Image: Jennifer Luxton / Seattle Times
Richard Brautigan, best know for the quirky Trout Fishing in America, encouraged unpublished writers to express themselves. Now there’s a library in his honor — a library of unpublished manuscripts.
In bookshops, I have often perused books by Richard Brautigan but have always concluded they were too odd for me. After reading about the unusual library the writer inspired, however, I have changed my mind. I’m going to take the plunge.
Megan Burbank writes at the Seattle Times, “It’s easy to trace the lingering influence of Tacoma-born writer Richard Brautigan if you know where to look. Though known for depicting San Francisco’s counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s with surrealistic flair, you’ll find one of his greatest legacies on three bookcases in the basement of Vancouver’s Clark County Historical Museum.
“Known as the Brautigan Library, the collection spans family histories, absurd Brautigan-esque capers, DIY religious tracts and memoirs of ordinary lives. They don’t feel like books at all, really, so much as the complete, unfiltered contents of other people’s minds. And they all have one thing in common: They’re unpublished. …
“When I visited the Brautigan Library in February, I couldn’t stop thinking of a passage from ‘Trout Fishing in America,’ perhaps Brautigan’s best-known work, that compares a bookstore to a graveyard:
‘Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them …’
“The books I encountered, crouched on the floor in that vaguely antiseptic-smelling basement, ran a fierce gamut. … Some stood out for their titles alone. My favorite was Alyce Cornyn-Selby’s ‘Did She Leave Me Any Money? A philosophical comedy about men, money, motivation, winning strategies, architecture, nudism, trucking, corporate assassinations, heart attacks, sexual politics, hometown parades, Spiritual Warriors, and the dredging of Willapa Bay.’ …
“The rows of manuscripts are punctuated with little cardboard printouts of mayonnaise jars, a nod to the collection’s cataloging technique, known as the Mayonnaise system.
“The name is a reference to the last line of ‘Trout Fishing in America.’ (‘Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.’)
“When Richard Brautigan died in 1984, control of his literary estate fell to his daughter, Ianthe Brautigan Swensen. [She] started getting letters from a man named Todd Lockwood. … His request [to create a library like the one in a Brautigan novel] was the first proposal Brautigan Swensen received that reminded her of the person her father had been.
“ ‘All of the sudden, I was like, “Right, this is the father that I remember,’” ‘ she says. ‘And right after my dad died, I was so — obviously — devastated and I thought in my mind that I’d lost him forever, and I picked up one of his books and there he was.’ …
“In 1990, Lockwood took on [the role of the novel’s librarian, who collected manuscripts.]. His Brautigan Library, based in Burlington, Vermont, operated as a nonprofit. At its peak, he says, it had about 100 volunteer librarians and attracted visitors from out of town.
“But in 1997, it closed due to lack of funding, and the manuscripts were put in storage in Lockwood’s basement.
“This caught the attention of John Barber, a faculty member in the Creative Media and Digital Culture program at Washington State University, Vancouver, who had once studied under Brautigan.
“He found space for the collection at the Clark County Historical Museum, and the library was moved and reopened in 2010. The manuscripts in the library date from the Vermont years: 1990-96. In 2013, it began accepting manuscripts again, but only electronically; there’s not enough space to keep accumulating paper volumes.” More.
What fun! This could be for you!
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