Hutton’s Masks on Display

I enjoyed Elyse Graham ’07’s Princeton Portrait of Laurence Hutton and his death mask collection in PAW’s October issue. For years, a sampling of these masks was displayed in vitrines in the now long-gone Rockey Room on B Floor of Firestone Library. The Rockey Room housed the angling book collection of Kenneth H. Rockey 1916 and included a sitting area with comfortable padded chairs, like a gentlemen club’s lounge. I visited it frequently in the 1980s because of my interest in fishing, but the masks had their own lurid appeal. Somewhat less appealing was the perpetual eye-stinging pall — and stench — of cigarette smoke. The Rockey Room was the last remaining space in Firestone that allowed smoking. Arrayed under glass, the masks were a grim memento mori presumably lost on the smokers who gathered there.

Editor’s note: The author, PAW’s editor from 1989 to ’99, recommends Wes Tooke ’98’s 1998 story on the Hutton collection, “Immortality in Plaster,” available online here.