Maya Angelou's Library

Moving from http://www.librarything.com/topic/179784

Maya Angelou's library is currently being sold off piecemeal at an estate sale in Winston-Salem, NC. See http://www.estatesales.net/NC/Winston-Salem/27106/952257 for information. The company has confirmed that they made no record of the books being sold.

How you can help:

If you go to the sale, please take lots of photos of the shelves. We may be able to reconstruct at least some of the library from the spines.

If you bought a book at the sale, please post a photo of the book, so that we have some record of it.

Comment on the FB thread about the sale at https://www.facebook.com/LastersFineArt/posts/857425234338497 to urge the company to catalog the books or for buyers to send images of their purchases.

Please feel free to add more ways to help.

If you're on Twitter, signal boost there too.

The fact that I can't get the book world on fire about this depresses me to no end. The post went nowhere on the big librarian group. All sorts of people who love to retweet some stupid joke of mine are nowhere to be seen. This is important.

I initially heard this story on the local news channel. I would have thought it should have made a national splash.

I'm sure we're all watching the Facebook page for the sale. This just appeared in the comments by the auctioneers:

We appreciate your concern with Dr. Maya Angelou's books. Wake Forest University has been through and catalogued the books from her library.

After the cataloging done by Wake Forest, the Angelou-Johnson family asked us to handle the sale of her personal items. This sale has been endorsed by Dr. Maya Angelou's son and grandson and we are under contract to sell these items by the executors.

Thank you for your concerns but everything has been looked at by Wake Forest University.

The Laster Family.

Huzzah!

Tim's on hold with Wake Forest to try and confirm this. I worry that they might have cherry-picked a few things and that what we're seeing is the remainder. But I'm willing to be hopeful too ...

From the images, the shelves do look in disarray. I'm hoping it was from someone performing a stock-take, particularly of the magazines/journals, right next to the 9 copies of Copious Hosting.

Spotted on ebay:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LIBRARY-MAYA-ANGELOU-Women-Writers-in-France-DEDICATION-...

Seller has many more.

Weird. There are 12 items for sale which are labelled from Maya Angelou's library, and the listings range from April to June. Was there a previous sale?

It sounds like certain portions have made their way out of the library in various ways, though this current one seems like the first public sale. Unclear about the others, frankly - wish we knew more!

One completed item too:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/MAYA-ANGELOU-PERSONAL-LIBRARY-ELINAM-HUGH-MASEKELA-SIGNE...

>8 BuiltByBooks: From Laster's FB page, it looks like they mention books being on sale back in April?

https://www.facebook.com/LastersFineArt/posts/806342759446745

Thanks kristilabrie. I completely missed the mention of books in that post. But sadly, there's also a comment from the auctioneers on that sale too:

Quite an assortment of books from her library. No list to give out, too many to name!

Posted to tumblr, fwiw
http://benjaminlclark.tumblr.com/post/126110921030/this-was-the-personal-library...

Spoke to head of auction company.

The books they're selling were all or mostly boxed up, and were unsolicited. The valuable and important stuff Oprah Winfrey bought.

This is good. I'm irritated that they'd unbox shit she was sent and put it on her shelves as if they were on her shelves when she was alive. That strikes me as dishonest. And I worry about the low-value books that Oprah didn't take. (If Maya Angelous read a crappy paperback, that's important to know.)

Yep. And the Wake Forest thing is a little confusing to me. Did they catalog anything? Take anything? Just evaluate and pass (unimaginable)? Who has Oprah's phone number to see if she'll let us come over and flashmob a catalog? I'll bring snacks.

>15 benjclark: Sounds to me like the latter happened with Wake Forest, though we're still waiting on final word there.

I spent the day on the phone with the various parties.

Apparently Wake Forest boxed them up, to give the estate time to decide what to do, and maybe to donate them. But the estate changed its mind and decided to sell them.

The core went to Oprah.

The rest—which both the auctioneer and Wake Forest said were mostly presentation copies—got shipped back to her house, put back on shelves and are being sold.

The auctioneer told me he thought they were boxed up to begin with—that Angelou didn't have them on her shelves. He was wrong there, but you can see why.

A close look at the Facebook images reveals multiple copies for some titles, and perhaps even a timeline:

Pre-boxes

Post boxes

I'm using the nine copies of Copious Hosting as a marker. The red and white cover is pretty distinctive.

Edit: Of course, there is the unlikely possibility that Maya Angelou had 18 copies of the same book.

UGH....

I had the pleasure to attend the sale earlier today. I can answer any reasonable questions. There were many large boxes near the library. Assumably the boxes containing the books that were either gifted to Dr. Angleou or used for storage. The books were a mix of many subjects. I did however see quite a few concerning to African Americans. History, ethos, literature studies etc... Again I will answer questions concerning the estate sale.

@WinstonWindsor --- Did you happen to take a few photos of the books?

I did leave a couple of messages on their timeline, they appear to have deleted some.

>20 WinstonWindsor:

The boxes were put together by Wake Forest. They boxed up her books after she died. There was some intent to donate them to Wake, or to have them buy it. But they decided to sell it on the open market, so the boxes came back. The auctioneer says they were under the impression that the books had been in boxes to start with, and that Wake Forest had cataloged everything. Neither was true.

>23 timspalding: So this is not her working library, correct? Oprah has that?

She had some special books. The auctioneer said they were in her bedroom. But she had lots of books on the shelves of her two houses. He described them as accessible, with nice little nooks to read. It's still murky.

The "good" books were, I think set apart somehow. But they were also the valuable books, like a first edition of James Baldwin. I can't believe her working library was full of first editions and precious rare books.

I *may* have some more photos coming.