Emory University Unleashes The Danowski Poetry Collection

Emory University kicked off National Poetry Month with a bang. They had three Pulitzer Prize winning poets (Mark Strand, W.D. Snodgrass and Richard Wilbur) headlining a conference titled “A Fine Excess: A Three-Day Celebration of Poetry.”

It was during this event that Emory took the wraps off what some say is the most important collection of English-language poetry in the world.

It was the first public display of the fruits of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library which they acquired in 2004.

The 75,000 rare books, posters, periodicals and recordings that make up the collection is "a nearly complete record of all published English-language poetry in the 20th century."

I repeat "a nearly complete record of all published English-language poetry in the 20th century."

The library arrived in 1,500 boxes and tea crates, and is still being processed!

The exhibition is titled “Democratic Vistas: Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library,” and features 250 jewels from the collection including:

-A magnificent copy of the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. (1855)

-Anne Sexton's annotated copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel.

-one of 11 known copies of William Carlos Williams' first book, Poems (1909), which was never reprinted

-a first edition of T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock and Other Observations" (1917), inscribed to his close friend Emily Hale;

Danowski has provided a 24-page handwritten introduction to the archive, titled “Anything you perhaps don’t recognize, please Google.”

Emory University Press Release

New York Times piece, Atlanta Sings of Poems Electric, Past and Present, by Brenda Goodman

New York Times slideshow of the exhibit

The Libraries of Power

"Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power" says Harriet Rubin in her New York Times piece C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success.

Some article highlights:

-Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist extraordinaire, whose wife calls him "the Imelda Marcos of books."

-Nike's Phil Knight's mysterious library which exists in "a room behind his formal office" and one that few people have access to.

-Apple's Steve Jobs fancied William Blake.

-Dee Hock, the man who founded Visa, has a 2000 square foot library in his home and who has "on his library table for daily consulting, Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát the Persian poem that warns of the dangers of greatness and the instability of fortune."

-Sydney Harman, the Harman of the high fidelity giant Harman Kardon, whose library "is full of things I might go back to... Almost everything I have read has been useful to me — science, poetry, politics, novels. I have a lifelong interest in epistemology and learning."

-Shelly Lazurus, CEO of the advertising powerhouse Ogilvy & Mather, says "I read for pleasure and to find other perspectives on how to think or solve a problem."

The article is a treatise on the power of books in the lives of powerful people. It is not about the high-end book collections of the rich and famous. I suspect, however; that Job's Blake collection was top shelf and that much of it came from the bookseller John Windle, a Blake specialist, who is also featured in the article. I also trust that each library mentioned boasts a few high-ticket gems but these libraries sound like working libraries. Libraries working to help keep these business leaders at the top of their game.

Granted this is an article on C.E.O.'s and appears in the Business Section of the New York Times but I think that Ken Lopez, a bookseller specializing in Modern First Editions, is a bit off the mark when he says "it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars."

Don't get discouraged you can build a significant library for a lot less money, a hell of a lot less. I promise.