Mabel Zoe Wilson: a visual history

Mabel Zoe Wilson, Western’s first full-time librarian and the namesake of the Western Libraries Wilson building, worked at Western from 1902-1945. 

She was a strong advocate for the library from the start. 

“Her first reaction to the Normal’s (library) effort to date was one of horror,” writes Marian Alexander, Western’s former Special Collections librarian. “Although later in life she was to recall that the collection at that time probably contained about 2,500 volumes, her initial dismay was surely based on finding none of the usual attributes of library organization.” 

According Alexander, Wilson was not formally trained or educated as a librarian, but she studied Greek, political economy, and rhetoric, and received a degree from Athens Ohio University.

With the help of her student staff, Wilson created a card catalog and classified every title according to the Dewey Decimal system for thousands of volumes by hand.

In 1908 she took a leave of absence to earn a Bachelor’s in Library Science at the Albany Library School in New York.

The library at Western was eventually housed in its own building in 1928.

The following year, Wilson became the president of the Northwestern District Library Associations, which allowed her to join many state-wide library committees. She helped organize the state’s first survey to assess the needs of various communities in the state for library services, which led to the passage of a bill in 1935 to provide rural library services.

Wilson’s presence in the library was legendary. She was well-known for a no-nonsense approach.

“I had great respect for (Mabel Zoe) Wilson; now other people said she had a sharp tongue, but she was always nice to me,” said Kathleen Mitchell Taft, ’25, in an oral history interview with Tamara Belts, '76, B.A., history, former Special Collections librarian.

Even Wilson's arrival on campus is steeped in lore.

She was also known for throwing great parties for students and staff. Co-workers often found vases of fresh flowers anonymously placed on their desk on their birthdays. War widows in need of funds could often find a part-time job with Wilson.

Wilson was a ”famously feisty, determined woman,” writes Alexander. “Slender and petit, even by the standards of the time, with a mass of dark hair and a penetrating gaze from deep-set brown eyes.”

She also traveled across the country and visited and studied other institutions and libraries and sharing her adventures in the student newspaper.

Wilson's philosophy for running the library was centered on trusting students, and she stopped charging fines for overdue library materials in 1909.

For more than four decades, the prospect of letting Wilson down was apparently a more powerful deterrent than financial penalty. 

"The Library is expecting several hundred books that were unintentionally carried away to be returned," read an item in the Northwest Viking in June of 1930. "The returning of these books will be of considerable value to the library and will further justify their belief that students are honest. They are hoping not to be disappointed."

Library fines weren't reintroduced at Western until 1951, several years after Wilson's retirement. (Western Libraries again stopped charging fines on overdue materials in 2021.) 

In 1945, Wilson retired, but she remained an active member of the local community and lived in a nearby apartment located a few blocks away from the university. After she became blind, she learned Braille and was able to continue reading, which allowed her to still enjoy what she treasured most, reading and books.

Her portrait in the library that bears her name portrays her as “dreamy, almost wistful-seeming,” Alexander writes. “The look belies the woman of steel within who created the library that now stretches up and outward in ways and directions she could not have imagined.”

Wilson’s legacy lives on at Western: The database of collections centered around the past and present of Western Washington University and the Pacific Northwest region is called MABEL, (Multimedia Archives Based Electronic Library) an acronym which is also an homage to Mabel Zoe Wilson.