Your Incredible Neighbors: Tubac archivist develops passion for life stories

Archivist, researcher, writer and librarian, Shaw Kinsley is most certainly an example of a modern-day Renaissance man.

His mission: “to treasure the past, educate the present and inspire the future.”

Living up to this mission, Kinsley, who recently turned 60, is surrounded in his Tubac home, where he has resided since 1996, by an eclectic collection of art, antiques, personal mementoes and books—shelves of them as a matter of fact, highlighting a passion he talks about with gusto.

Kinsley practices what he preaches. His journey to where he is now is a colorful one.

After attending a boarding school in Connecticut as a young student, he enrolled at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he studied English history, minored in art history and was elected to Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors society.

He continued his education in librarianship, bibliography and rare books at Columbia University in New York City, and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Working for his father’s retail store specializing in upscale clothing for men, Kinsley gained a flare for the men’s fashions, adhering to a more conservative, or “preppie” look as he puts it, eventually working for designer Ralph Lauren in the wholesale side of the business in the early 1970s.

“I was one of four salesmen in the entire country employed by Lauren at that time, so I got my early start with his signature Polo brand,” he said.

Kinsley went on to become a shirt designer for Cluett Peabody International and Arrow shirts and later a merchandising manager, because of what he calls his “keen eye for color.”

Kinsley gave up his clothing career as manufacturing moved out of the United States and onto foreign soil.

“The outsourcing made me lose interest in the field, so I decided to follow my bliss and become a librarian,” he said.

His hunger to read and collect books started as a youngster.

“My mother read to me when I was very small,” he said. “The first book that made an impression on me was ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' by Jules Verne.

“Along with the movie starring James Mason as Capt. Nemo, I was hooked and even ran around with a little ‘M’ on my shirt,” he recalled. “I learned early on that books are like vessels that take you places in your mind.”

He enrolled in the Pratt Institute School of Library and Information Science in Brooklyn, N.Y. and earned a library degree, concentrating in archives and rare books that were printed from the invention of printing in the 1400s to the early 1800s.

“My favorite books are those that were printed after Columbus returned from the New World with all his observations and discoveries,” he said. “I was enchanted with the interchange of goods, from the new to the old worlds, along with the exciting exchanges of ideas and goods. That was just extraordinary to read about.”

After getting his library degree, Kinsley worked from 1992 to 1994 as the reference librarian at the New York Academy of Medicine, a private research library devoted to the medical profession.

The cornerstone of the library’s historical collections is the Malloch Rare Book Room, which contains about 35,000 rare and important books, manuscripts, archives and artifacts documenting the history of medicine, science and other health-related disciplines. About 32,000 of these date from 1700 BC to 1800 AD.

“I discovered that doctors, more than any other scientists I encountered, are interested in their history,” he noted. “I fell in love with that library. It housed the history of medicine, including botany, chemistry, anatomy and the history of science with books that just astounded me.”

While there, Kinsley made contributions to the Malloch Rare Book Room newsletter.

“I found in the end that my interest in rare books was not so much their text, but what they’re like as an object,” he said.

“What you learn when you look at a book as an artifact, is beyond the binding,” he said.

He described what he called “a charming” calf leather-covered magazine with a signature dated 1766, signed and dated again in 1806 and then again by his parents in 1974.

“That’s the artifactual thing I like—discovering the journey it took from the moment it was printed.”

Kinsley studies the way the paper is made, the ink, and the book’s overall construction.

“It’s all a puzzle and that is what intrigues me,” he added.

Many of the books in Kinsley’s library were inherited from his parent’s own rich collection from their many travels abroad.

“Interestingly enough, people try to restore old books and that often times decreases their value,” he said. “Left alone in their original binding rather than being fixed is sometimes the answer to keeping their value.”

He worked as the chapter archivist for two years for the Special Libraries Association, New York Chapter, as well as working on the privately published book, “An Architectural Celebration” for the University Club in New York.

Since living in Tubac, he’s collaborated on “Out of the Limelight,” an autobiography by Jane Lowe, privately published in 2007 and available from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Tubac Center of the Arts, 9 Plaza Road, where the author will be on hand to sign copies.

Kinsley is also editor of the Tubac Historical Society’s monthly newsletter, a position he’s held since 2005.

At the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, he processed six major collections and created an online and print finding aids.

In 2000, at the advice of a friend, Kinsley departed for Lineker College, Oxford University in the United Kingdom where he majored in the History of Science: instruments, science, museums and technology.

“I had to write two essays to get accepted to the program. One was on the geometry of war and the other was to write an essay on why it’s important to “keep the real things.” rather than copies of famous documents or photos or whatever,” he explained. “I got in and the four of us who were accepted had a great year working together studying the Greek astronomy of Ptolemy all the way up to the Theory of Relativity.”

Following his studies, Kinsley spent a summer fulfilling his Oxford masters’ thesis requirements when he rented an English country cottage and wrote “Willughby’s Fishes: A Publishing Venture of the Early Royal Society” after visiting 32 libraries throughout England, Scotland and France.

Given his passion for preserving history, his quest now is to help make people’s heritage, achievements, memories and life stories available to current and future generations.

“As an archivist, I can organize and preserve your papers, records, photographs, and other materials through digital transfer, proper archival storage, or the creation of oral history tapes and transcripts.”

As a researcher and librarian, Kinsley says he can find additional background material, and as a writer, can present them to future generations as organized collections with finding aids, or as written memoirs, autobiographies or corporate histories.

You can reach Kinsley at sdk878@earthlink.net or at (520) 398-2686.

rford@gvnews.com | 547-9740