By Harriet Staff
Raymond Danowski, a voracious reader and holder of the largest private collection of 20th-century poetry in English, has died, reports the New York Times. "At first they filled a barn at his farm in Hertfordshire, England. Then he trucked them to warehouses the size of basketball courts in London and Geneva. Finally, in 2004, after cramming them into four boxcar-size shipping containers, he donated them to Emory University in Atlanta, where they became known collectively as the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library." More, from Sam Roberts:
“It wasn’t just a poetry library,” Professor Young said. “It was a library of the 20th century.”
Mr. Danowski died on Feb. 2 at his home in Stellenbosch, South Africa, at 74. His son Henry said the cause was brain cancer.
Mr. Danowski always said that he had never intended to keep the collection private. He enjoyed collecting but hoped that the books he procured would become publicly available.
“I want to say book collecting is fun; serious fun possibly, but always an antidote to the idiocies of life and the pretensions of academia,” he wrote in 2008.
“Book collecting is an outlet for fanaticism, passion, love, and rationality,” he added, “without their drawbacks.”
His collection includes not only poetry but also periodicals, manuscripts, posters, audio and visual recordings and other artifacts about the people and global events — from the Spanish Civil War to the Black Panthers — that inspired it. (It includes at least one 19th-century artifact, a first printing of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” which the poet himself published anonymously in 1855.)
Find the full obituary at the NYT.
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