Rita Bottoms, Polyartist Librarian
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University of California, Santa Cruz University Library Rita Bottoms, Polyartist Librarian UC Santa Cruz 1965-2003 Interviewed and Edited by Irene Reti Santa Cruz, California 2005 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Early Life 6 UC Los Angeles 8 The Early Years at the University Library, UC Santa Cruz 17 Santa Cruz in the 1960s 21 Preceptor at Cowell College’s Parkman House 24 The Early Years of Special Collections 28 Robert A. Heinlein 50 Interweavings: Nurturing Relationships with Artists and Writers 69 Polyartists 73 Norman Strouse 74 The Acorn Press 77 William Everson and the Lime Kiln Press 79 Kenneth Patchen Archive 97 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 123 THE PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTIONS 134 Edward Weston Project Prints 135 Horace Bristol 145 Morley Baer 147 Keith Muscutt 148 Graham Nash 149 Al Weber 151 Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch 152 Other Photography Collections 153 Gregory Bateson 159 John Cage 164 Stack o’ Wheats Prints 173 George Barati 178 Ernest T. “Bud” Kretschmer 181 Lou Harrison 183 Trianon Press Archive 198 Norman O. Brown 204 Recollections of UCSC’s Chancellors 211 Marcel Sedletzky 219 Rare Book Conference at UC Santa Cruz 220 Special Collections Staff 224 Lan Dyson 227 Neufeld Family Archive 229 Elie Wiesel 233 Moments of Connection 235 Index 238 Selected Publications 266 All uses of this manuscript are covered by an agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Rita Bottoms, dated January 25, 2005. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All the literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the University of California, Santa Cruz. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the permission of the University Librarian of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dedicated to the Memory of David and Ida Berner Josie May Bottoms Frances Baer Ruth-Marion Baruch Ginny Heinlein Lee Jeffers Anais Nin Miriam Patchen Florence Wyckoff Rita Bottoms: Introduction page 1 Introduction The Regional History Project conducted fourteen hours of interviews with Rita Bottoms, Head of Special Collections at the University Library, UC Santa Cruz, shortly before her retirement in March 2003. This oral history provides a vivid and intimate look at thirty- seven years “behind the scenes” in the library’s Special Collections. For thirty-seven years Bottoms immersed herself in collecting work by some of the most eminent writers and photographers of the twentieth century, including the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, photographer Edward Weston, composer John Cage, visual poet Kenneth Patchen, poet and letterpress book printer William Everson, poet and visual artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, composer and poet Lou Harrison, singer and photographer Graham Nash, and philosopher Norman O. Brown. But her role as a curator and librarian extended far beyond acquiring collections; she developed intense and profound intellectual and emotional relationships with each of these individuals. It is her detailed and deeply personal stories of these relationships which form the heart of this volume, and provide the kind of human amplification of the library’s collections which can only be captured through oral history. Bottoms’ recollections of these page 2 Rita Bottoms: Introduction individuals are an important contribution to the history of twentieth century art and literature in the United States. Rita Bottoms was born Rita Margo Berner in Bridgeport, Connecticut of Hungarian and Russian Jewish immigrants. Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was four. She graduated from Van Nuys High School, attended UC Berkeley from 1956-1958, and transferred to UC Los Angeles, from which she graduated in 1960. While attending UCLA, Bottoms worked at the UCLA library in the acquisitions department. After graduation and a trip to Europe she returned to Los Angeles and took a position as a library assistant in acquisitions at San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge. She was inspired to attend library school and applied and was accepted at UCLA. There she worked briefly in the Special Collections department. Lawrence Clark Powell was the University Librarian at UCLA at the time and later became the dean of the library school as well. Powell, a larger than life figure in the library and literary worlds, once wrote: “No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.” In his twenty-eight year tenure as University Librarian, Lawrence Clark Powell built UCLA’s library into a world-class institution. Bottoms graduated from UCLA library school in 1965. Her candid recollections of Powell, whom she described as a “sweetheart, but wild and provocative” are another historical contribution of this volume. In library school at UCLA Bottoms was president of her class and “father of the printing chapel.” She learned letterpress printing under the direction of Andrew Horn at UCLA. In the summer of 1965 she enrolled in a course on information