LOA Sub-Libraries

An article in LOA's latest annual report highlights one of its supporters, a person who has been influential in the creation of what was termed a sub-library within LOA's scope. In that instance, the sub-library is "American writing on nature and the environment." The term sub-library is interesting. It is easy to think of other sub-libraries within LOA's growing collection of publications, but there may be some debate about what they are and which volumes belong in which sub-library.

A sub-library I find especially interesting is what I think of as non-fiction contemporary writings. Books I include in that range from the John Smith volume, through the Pamphlet Debate during the colonial era and Revolutionary War writing; the writings of Franklin, Washington, Adams, et. al.; early Black and slave writings; and finally through the Reporting Civil Rights and Reporting Vietnam volumes.

History writing such as Parkman's France and England volumes are interpretive at a distance and not first-hand accounts, so I would put those in a separate category. I'm not sure what to do with Emerson, Thoreau, William James, some of Henry James, Didion, et. al. There may some rationale for including them with histories. Poetry, drama, and fiction seem easy, but when it comes to genre writing, should that be a separate category of its own or included with "main stream" writing? Can a clean definition that unambiguously distinguishes between be found?

Thoughts, anyone?

LOA used to include a list of its main-series volumes in the back of books that had room for it. The list was in order of publication starting with Herman Melville and going sequentially on from there. As the list grew longer, it became increasingly unwieldy because of the arbitrary way the items were arranged. If you were looking for a certain kind of book, it became harder and harder to wade through everything, trying to find what you were looking for. If you were looking for environmental works and didn't know that Rachel Carson was an environmental writer (unlikely these days but not impossible), that made it that much harder.

Every time I see empty pages at the end of the final quire (or whatever it is called) in recent volumes, I think of it as a missed opportunity. How about including a list of related works instead--a subset of the full main-series list of titles--from a particular sub-library?

I like what you suggest here, Podras. The insert that summarizes the current volume's contents suggests a few similar volumes but the list could be expanded.

Agree. And building on another thread: perhaps related sub-libraries could be listed explicitly, too, when related to the book in question.

It seems clear that at several sub-libraries are ongoing: the contemporary accounts of wars (the War of Independence, War of 1812, Civil War, the World Wars, Vietnam); the writings of founders and debates around the Founding; and a comprehensive look at African American history and culture from the 18th century through anti slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, including the poetry volume. I believe grant funding, in which project definition is essential, is behind at least a couple of these initiatives.

When it comes to literature, it is pretty clear that they started out with the accepted canon including the American Renaissance (Emerson, Hawthorne, etc); the Jameses, Faulkner, then branched out into genre when they began running low on the canon and figured out that Philip K. Dick and friends would sell. Plus the ongoing debates about canons opened up writers of color and women at an increasing pace. All of these can be seen as sub categories.