy Twain recognized the real reason for the ban. A few months earlier, he'd roughed up, in print, an upstanding Denverite named Funston ("...whom God has not dealt kindly with in the matter of wisdom") who happened to have connections to the library. Wittily dispensing with Funston without damning Denver (or even the library) as a whole, Twain added that, "...the bowels of my sympathy are moved toward him."

He closed the letter with the sort of gentle, barbed, backsliding vitriol that made him famous, writing, "No, if Satan's morals and Funston's are preferable to Huck's, let Huck's take a back seat; they can stand any ordinary competition, but not a combination like that. And I'm not going to defend them, anyway."

Shamed by Twain's letter, which was run in newspapers nationwide, the library quickly reversed its decision and made the book available to all readers. The moral of the story? Run, do not walk, please, to the circulation desk and borrow Huck Finn for Huck's sake (and yours).

Weldon Kees: The Unhappiest Librarian of All Time
There's no special suffering involved in being a clever and multi-talented librarian in Denver unless you convince yourself that the Denver Public Library is the most atrocious backwater in the known universe while you, on the other hand, are the most underrated genius in America.

For Weldon Kees (1914-1955?), as for librarians and regular people before and after him, Denver represented a way station on his path toward the big time that he never truly managed to locate. And he was an underrated genius.

A multi-disciplinary Renaissance man who never found his niche, when Kees wrote, he was published in national magazines from Time and New Directions to The Partisan Review; when he painted, he was featured in a show that included Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. His interest in behavioral science led him to early experimental film work with the noted anthropologist Gregory Bateson; and the jazzy pop songs he composed include charming, grin-inducing titles like "Don't Drink the Foam on Your Beer, Baby," and "God, But It's Grim Being God."

Finally, when he decided to make a dramatic, mortal exit to punish himself and the world simultaneously, boy did he do it.

Born and raised in Beatrice, Nebraska, Kees arrived in Denver as a promising twentysomething, fresh from a stint with the Federal Writers Project. Lucky enough to land a job at the Denver library at a depression-era moment when plenty of equally talented people were out of work, Kees nevertheless lost no time in stewing about his predicament, complaining in unprintable terms about his co-workers and indicting Denver's "vaguely arty people" as provincial.

The irony - though it's a safe bet that Kees would have to be bribed to admit it - is that in his six seemingly frustrated years here, he worked and wrote prodigiously, pouring out the short fiction that would later make his reputation: fiction good enough to land him, five decades later, thick into the midst of an international cult following of readers who love him not only for the jaundiced eye he cast on the world around him but the almost cavalier way in which he moodily turned away - time and time again - from commercial success and wider recognition.

Some say he was distracted by his wife's chronic depression and alcoholism; others say he was distracted by his own. Either way, Kees' arbitrarily high personal standards and irrationally low tolerance for personal failure kept him rooted in a state of chronic dissatisfaction, though several modern day on-lookers have marveled at his hard-working achievement in a multiplicity of fields.

While in Denver, he wrote the only novel he would ever complete, bitterly resolving to never write another after major publishers rejected it. Fall Quarter remained unpublished for nearly 50 years until it was released to critical praise in 1990. His only short story collection, published exactly 30 years after his later disappearance, includes a piece called "Public Library," full of overheard snatches of dialogue and briefly glimpsed visions at the Denver library, complete with an infuriatingly true-to-life child who scrawls "This is a dirty filthy book." in a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and patrons who compulsively clip nude pictures out of large art books when librarians aren't looking.

Kees and his wife lived in an apartment at 11th Avenue and Pearl Street on Capitol Hill and in spite of themselves resembled a young, happily married couple. Kees took library science courses at the University of Denver, and on the weekends they enjoyed Elitch Gardens and neighborhood cafes. Politically active, Kees was in Denver for the advent of World War II and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans in camps on the Colorado plains. Accordingly, he kept in close touch with San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, who was attempting at the time to organize an underground railroad of sorts for helping Japanese Americans avoid detention.

A little more than a decade after leaving Denver, Kees in 1955 was on shaky emotional ground in San Francisco. Unhappy with his lack of recognition and obsessed with the hazardous Mexican endgame adventures of Malcolm Lowry and Hart Crane, Kees admitted to friends that he daydreamed about starting over there. Eager to get a book of his poems into print, he was forced to ask his aging parents to subsidize the printing. Feeling adrift after turning 40, the final straw may have come when he allowed himself to be persuaded to commit his wife to a mental institution after a breakdown.

On July 18, 1955, his empty car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge and he was never seen again, though at least one journalist with an overactive imagination reported seeing Kees in Mexico in 1984, and his mother in later years said repeatedly that he was still alive.

One hopes that he's finally happy, and that as a modern-day malcontent he would have loved daydreaming about the possibilities for escape that the helipad on top of the library represents.

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