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Charles Watts
Memorial Library
The books, journals, audio and video recordings, broadsides, art objects and manuscripts in the Charles Watts Memorial Library have been assembled from diverse sources
The books, journals, audio and video recordings, broadsides, art objects and manuscripts in the Charles Watts Memorial Library have been assembled from diverse sources. After KSW opened a Vancouver office in 1984 very few of the books from the former David Thompson University Centre followed. Some did arrive and others from the writer-run Literary Storefront, active in Vancouver’s Gastown in the early 1980s, were added to the collection. After the New Poetics Colloquium in 1985, a set of Tuumba letterpress editions were donated by their publisher, colloquium participant Lyn Hejinian. This set formed a ground for the local discussions of poetics through the rest of the decade.
Since 1986 materials have accumulated through purchases from visiting writers, remainders from KSW courses, review copies sent to Writing and Raddle Moon, an inheritance from Proprioception Books, and donations from supporters. In 1998 we purchased Colin Smithís poetry library when he left Vancouver for Winnipeg, giving the collection an influx to complement and jolt the Tuumba core. The following year we acquired a portion of the library of Charles Watts (1947-1998), a long-term supporter of KSW whose loss continues to be felt and is inscribed in the name of this library. The donation included rare journals, modernist poetry and criticism, and publications related to oppositional writing since the fifties.
At present KSW has no acquisitions budget. We continue to seek donations (which will receive receipts for income tax in Canada).
Access to the (non-lending) library is free, by appointment.
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Catalogue |
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Click here to download our most current catalogue (PDF Document).
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| About charles watts |
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Charles Watts was curator of Special Collections in Simon Fraser University's library from 1980 - 1997
Charles Watts was curator of Special Collections in Simon Fraser University's library from 1980 - 1997. A man of rare enthusiasm and energy, he is credited with having built SFU's contemporary literature collection into one of the best on the continent. In 1995, he and Edward Byrne organised a conference in honour of Robin Blaser called " The Recovery of the Public World ", and later edited a collection of essays under the same title (Talonbooks 1998). He published one book of his own poetry, Bread and Wine (Tantrum 1987), and a number of essays and papers in journals. At the time of his death he was working on a PhD thesis on Herman Melville.
Of his vocation, Watts said: "I consider my real graduate education to have begun when I became curator of the contemporary literature collection, I began to know something in detail of the energy, the remarkable production of work by North American poets writing since the end of the Second World War, both of little magazines and books."
Watts was raised in Roseville, California, and came to Canada for Masters studies under Robin Blaser, at SFU. Blaser remembers that "Charles had a genius for companionship and drew others to him. He was a key figure in the writing community, particularly in Vancouver."
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