The Downtown Collection: Documenting the Scene

How did the Downtown Collection start? From the moment he took charge of the Fales Library & Special Collections in 1994, Marvin Taylor was determined to seek out and acquire the materials that document the Downtown scene. The “avant garde” of the 1960s and early 1970s was already well-represented in Fales—nearly every publication featured in the 1998 New York Public Library exhibition A Secret Location on the Lower East Side is held by the library. The first acquisitions which formed the cornerstone of the Downtown Collection neatly extend that story well into the 1980s and chief among these are The Ron Kolm Papers. Ron Kolm is a writer, editor, artist, promoter, and genuine Village Character who had amassed a major collection of print and manuscript materials documenting the vibrant literary and art scene. In addition to Ron’s personal correspondence with dozens of artists and writers, his manuscripts, photographs, and other archival materials, his personal library of over 6,000 printed items established the Downtown Collection as the leading library of printed works from the Village during the last quarter of the twentieth century. These books were added to BobCat--the online catalogue of NYU–and include signed first editions and chapbooks by writers such as Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, Gary Indiana, Walter Abish, Spaulding Gray, Patrick McGrath, Harry Mathews, Hal Sirowitz, Max Blagg, Janice Eidus, Constance DeJong, and David Wojnarowicz. Ron’s library also included complete runs of the important literary magazines of the period, including Between C and D, Appearances, Red Tape, Benzene, Zone, The Portable Lower East Side, Beat, Vox, Semi(o)texte, Peau Sensible, Raw, and The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side. No longer stacked in the Kolm family apartment, these materials are neatly catalogued and shelved in the Fales Library where they are available to researchers, students, poets, and the idly curious.

One object from the Ron Kolm Paper’s neatly conveys the spirit of playful intellectual subversion that characterizes much of the work in the Downtown Collection–the Unbearable Manual of Style. The Unbearables are a loosely organized collective of Downtown writers and artists who have been attacking the increasing commercialization of the literary and artistic scene since 1985. Using a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style—a text with which most of them were intimately acquainted from their work as proofreaders, data entry specialists, and office temps on the margins of the marketplace—each artist or writer took a section of the Manual and explored/exploded its definitions and restrictions of “style.”

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The Downtown Collection: Documenting the Scene

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The Downtown Collection: Documenting the Scene

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