About

The Pykewater Library is a 30,000-volume private collection housed between Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA. The purpose of the Library is to supply the general public, scholars and expert policy-makers with access to a range of Knowledge Lists and academic summaries. The Pykewater Library offers itself foremost as an independent consulting service, converting theoretical political knowledge into practical principles of application. To this end, the Pykewater Library hopes to close the “gap” between academic knowledge and the greater democratic public, offering a supplement to, rather than substitution for, the resources of traditional academia.

The Library includes a range of digitizing and archiving resources, article databases, and cataloged syllabi, as well as a non-exhaustive but academically-sanctioned compilation of subject-based Knowledge Lists. The Library is non-partisan and primarily humanities-oriented, though services may be extended to subjects of the sciences, medicine, and architecture upon request.

The Pykewater Library responds to a contemporary deficit—a deficit that has come about with the retreat of the discourse concerning the “good life” and a decline in the corresponding faith in principles of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. This deficit is in part the result of a separation of the resources of self-cultivation and philosophical exploration from the modes of everyday life; this is more than a separation between the “academic” and “non-academic” professions, however, and points to a much greater chasm between the tools and forms of human knowledge and the means of human action and world-building. The Pykewater Library hopes to fill this deficit by supporting individual and collective experiments in “living well.” The Pykewater Library believes that exploring this question involves taking advantage of the full breadth of classic and contemporary literature and offers its collections as a reflection of this mission.

Any and all are invited to participate in the Pykewater Library’s mission. Please direct inquiries and requests to: pykewater@gmail.com

William D. S. Pennington

Founder/Curator, Pykewater Library

PhD Candidate in Government, Cornell University

Dedicated to Hannah Aurora and Alexander William.