This story originally appeared in the February 2018 issue with the headline “A Book Lover’s Paradise.”
Chic in black, Melba Whatley surveys her library, a 2,400-square-foot modern structure with vaulted ceilings connected to her Tarrytown home in Austin via a walkway. Whatley devotes her time to her work on the boards of the Contemporary Austin and the Waller Creek Conservancy, of which she’s a founder. Rice University professor Carlos Jiménez designed the library, home to about 10,000 books, filed into ten-shelf-high maple bookcases. “It’s a great disaster to collect books,” Whatley says. “They require a lot of space. My husband, Ted, is a teacher of history, so he had a large collection of history and biography, and I had fiction and art books. We were meant to be together with those two collections.”
Melba Whatley moved to Austin in 1988 when her husband, Ted, wanted to return to his hometown. Since moving here, she's been involved with everything from being the facilities board chair at St. Edward's University to starting the Waller Creek Conservancy. "We all have roles in life—mine is being an activist," she says. Investing in downtown's Waller Creek "is a chance to do something that will transform us, and it will by creating this chain of extraordinary urban parks around the restored creek."
Of her thousands of books, Whatley has particularly fond memories of consuming the series of sea adventures that started with "Master and Commander." "I am a generalist—in reading and in life," she says. "Thus, my reading list is sloppy and all over the place. Once I read all of Patrick O’Brian’s novels about a naval captain fighting Napoleon’s French—all [twenty] of them. In a row. I loved every minute of it. Later, I was told they were books for men."
Richard Ford and Jane Austen are two of Melba's favorite authors. Nonfiction highlights include Ron Chernow’s books on presidents Washington and Grant. "Young Men and Fire," a book about courage, "has stayed with me for years."
Whatley's travels through Greece and studies of ancient Greece have had a big influence on her. "Greece is where I fell in love with architecture," she says. "Somewhere in my reading, I came across what the writer characterized as the Greek definition of happiness. I memorized the definition because it worked for me: 'Happiness is the exercise of vital functions along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.'”
With her work on the boards of the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation and the Contemporary Austin, Whatley has been instrumental in helping to create the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at the Contemporary's 14-acre Laguna Gloria. She's also proud of the Contemporary's Museum Without Walls program, which brings contemporary art to unexpected places, such as Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei’s 'Forever Bicycles,' which sits along Austin’s popular hike and bike trail.
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