September 29, 2004
A Windfall of Modern Poetry for Scholars
By BRUCE WEBER
ATLANTA, Sept. 23 - More than four decades ago, when Raymond Danowski
was an unhappy teenager in the Bronx, he worked after school shelving
books in the Burgess-Carpenter Library at Columbia University.
"It was like an oasis for me," Mr. Danowski recalled.
He has traveled a long way since then; his picaresque life as a
thrice-married art dealer and book collector has led him throughout
the world, and he splits his time between Britain and South Africa.
Now in an astonishingly literal fashion he has donated a library he
himself created - some 60,000 volumes and tens of thousands more of
periodicals, posters, recordings and other items devoted to
20th-century poetry in the English language - to the Robert W.
Woodruff Library at Emory University here.
The Danowski collection includes rare and coveted volumes by T. S.
Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, William
Carlos Williams and James Merrill, among many others. There is even a
first printing of an 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass,"
Mr. Danowski said, because of Whitman's influence on later poets.
Mr. Danowski's gift is "the largest English-language poetry collection
ever put together by an individual,'' said Stephen Enniss, the
director of special collections and archives at the Woodruff Library.
With its many treasures, its overall condition (a remarkable number of
volumes are pristine) and, most of all, its breadth, Mr. Enniss says,
it ranks among the most important literature collections of the last
century. The donation instantly transforms Emory into the nation's
center for poetry research, said Ronald Schuchard, an English
professor at Emory who was instrumental in persuading Mr. Danowski to
bring his library here.
"This library contains outstanding copies of the most singular
rarities,'' said Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment
for the Arts and a poet himself. "But beyond that, if there is any
book of modern poetry that isn't in it, I'd like to know what it is.
With this wildly omnivorous collection, Emory has become one of the
major literary archives in North America.''
Amassed over 30 years, the collection was stored first in a barn in
Hertfordshire, England, and later in warehouses in London and Geneva.
It is uncatalogued in any computer file and the only record of its
holdings have until now been in Mr. Danowski's mind. He said that he
could envision the library, virtually volume by volume, though he had
never seen it all assembled. It was shipped to Atlanta in about 1,500
cardboard boxes and tea crates that filled two 40-foot-long and two
20-foot-long cargo containers.
The library has yet to be completely appraised by Emory. "We place the
value at $6 million to $7 million and counting," Earl Lewis, the
university provost, said. The gift was made earlier this year, but
Emory announced it only this month because it took months for the
university to determine what it had.
"A teaching library, one that a grad student could use for doctoral
research," Mr. Danowski said. "That's what I set out to make."
In his telling, the collection began with the bibliophilic interest of
a reader of poetry in general with a fondness for W. H. Auden in
particular. The turning point came in the mid-1970's when a book
dealer he knew in London, Bernard Stone, became ill and lost the lease
for his business, Turret Press, a popular gathering spot for poets and
poetry lovers. To help him, Mr. Danowski said, "I sent him a check for
all I could afford, to buy whatever he would match to the check."
He remembers the amount as just £2,000 to £3,000 and the moment "as
the start of a problem, more than a collection."
"When I sent Bernard this check," Mr. Danowski said, "he sent a
truckload of books to the farm we were living on, and I had to shelve
them in this barn. I got hooked on the gaps. "
From then on he spent much of his time on the telephone with book
dealers around the world. One was Richard Emmet Aaron, a dealer and
archivist who began his business in Switzerland and now lives in
California. "In 1978 an English dealer contacted me and said he
thought I could be of use to Raymond," Mr. Aaron recalled. "So I sent
Raymond my catalog and he ordered practically the entire thing. That
got my attention."
Professor Schuchard, a collector of Irish literature who has been
highly involved in building Emory's poetry collection, learned about
Mr. Danowski in 1996 at the Grolier Club in New York and the two met a
year later. In 1986, Professor Schuchard said, he begged the then dean
of Emory for money to buy books from the estate of James Gilvarry, one
of the most discerning collectors. He was turned down.
"I was ready to weep," Professor Schuchard recalled. "One of the two
or three great collections of the century, and we weren't going to be
there. But who was there? Getting all that great stuff? Raymond
Danowski. And now it's here."
