Raymond Danowski, stockpiler of poetry, dies at 74

Eventually, he amassed a staggering 75,000 volumes of verse, believed to be the largest private library of 20th-century poetry in English.

At first they filled a barn at his farm in Hertfordshire, England. Then he trucked them to warehouses the size of basketball courts in London and Geneva. Finally, in 2004, after cramming them into four boxcar-size shipping containers, he donated them to Emory University in Atlanta, where they became known collectively as the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.

“He did it for 30 years without a database or a computer,” said Kevin Young, an Emory professor who was curator of the Danowski library and is now director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library.

“It wasn’t just a poetry library,” Young said. “It was a library of the 20th century.”

Danowski died Feb. 2 at his home in Stellenbosch, South Africa, at 74. His son Henry said the cause was brain cancer.

Danowski always said he had never intended to keep the collection private. He enjoyed collecting but hoped the books he procured would become publicly available.

“I want to say book collecting is fun; serious fun possibly, but always an antidote to the idiocies of life and the pretensions of academia,” he wrote in 2008.

“Book collecting is an outlet for fanaticism, passion, love, and rationality,” he added, “without their drawbacks.”

His collection includes not only poetry but also periodicals, manuscripts, posters, audio and visual recordings and other artifacts about the people and global events — from the Spanish Civil War to the Black Panthers — that inspired it. (It includes at least one 19th-century artifact, a first printing of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” which the poet himself published anonymously in 1855.)

Danowski said he regarded the collection as “a snowflake, a symmetrical structure relating to issues of the 20th century.”

“I was lucky,” he told students at Emory. “I was able to find things that people were willing to get rid of.

“That’s how you save treasures,” he said. “Hoard.”

Raymond Alfred Danowski was born on Sept. 10, 1943, in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx. His mother, the former Jean Malcolm, was a Sears model. He described his father, also named Raymond, as a shellshocked World War II veteran with a violent temper who worked in a supermarket warehouse and also in tax enforcement.

The elder Raymond deliberately placed his night-school books on a high shelf, out of reach of his 4-year-old son.

Instead, young Raymond borrowed Dr. Seuss’ “Horton Hatches the Egg” (1940) from a mobile library. He listened to stories on the radio and devoured comics but did not read another book until he discovered “The Count of Monte Cristo” at his branch library on a class visit when he was 10.

He was introduced to poetry by two uncles, one an aspiring actor who flamboyantly performed Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” at home, and another whose English bookie mailed him poems by W.H. Auden. (Danowski ultimately collected about 1,000 volumes of Auden’s works.)

Serving mornings as an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, he mingled in museums and Greenwich Village galleries and coffee houses. As a student at Cathedral Prep, a Roman Catholic seminary, he became smitten with rare books after an aunt, who worked at Columbia University, got him an after-school job shelving books on the campus at the Burgess-Carpenter Library, now the Milstein Library.

“When I decided to create this collection, as I found the books, I was shelving them in my mind,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “It was an imaginary library, based on the Burgess-Carpenter experience. It was really like being a librarian in my dreams.”

After spending two years at Fordham University in the Bronx, Danowski worked as an art dealer in Woodstock, New York, and then in Europe. He also campaigned against apartheid in South Africa.

In the mid-1970s, a London book dealer he had befriended became ill and also lost his lease. Danowski bought his collection.

Two decades later, he connected with W. Ronald Schuchard, now a professor emeritus of literature at Emory, who had heard about Danowski’s acquisitiveness from acquaintances at the Grolier Club for bibliophiles in New York.

Danowski chose Emory as the repository because it was expanding its poetry archive (since 1975 it had acquired the papers of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes) and agreed to make Danowski’s “bibliotheque imaginaire” available not only to scholars but also to undergraduates.

Most of the financing for the collection came from his third wife, Mary Moore, daughter of the sculptor Henry Moore. She later sold much of it to the Poetry Trust, which also helped subsidize his purchases.

Danowski’s first three marriages — to Fran Kolomaznik, Susan W. Pelton and Moore — ended in divorce.

He is survived by his wife, Sandra Olivier, and a stepson, Kristo Olivier; two daughters from his first marriage, Mary Danowski Paguaga and Justine Danowski; a son, Augustus, from his second marriage; three children from his third marriage, Guston and Henry Danowski and Jane Hoogewerf; his sisters, Elizabeth Danowski Haley, Catherine Danowski Lafex and Jean Danowski; and six grandchildren.

Danowski began his collecting with the Spiral Press edition of “Poems by Edgar Allan Poe.” Among the tens of thousands of other volumes he acquired, his favorite, he said, was “Fragment Thirty-Six” by H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle), the early 20th-century Imagist poet.

After three decades his quest had indeed become an obsession, he told The Poetry Foundation, but, he explained, “not in the sense of going mad; I understood it in the sense of trying to be complete.”

It could never be, though, he acknowledged. The collection is still punctuated by gaps and missing links, an organic aggregation that is meant to grow.

“It now has its own life,” Danowski told the Emory students. “You really are its life.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Raymond Danowski, stockpiler of poetry, dies at 74

His odyssey from college dropout to art dealer and philanthropist, for whom a book-collecting hobby became an obsession, could itself inspire an epic poem.

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Raymond Danowski, stockpiler of poetry, dies at 74

His odyssey from college dropout to art dealer and philanthropist, for whom a book-collecting hobby became an obsession, could itself inspire an epic poem.

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