Harvard Acquires John Ashbery's Personal Library / Harriet Staff. In: Poetry Foundation - Originally Published: January 25th, 2019

John Ashbery's personal library, which contains approximately 5,000 volumes, "will now be getting space on the shelves at Harvard University, his alma mater," reports Jennifer Schuessler for the New York Times. More:

The university’s Houghton Library, which began acquiring the poet’s manuscripts and other papers in 1986, has announced the acquisition of the John Ashbery Reading Library, which includes more than 5,000 books of poetry, art criticism, architectural history, philosophy, religious history and cookbooks collected over the poet’s lifetime.
The collection, which was donated by Mr. Ashbery’s husband, David Kermani, convey the traces of the poet’s thought, and also of his hand. There are annotated editions of books by Boris Pasternak, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche and others, as well as the copy of the “Oxford Book of American Verse” he used as an undergraduate, with pressed flowers used as bookmarks.
Christina Davis, the curator who will oversee the collection, called the assemblage of books “one of his consummate works of art.”
“During his lifetime,” she said, “it was also a vital artery in his writing life and served as a kind of early and intimate internet, from which he drew ideas and felicitous bits of data on a regular basis.”

Read on at the NYT.

via https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2019/01/harvard-acquires-john-ashberys-personal-library