The Poetry Center's 60,000th book is Rescuing Q: Quandaries and Queries, by Suzanne Moore.
The UA Poetry Center’s renowned library collection, which began more than 60 years ago with a personal donation of about 500 volumes, has now reached 60,000 books.
The 60,000th book itself is an artist’s book titled Rescuing Q: Quandaries and Queries, by Suzanne Moore, a painter, printmaker and lettering artist who now lives in Tucson.
“I’d had her on my radar for several years before this, looking for the right fit for our collection. This book came across a rare book dealer site at exactly the right time,” said Sarah Kortemeier, Poetry Center Library Director. “It’s a book that requires a whole network, an ecosystem of artists who are working in Southern Arizona and it’s just gorgeous. We could not be more proud to have it in our collection.”
The book, which Moore created over a period of 20 years, is focused on a series of poetic questions that she sourced from friends and family, like “Can a mirror keep a secret?” The book is limited to 26 copies, numbered A to Z. The Poetry Center has copy F. It was printed by lone goose press in Bisbee on paper handmade by Tucson’s Cave Paper. The book was bound by Moore’s husband, Don Glaister.
The Poetry Center will host a celebration of the 60,000th book on Saturday, March 8, at 11 a.m. Rescuing Q will be on display and Moore will talk about the making of the book, with a cake and lemonade reception to follow.
“Collecting 60,000 books is such an exciting milestone for the Poetry Center—it is a threshold moment, and we are so excited for what this means for future visitors to our collection. Most of all, we celebrate the careful librarianship of many who have worked at the Poetry Center and helped bring us to this point, including current library staff Sarah Kortemeier, Julie Swarstad Johnson and Aria Pahari,” said Tyler Meier, Executive Director of the Poetry Center.
The Poetry Center was founded in 1960 with a donation from the personal collection of Ruth Walgreen Stephan (1910-1974), who gave about 500 books, focused on contemporary poetry in English and translations of great poets from around the world. Intending for the collection to have national and international significance, Stephan later created an endowment that has supported library acquisitions ever since.
The Poetry Center’s Ruth Stephan and Myrtle Walgreen Collection is intended to be as representative as possible, but is particularly strong in Southwestern poetry and languages of the borderlands.
“We’re trying to document contemporary American poetry in particular,” Kortemeier said. “We try to balance our collecting between really big publishers and small indie publishers, all the way to people doing kitchen-table DIY publishing. It’s important to be able to preserve and platform the works of people who don’t have a huge reach.”
The Poetry Center buys about 100 books a month and about 50 rare books every year, a pace that has held for more than a decade.
“It’s a very steady river of poetry,” Kortemeier said. “An interesting thing about the Poetry Center’s collecting is we’re frequently the first library in the country to buy these books. So we’re often creating the first catalog records for those books, which other libraries can then use.”
Most of the books live on open stacks in the Poetry Center’s main reading room, while the rare books are placed into an archival enclosure and stored in closed stacks in the rare book room. But everything is available to library patrons for on-site use.
In addition to the book collection, the Poetry Center subscribes to more than 300 literary journals, which is particular useful for students who can look at places to submit their work. The Poetry Center library includes more than 30,000 back issues of those periodicals.
The Poetry Center began marking milestones with the 40,000th book in 2010, which paid homage to the late Steve Orlen, a poet and beloved University of Arizona professor. The Poetry Center holds the only copy of A History of Our Family: Orlen Dynasty.
The 50,000th volume was book artist Charles Hobson’s rendering of W.S. Merwin’s Trees, published in an edition of only 30 copies. The late Merwin developed a close relationship with the Poetry Center, visiting for public readings over a span of more than 40 years.
“It takes about a decade to collect 10,000 books, so we’re happy to be able to mark this occasion in a special way,” Kortemeier said.