The Peak

The 7th Floor: The Peak Visits Special Collections

By Adam Cristobal

Why does The Peak want to do a feature on Special Collections?” asked Eric Swanick, the Head Librarian of W.A.C. Bennett Library at SFU Burnaby, as he looked at me rather quizzically. It was as if a few Jovian planets in several solar systems had gone off-balance in the universe. I smiled sheepishly as he raised his eyebrow. Such a befuddled inquiry was of course good, fine, and understandable, seeing as readers are probably asking the same.

You probably have not heard of Special Collections. If you have, you are likely to be a bit of a literary junkie, one possessing the capability of being a remarkably annoying keener in any given English lecture, much like myself. As for all other students, they may or may not have noticed that the elevator buttons in the Bennett Library bearing the number “7” are the least worn down and in the best condition.

This is the floor on which Special Collections is located. Its lack of traffic is probably due to the fact that it is mostly composed of that which makes up the bureaucratic centre of our information empire: library committee rooms as well as management and processing offices among other things, things which most students, quite frankly, do not often care about.

In high contrast to the latter, Special Collections is actually quite interesting. It is so interesting that its most frequent visitors are graduate students and researchers, those who are on the edge of their fields. The very title it bears evokes some allure, as if to suggest that those supposedly sneaky librarians have been stowing away precious secrets on the seventh floor. Indeed they have, for nearly 40 years at that, making it almost as old as the university itself. Swanick, together with Tony Power, the Contemporary Literature Collection Librarian and curator, were kind enough to have a chat with The Peak and give a tour of some of SFU’s best kept secrets, all of which are tucked away in a humidity and temperature control-equipped vault.

Roughly speaking, Special Collections at SFU began with two collections, one devoted to William Wordsworth and another centred on contemporary literature. For those readers out of the literary loop, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was one of the most prolific and celebrated English poets of the Romantic Age.

Our collection of his works was first expanded and built in the early ‘70s by Jared Curtis, a Wordsworth scholar and emeritus professor of the English Department, and contains over 500 titles of Wordsworth’s writing published within his lifetime, late 19th century editions, and materials concerning the Lake District in Northern England, the picturesque area in which he was born and raised. The collection’s ultimate goal, as stated on the its website, is to acquire “all the Wordsworth lifetime editions, the principal and popular post-1850 editions published in the 19th century the late 18th- and 19th-century guides, tours, and histories of the Lake District,” a feat which will hopefully be accomplished with time as our school and library grow.

Many of these books are of great antiquity and, in some cases, extremely rare. As a result, while our collection may not be as extensive as that of Dover Cottage (Wordsworth’s former residence), the British Library, Cornell, and Yale, it is still significant in the field and is perhaps one of our humble institution’s minor claims to fame in the world of academia. Swanick revealed a few fine-bound volumes embellished with gold flourishes and cover designs, the rarer of which are boxed up for additional protection and preservation. These covers are far more intricate and unique than anything coming out of our contemporary publishing houses — a little voice inside of me was screaming, “See?! At least something of ridiculously awesome proportions was purchased with your tuition money!”

On the opposite end of the spectrum is our Contemporary Literature Collection, the largest and most extensive component of our Special Collections, containing over 1800 books, 1600 periodical titles, 750 poetry posters and broadsides, 146 metres of manuscript, 185 journal and serial publications, and 900 audio recordings of poetry readings, all of which include both published and unpublished works of the authors, such as manuscripts and archives.

For the everyday bibliophile, the sight of these items is even more staggering than the previous bombardment of statistics. I was on the brink of a veritable inkhorn heyday yet kept my studious composure, doing my best to prevent my eyes from darting to every single little spine and label in the vault. Shelves of tapes, piles of books which have extended even outside of the vault; boxes, totes, binders, and folders of letters, manuscripts, photographs, the intellectual and literary lives of great writers and movements bundled up and systematically categorized, just a few floors above those comfy chairs where students so often pass out, gaping and open-mouthed due to academic exhaustion.