Among the 1,000 or so Auden volumes, which amount to the most complete
collection of that poet's work, Mr. Danowski said, is one of 13
surviving copies of a book of early poems privately published by a
fellow student, Stephen Spender, in 1928, two years before what most
literary historians think of as Auden's first book. The inscription,
in Auden's hand, reads:
Stephen Spender does worse
Than loving boys and verse
He writes prose
And bleeds at the nose
Mr. Danowski's showpieces, many on display on the 10th floor of the
Woodruff Library, represent a tiny fraction of the collection's value.
And how do you measure the sheer romantic folly of his ambition.
He wanted simply everything associated with English-language poets of
the 20th century, no matter where it was published.
"Raymond placed as much importance on a minor poet as on T. S.
Eliot.'' Mr. Aaron said. "He wasn't interested in the stature of a
poet. He was trying to capture the voice of a community."
Here is a complete collection of titles from Black Sparrow Press,
which published elegant and colorful editions of poets like Diane
Wakoski and Charles Bukowski. Here is a mammoth collection of
counterculture ephemera, journals printed on mimeograph machines,
handbills announcing poetry readings in Haight-Ashbury, LP's of poetry
readings, psychedelic posters.
To the obvious question about how he financed his obsession, Mr.
Danowski is only partly forthcoming.
He spent two years at Fordham University but never graduated, Mr.
Danowski said, and started dealing in etchings and lithographs in
Woodstock, N.Y., in the 1960's, and also worked as a charity
fund-raiser. He traveled around Europe in a van, working in a Paris
art gallery; engaging in political activism, especially anti-apartheid
work in Britain and South Africa; marrying three times; and fathering
six children. The money for the collection, he said, has mostly not
been his, but that of two benefactors. The first was his third wife,
Mary Moore, the daughter of the sculptor Henry Moore, from whom he has
been separated for eight years, though they remain close. (He lives
with another woman.)
Later, he said, "my wife sold the core of the collection" to the
Poets' Trust, a charitable foundation based in Britain that
specializes in donating books to schools and universities, mainly ones
in South Africa.
Since the early 1980's the trust has financed the collection, now
known as the Raymond Danowski Library. The trust spent nearly a decade
searching - mostly in the person of Mr. Danowski - for a proper
repository. Emory was chosen because of its growing poetry archives
(since 1975 it has acquired the papers of Seamus Heaney and Ted
Hughes, among other important collections) and its stated intention to
create a center for poetry research that would be accessible to
undergraduates as well as scholars.
Mr. Danowski, now 61, said that he does not know how much money he has
spent on books over the years. "It's many millions of dollars," he
said, but he did not keep track because all he did was buy books and
pass along the invoices. He said he has received no tax benefits from
his donation.
"It's my baby," Mr. Danowski said of the collection. "But I don't own
it."
Which leaves, really, only one more question: Why?
The answer came to him only recently, in an epiphany that harked back
to his student days. At 15 he was a student at Cathedral Prep, the
seminary of the Archdiocese of New York, commuting each day from a
Bronx housing project. After school he went to his job shelving books
at the Burgess-Carpenter Library, a largely literature and humanities
collection that has since been folded into general holdings at Butler
Library. The job was an escape from the rigid discipline of school,
and the discomfort of home, where his father, a shellshocked World War
II veteran who worked in a supermarket warehouse, tended to violence.
"The corridors were lined with books, and there were reading rooms
with large tables, and windows looking out on trees, sometimes a
tennis court," Mr. Danowski said. "There were a lot of students
working there, and those of us doing the shelving, we'd push carts
around and then we'd disappear and start reading. I'd read for an hour
and then get caught, and go back to shelving, and then find another
place and read."
It was the first time, he said, that he understood books to be a
sanctuary.
"When I decided to create this collection, as I found the books, I was
shelving them in my mind," he said. "It was an imaginary library,
based on the Burgess-Carpenter experience. It was really like being a
librarian in my dreams."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
FAQ
Search
Profile
Private Messages
Log in/Register/Password
