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| Chronicles of a Life |
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Collector and Chemist Roy G. Neville
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“A scan of the title page does you no good. You want to read the book.”
—Dr. Roy Neville |
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| Antique book collector and chemical engineer Dr. Roy Neville (above). Medieval woodprints from the Nuremberg Chronicles are among Neville’s most prized possessions (below). |
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| Image courtesy of the Special Collections and Archives, UO Libraries |
Dr. Roy Neville, 78 years old, speaks about his life with the accuracy of an archivist and the charm of a storyteller. A collector of all sorts, it seems he’s catalogued all the details into memory—down to the exact addresses of his graduate student housing during the early 1950s.
Dr. Neville can recite the date of his first PhD chemistry seminar (May 20) which shares the distinction of also being his first official date with Jeanne, his wife of more than fifty years. He can even tell you what they had for dinner (Dinty Moore stew).
“My mouth was full of chalk dust,” says Neville of the lecture. “I was sure I would make a fool of myself in front of this beautiful girl—quite brainy, too—sitting front and center.”
In 1952, a tea bag cost a penny at the EMU, with all the hot water you could drink. A Hershey bar cost a nickel. The latter was a staple for Neville on the steam train from New York to Portland Station. The former was fuel for his studies in physical and organometallic chemistry.
A Fulbright Scholar from Britain, this hungry 24-year-old set sail from England with only $56 in his pocket and arrived in Eugene with .40 cents. Thankfully, he was picked up at the station by Professor Robert B. Dean and led to his house where he recalls eating a “beautiful piece of salmon” (3 helpings).
In record speed (2 years and ten months, to be exact), Neville had earned a master’s, defended his Ph.D., and married that girl in the front row.
He is nothing if not determined.
Having graduated in the McCarthy era, Neville said that job prospects were more limited for non-U.S. citizens than they are now. But that didn’t stop him. Though he researched wet strength paper and polymers for plywood for the first few years after graduation, he eventually found himself in the aerospace industry and finally at Boeing, where he founded a department of material science. Neville specialized in high temperature oxidization-resistant polymers and protective materials. In fact, he worked on the polymer and received a patent for its use on the Saturn V booster of the original Apollo space craft.
After retiring from the aerospace industry, Neville has continued to consult for law firms and various mining and Silicon Valley companies. Why do such companies need chemists? one might ask. Neville tells the story of a mining company that spent one million dollars for the wrong type of plastic coating on a steel tank. Overnight, the tank, used for leaching uranium ore with cyanide solution, had become a sieve. When Neville was called in to tackle the problem, he remembered those old UO chemistry lab stoppers—and suggested ordinary rubber to correct the problem.
But Neville’s journey wasn’t always smooth: the interruptions of WWII and unpredictable job closings have been the misfortunes that make him reflect on his life as “quite a ride.”
A lifetime collector of rare books on alchemy, chemistry, chemical technology and related subjects, circa 1470–1900, Neville credits the hobby as the single consistent occupation he’s had in his life: “It is the only thing that kept me sane.” He thought about selling his collection of rare books in the 1960’s when “times were tight” but, in holding on, saw the collection grow in both size and value over the next few decades.
Just last year, that persistence paid off. Valued between thirteen and fifteen million dollars, Neville’s collection of more than 6,000 rare chemical texts was purchased for ten million dollars by Gordon and Betty Moore on behalf of the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) in Philadelphia. Neville donated the rest of the library simply because it would be a “crime to break it up.”
“I’ve always been a collector, saving all my school books,” said Neville, who remembers his first acquisitions as clearly as his most recent. “Our local bookshop in England had antique books upstairs and one day, for 3 shillings and 6 pence, I picked up Book Collecting as a Hobby… I was only eighteen years old at the time.
The bookseller said he liked to encourage young collectors, and though I only had 15 shillings, he found me a book from each of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.”
While Neville studied chemistry in Eugene, those books were sold to purchase, of course, more books.
Eugene was where his book collecting started in earnest, said Neville. When, in 1952, the UO library held a contest for the best graduate student private library, Neville won first prize ($25). The few illuminated manuscripts and other rare books he owned back then were installed in a glass display case in the front vestibule of the main library for the next two months. He was hooked.
Since then, he’s collected everything from Newton’s Principia (1687, first edition, the “greatest book in natural science ever published”) to the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493, the late medieval illustrated treatise “describing the history of the world from the creation to 1490”). Printed in gothic type and woodcuts, this is the one book that Neville couldn’t bear to give away, he said, and so he’s grateful that the CHF has agreed to let it stay with him for a while. “It’s a unique experience to hold the original work in your hands, “ said Neville.
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1245 University of Oregon • Eugene, OR • 97403-1245
(541) 346.3950 • FAX (541) 346.3282 • alumnidev@cas.uoregon.edu
Copyright © 2005 University of Oregon
Updated May 25, 2005
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