Heavily rooted in post-modernist, avant-garde, or “formally innovative” poetry, SFU’s Contemporary Literature Collection specifically focuses on movements which took place within the 20-year period between 1945 and 1965. Such movements would include the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Tish group, encompassing a total of 172 writers. In addition to these, the collection includes some modernist predecessors such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.

Older than the Wordsworth Collection, SFU’s Contemporary Literature Collection began in the late ‘60s. “There wasn’t much material available [on these writers] at the time,” said Power. As a result, it has since then become one of the “two to three strongest of the sort in North America.” However, he also noted that some of the items included might not necessarily be rare or of particular value but are still important as components to the collection — I actually saw a few Kerouac volumes, some of which I own myself (seeing them there made me feel a tad special about my personal bookshelf). Despite this, a great number of volumes remain special, or first editions of the books, and are therefore difficult to come by.

Beyond these two compilations, SFU’s Special Collections has continued to expand and has rapidly done so within the last decade, acquiring collections focused on various topics ranging from the Indo-Canadian community of British Columbia, younger writers from within the province, printing and book history, as well as “gay history.” The most notable among these are the Editorial Cartoons Collection and a collection devoted to the Vancouver punk scene.

The collection of editorial cartoons is described as extremely “rich,” containing over 5000 original drawings dating from 1952 to the present, all of which were published in Canadian newspapers and drawn by an array of cartoonists including Roy Peterson and Dan Murphy. Many of these are available online at http://edocs.lib.sfu.ca/projects/Cartoons/, but the effort, detail, and intricacy of these simple commentaries is not often considered. Swanick pulled out a box of originals, all of which appeared astoundingly different to what usually appears in newspapers, clearly works of great skill and art in their own right. These items are donated to the library by the artists themselves and have gradually become the fastest growing collection, perhaps due to the tax break received by these artists for their contributions.

The first item at Special Collections that Swanick opened for me was actually a scrapbook belonging to the Vancouver Punk Music Collection. While I might not have been exactly described as “punk,” back in high school, I was still a hardcore, bleach-banged, black band hoodie, checked wristband, and pin-button clad denizen of Taking Back Sunday. This obviously peaked my interest, however, as he flipped through a few pages, I could not help but wonder as to why there was never a special collection devoted to my subculture. Perhaps this is because it never rivalled the unique and active group of the yesteryear’s Punk scene. Maybe in another 20 years I will stumble upon some mementos of my time.

Like the Editorial Cartoons Collection, this collection has also been built up primarily through donations. Items are usually received from personal collections of punk paraphernalia. Swanick noted that there is currently “a lot of interest and collecting going on” and that one collector claims to have “three garages full of the stuff” at home. Indeed, the entire collection seems to be a playground of nostalgia for the previous owners of mohawks and rustic jean vests, containing approximately 150 records, posters, and issues of Snot Rag zine. Some of the items have been given to the library by the bands themselves, such as the Modernettes and Joey “Shithead” Keithley of D.O.A.

“Preservation and access,” as highlighted by Swanick and Power, seem to be some of the recent concerns of Special Collections. As previously mentioned, most of the Editorial Cartoons Collection are available online, but so are 100 Wordsworth items. Despite this, the tactile nature and beauty of these originals cannot be disregarded. Anyone can look up the Gutenberg Bible on the internet, but at SFU we have a genuine leaf of a copy (which, inconsequently, seems to have been somewhat popularized by Professor Paul Dutton of the Humanities Department). Though such items are primarily used for research, they are real and kept by our university, representing something to be proud of in our own small, nerdy way.

Yonder its towers, looming over the Burnaby Campus, a titanic mammoth of a library which clings to Convocation Mall like an obese toddler at a coffee table, constantly entered by students on quiet quests to research, study, sleep, and Facebook. Perhaps, some day, a reminiscing grad student or researcher will enter its doors in order to point at a page in Special Collections to say, “Dude, this poster, that concert.1982. Remember?”