science taught by Robert Hayes. This was the first course at UCLA on automated cataloging systems and her experience in this course was to prove useful when Bottoms arrived at UC Santa Cruz’s library, where founding University Librarian Donald T. Clark was pioneering the development of an automated catalog. Rita Bottoms: Introduction page 3 Other early influences on Bottoms were her college roommate Samantha Connell, daughter of the well-known photographer, Will Connell. This friendship nourished the seeds of Bottoms’ interest in California photographers. At UCLA, Bottoms studied photography in the art department, where her teaching assistant was photographer Robert Heinecken, then just beginning his influential career. On September 1, 1965 Bottoms began working as a reference librarian at the newly opened University of California, Santa Cruz. She joined a small core of faculty and staff who were building a new and experimental UC campus from scratch. McHenry Library was still under construction, and the library was temporarily located in the Central Services (now Hahn) building. Partially due to her previous experience at UCLA working on the Will Connell collection, Bottoms soon became the Head of Special Collections in the newly opened University Library, running the unit out of what she came to call “the broom closet” (now part of the circulation office behind the central stairway). Special Collections grew as part of what Bottoms called “this iconoclastic, experimental campus located in the California redwoods.” Coming from urban Los Angeles, Bottoms soon adjusted to life in a redwood forest. She recalled: “I almost sprained my ankle jumping over a ditch in the forest, going to work, I soon changed my whole way of thinking about dress and clothing and shoes. It was the woods. You would see beetles in the library, incredible striped beetles.” Bottoms shares her impressions of the early UCSC campus, in which the staff knew all 650 students by name and everyone thought of themselves as “part of a wonderful experiment.” Bottoms served as a residential preceptor at Cowell College’s Parkman House in 1966-67, the year that the students moved out of the trailers and into the dorms. She also shares her memories of the Hip Pocket Bookstore, the Catalyst and other Santa Cruz institutions during the mid- to late 1960s. At the beginning of her tenure Bottoms experienced considerable isolation on this fledgling campus located in a somewhat remote rural location, but by the 1990s she had page 4 Rita Bottoms: Introduction formed extensive collegial relationships with colleagues in her field and even organized a conference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Association which took place at UCSC in 1992. She also traveled extensively, speaking at programs about the Kenneth Patchen, John Cage, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other collections represented in the library. Another key chapter of the oral history is concerned with the Lime Kiln Press, a harrowing but rewarding letterpress printing endeavor during which Bottoms worked closely with poet and letterpress printer William Everson and his students to publish Granite and Cypress and other singular, gorgeous fine press editions. Bottoms discusses key library staff, such as University Librarians Donald T. Clark, David Heron, and Allan J. Dyson, her colleague and assistant Carol Champion who worked with her for over thirty years in Special Collections, as well as various bibliographers and librarians. She describes some of the chancellors who served during her thirty-seven years at UC Santa Cruz, as well as their wives, particularly Karen Sinsheimer, with whom she developed a close and collegial relationship. Several themes emerge in this oral history. The first is a focus on polyartists, those who excel at more than one non-adjacent art form and weave these forms together. Defying the academic emphasis on specialization and compartmentalization, Bottoms demonstrated the wisdom and open-mindedness to recognize and welcome the eclectic vision of people like composer John Cage, who pursued a passionate and expert interest in wild mushrooms, and gave Special Collections his collection of mushroom books and ephemera. Another theme is Bottoms’ “seat-of-the-pants” approach to developing and managing a Special Collections department in a small public university without a large collections budget or extensive private endowments. Her chronicle of the evolution of library collections and archives at a smaller public university campus is a contribution to the Rita Bottoms: Introduction page 5 history of librarianship in the United States. Central to the success of this approach was Bottoms’ wholistic and whole-hearted involvement in the lives of the people whose work she was collecting. Bottoms’ human-centered, compassionate approach to library collections is inspiring and remarkable. She has transformed librarianship into a kind of spiritual midwifery. Copies of the manuscript are on deposit in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; and in Special Collections at McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.