A Living Library
Housed at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library is a 75,000-volume collection of rare and first editions of modern and contemporary poetry, which seeks to collect every poetry volume in English published worldwide in the twentieth-century. This alone would make the Danowski Poetry Library distinctive, but it also includes over 50,000 literary journals, several thousand broadsides, recordings, counterculture newspapers, unique manuscripts, ephemera, and even objects that provide the full context of poetry as a vantage point on the twentieth century and beyond.
Assembled by collector Raymond Danowski over 30 years, the collection is thought to have been the largest library in private hands until its arrival at Emory in 2004. The collection is also a living library, regularly added to by new acquisitions, readings, publishing efforts, digital projects, and exhibitions such as this one, in order to realize its place as the poetry library of record for the twentieth century.