Steve Clay and Mary Catherine Kinniburgh of the venerable Granary Books came to see me today.
Can it be that a half-century has passed since I founded The Niagara Magazine, published my dissertation on the manuscripts and letters of William Carlos Williams, received the PhD in Modern American Poetry; began trading literary magazines and broadsides and pamphlets with small press publishers all over the world; and collecting signed first editions by American poets and writers I’d met in graduate school, at The New York Public Library, heading up the National Book Foundation, and launching the Creative Research Center — and, yes, keeping all of these miscellanea and ephemera and beloved talismans of an unabashedly obsessive literary life so close at hand…until finally, now, on the third floor of my home, I have arrived at the regretful realization that my personal archive-fever must be broken, and the fruits of this long labor offered up.